Why Leaders Lie - Mearsheimer, John J_.original_ [27]
Lying to the public is relatively easy for another reason. As noted, it is difficult for statesmen to lie to each other about significant matters, because there is not much trust between countries. Anarchy pushes states to be vigilant in their dealings with each other, especially when national security issues are at play. But that is not the case inside most states, where large numbers of people, including educated elites, are predisposed to trust their government, whose most important job, after all, is to protect them. Robert McNamara once said that it is “inconceivable that anyone even remotely familiar with our society and system of government could suspect the existence of a conspiracy” to provoke a war.51 Many Americans would readily endorse McNamara’s claim, as they expect their leaders to be straight with them. This trust, of course, is what makes the public easy to fool, and this is why the behavior that McNamara describes is not just thinkable, but we have evidence of it.
One might surmise that fearmongering does not pay because the liar will eventually get caught and be punished by his public. He might lose credibility with his citizens or maybe even be voted out of office when he comes up for reelection. These possibilities are not much of a deterrent, however, mainly because leaders who lie to their publics think they can get away with it. For starters, it is not clear that the lies will be unmasked anytime soon. It took more than thirty years before it became public knowledge that President Kennedy had lied about how he settled the Cuban missile crisis. As discussed in the next chapter, he agreed to a secret deal with the Soviets in which the United States would remove its Jupiter missiles from Turkey in exchange for the Soviets taking their missiles out of Cuba. But Kennedy and his advisors denied making that deal during and after the crisis.
Furthermore, perpetrators are likely to think that even if they get caught, they will be able to rely on smart lawyers and friends in high places to help them craft a clever defense so that they can escape punishment. Finally, and most importantly, leaders who engage in fearmongering invariably believe that their assessment of the threat is correct, even if they are lying about some of the particulars. They think that they are in the right and what they are doing is for the good of the country. Thus, their lies will matter little in the long run if they expose the threat for what it is and deal with it effectively. The end result, in other words, will justify the means.
This line of thinking surely underpinned the Bush administration’s deception campaign in the run-up to the war in Iraq, and it probably would have worked if the United States had won a stunning victory, like it did in the 1991 war against Iraq. A comment by Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen in November 2005, when the second Iraq war was going badly, illustrates the cleansing power of military victory: “One could almost forgive President Bush for waging war under false or mistaken pretenses had a better, more democratic Middle East come out of it.”52
WHEN ELITES ARE LIKELY TO FEARMONGER
Regime type influences the likelihood of fearmongering. In particular, it is more likely in democracies than autocracies, because leaders are more beholden to public opinion in democratic states. Of course, not all democratically elected leaders will surmise that their people need to be deceived because they cannot assess the facts of a situation correctly or handle the truth; but some will. There is actually a rich tradition of this kind of thinking on the right in America, where it is widely believed that democracies are at a disadvantage when they compete against nondemocracies, because the broader public is an obstacle to developing a smart and bold foreign policy. This line of thinking was evident during the Cold War, especially among neoconservatives and other hardliners like James Burnham and Jean-Fran