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wars, as well as waging war in vicious ways that violate just-war theory. For example, Duke political scientist Alexander Downes shows in his seminal book Targeting Civilians in War that “desperation to win and to save lives on one’s own side in costly, protracted wars of attrition causes belligerents to target enemy civilians.”1 Indeed, he shows that “democracies are somewhat more likely than non-democracies to target civilians.” Remember that the United States purposely killed about 900,000 Japanese civilians in the last five months of World War II, not because it feared losing the war, but because it wanted to win the war without having to invade the Japanese homeland.2 General Curtis LeMay, who was in charge of that murderous bombing campaign, once remarked, “If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.”3

Such brutal state behavior, however, is not restricted to wartime. The United States, for example, played the leading role in getting the UN to impose economic sanctions on Iraq from August 1990 until May 2003. That financial and trade embargo helped create a humanitarian disaster, killing about 500,000 Iraqi civilians according to UNICEF estimates.4 Statesmen also form alliances with particularly odious countries when they believe that it makes good strategic sense. To defeat Nazi Germany in World War II, both Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt worked closely with Josef Stalin, who was not simply a tyrant, but was also one of the greatest mass murderers of all time.5

When states act in ways that run counter to liberal norms or international law, their leaders often invent false stories that are designed to mask what they are doing. Not surprisingly, both British and American elites—including academics, journalists, and policymakers—went to considerable lengths during World War II to portray Stalin in a favorable light, so that it would not appear that Britain and the United States were run by ruthless statesmen who would cooperate with one tyrannical mass murderer to defeat another.6 Thus, he was frequently described as friendly “Uncle Joe,” while the stark differences between the American and Soviet political systems were sometimes played down, giving the impression that the Soviet Union was a democracy too.

The Western allies’ efforts to portray Stalin as something he was not was put to a severe test in the spring of 1943, when it became apparent to both Churchill and Roosevelt that the Soviets had murdered thousands of Poles—most of whom were army officers—in the Katyn Forest three years earlier in the spring of 1940.7 As one British policymaker remarked at the time, “It is obviously a very awkward matter when we are fighting for a moral cause and when we intend to deal adequately with war criminals, that our Allies should be open to accusations of this kind.”8 Nevertheless, the British government went right to work blaming the killings on Nazi Germany, knowing that the Soviets were actually responsible. The Foreign Office maintained that “the story should be treated as a German attempt to undermine allied solidarity,” while the Political Warfare Executive, a key government unit involved in the propaganda war, issued a directive saying: “It is our job to help to ensure that history will record the Katyn Forest incident as a futile attempt by Germany to postpone defeat by political methods.”9

Another case of liberal lies involves Nazi Germany’s efforts to blame Poland for starting World War II on September 1, 1939. On that fateful day, Hitler told the Reichstag that he had been patiently waiting for two days “for the Polish government to send a plenipotentiary” to talk with him, but none arrived.10 The clear implication was that he was interested in finding a diplomatic solution to the dispute between the two countries over the future of Danzig and the Polish Corridor, but Poland would not cooperate with him, because its leaders were not interested in peace. Then, after mentioning his “love of peace,” Hitler claimed that Poland had fired the first shots