Why Leaders Lie - Mearsheimer, John J_ [56]
42. Scheer, Scheer, and Chaudhry, Five Biggest Lies, 80.
43. Nicholas Lemann, “How It Came to War; When Did Bush Decide That He Had to Fight Saddam?” New Yorker, March 31, 2003. See also Richard N. Haass, War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009), 4–6.
44. Times (London), “The Secret Downing Street Memo,” May 1, 2005. See also Michael Smith, “The Real News in the Downing Street Memos,” Los Angeles Times, June 23, 2005.
45. Woodward, Plan of Attack, 269–74. For other evidence that Bush had decided to go to war before the end of January, 2003, see ibid., 95, 113, 115, 119–20, 169, 178. Also, there was evidence in the media during 2002 that the Bush administration had decided to remove Saddam by force. For example, see John Walcott and Mark Danner, “The Secret Way to War: An Exchange,” New York Review of Books, July 14, 2005, 48–49.
46. Note that in this instance the Bush administration was engaging in both fearmongering and inter-state lying, which reminds us that a particular lie can be directed at multiple audiences and serve multiple purposes.
47. For an excellent discussion of why and how leaders inflate threats, see A. Trevor Thrall and Jane K. Cramer, eds., American Foreign Policy and the Politics of Fear: Threat Inflation since 9/11 (New York: Routledge, 2009).
48. Steven Casey, “Selling NSC-68: The Truman Administration, Public Opinion, and the Politics of Mobilization, 1950–51,” Diplomatic History 29, no. 4 (September 2005): 655–90. In fact, the Truman administration’s rhetoric was so alarmist that there was “a very real fear that the popular mood could easily overheat, thereby reducing officials’ freedom to maneuver and perhaps even pushing them toward excessively radical and dangerous policies” (ibid., 661). See also Nancy E. Bernhard, U.S. Television News and Cold War Propaganda, 1947–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall, America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009).
49. Leslie Gelb with Jeanne-Paloma Zelmati, “Mission Unaccomplished,” Democracy, no. 13 (Summer 2009): 24.
50. The classic brief against the Articles of Confederation is Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers, ed. Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1987), 145–84. For critiques of American policy-making machinery under the Constitution, see Theodore J. Lowi, “Making Democracy Safe for the World: National Politics and Foreign Policy,” in James N. Rosenau, ed., Domestic Sources of Foreign Policy (New York: Free Press, 1967), 295–331; Theodore J. Lowi, The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United States, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1979); E. E. Schattschneider, The Semisovereign People: A Realist’s View of Democracy in America (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975). See also Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission, Triangle Papers 8 (New York: New York University Press, 1975); and David Donald’s essay, “Died of Democracy,” in David Donald, ed., Why the North Won the Civil War (New York: Collier Books, 1962), 79–90, in which he argues that the South lost the Civil War because it was too democratic.
51. Alterman, When Presidents Lie, 210.
52. Richard Cohen, “A War without Winners,” Washington Post, November 3, 2005.
53. James Burnham, Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1964); Donald Kagan and Fredrick W. Kagan, While America Sleeps: Self-Delusion, Military Weakness, and the Threat to Peace Today (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000); Donald Kagan, On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace (New York: Doubleday, 1995), 572–73; Robert G. Kaufman, “To Balance or to Bandwagon? Alignment Decisions in 1930s Europe,” Security Studies 1, no. 3 (Spring 1992): 417–47; Norman Podhoretz, The Present Danger: Do We Have