Why Leaders Lie - Mearsheimer, John J_.original_ [29]
Regarding the run-up to the current war in Iraq, it is worth noting that the United States is a democracy as well as an offshore balancer, and it was attempting to sell a preventive war. Not surprisingly, the Bush administration told lies and engaged in other kinds of deception to create the impression that Saddam was an imminent threat and that the United States would thus be fighting a preemptive war, not a preventive war.59
CHAPTER 5
Strategic Cover-ups
Strategic cover-ups can take two forms. Leaders can lie about a policy that has gone badly wrong. The motivating reason for the falsehood is to protect the country’s interests, not to shield the individuals who are responsible for the policy failure, although that is usually an unintended consequence. Leaders can also lie to hide a controversial but smart strategy, because they fear that it will meet serious public resistance and not be adopted. The aim in this instance is not to conceal a bungled policy from the body politic, but to implement a particular policy without arousing strong opposition. In both cases, however, the leaders believe that there are sound strategic reasons for the cover-up. They are lying for what they judge to be the good of the country.
Inter-state lies are directed at other states, while fearmongering is directed at the home front. Strategic cover-ups, in contrast, are usually aimed at both of those audiences. To be more specific, a leader bent on covering up a controversial or failed policy will always seek to deceive his public and will frequently try to deceive another country at the same time. In other words, the intended audience for a strategic cover-up can either be the home front alone or the home front plus a foreign audience. But the target of this kind of falsehood cannot be just another country, because that would be an inter-state lie.
Strategic cover-ups, it should be emphasized, are not examples of concealment, which is when leaders deceive their intended audience by hardly saying anything about an important foreign policy problem. With strategic cover-ups, leaders are dealing with international issues that have a public face and are certain to prompt hard questions that the government will have to answer. In those cases, however, leaders will tell lies because they believe that it is in the national interest to deceive their fellow citizens, and often other states as well.
WHY LEADERS ENGAGE IN STRATEGIC COVER-UPS
One reason that leaders sometimes seek to hide failure and the incompetence that caused it is because they do not want to convey weakness to an adversary who might exploit it, or because they think that it might damage their relationship with other countries. Of course, they also worry about the home front, where news about botched operations and ineptitude can undermine national unity, which is especially important when fighting a protracted war that is not going well.
During World War I, for example, Marshal Joseph Joffre, the commander-in-chief of the French army, bungled the planning for the battle of Verdun (1916) and then mismanaged the battle itself. He was clearly incompetent and most French political leaders knew it. But they could not tell the public that he was inept when thousands of French soldiers under his command were being wounded or killed each week. They feared that revealing the true facts about Joffre would badly weaken morale on the home front and possibly undermine the war effort. So the politicians concealed their critical discussions about Joffre from the public and falsely portrayed him as an able leader. “Concern for morale,” as the scholar Ian Ousby writes, “prevented him falling into official disgrace.”1 It also would have been foolish to reveal to the Germans that the French forces facing them at Verdun were in serious trouble because they were under the command of an inept general.
Israel’s behavior in the aftermath of the infamous Qibya massacre is another case