Why Leaders Lie - Mearsheimer, John J_.original_ [30]
There was a huge outcry around the world—including from the American Jewish community—when it became known what the Israeli commandos had done in Qibya. Oxford scholar Avi Shlaim writes that “The Qibya massacre unleashed against Israel a storm of international protest of unprecedented severity in the country’s short history.”4 News about the raid was also causing problems for the Israeli government on the home front.5 Fully aware of the potential for further trouble at home, not to mention the damage that was being done to Israel’s international standing, Israeli leaders tried to rescue the situation by lying. “On October 19,” Israeli historian Benny Morris writes, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion “went on the air with a wholly fictitious account of what happened.” He blamed the massacre on Jewish frontier settlers and said, “The Government of Israel rejects with all vigor the absurd and fantastic allegation that 600 men of the IDF took part in the action.… We have carried out a searching investigation and it is clear beyond doubt that not a single army unit was absent from its base on the night of the attack on Qibya.”6 But Ben-Gurion’s lying did not work, and on November 24 the UN Security Council passed a resolution expressing “the strongest censure of that action.”
Leaders might also lie to cover up a controversial policy that they believe is strategically sound, but that they want to hide from their own public and possibly other countries as well. The underlying assumption is that most of their fellow citizens are unlikely to have sufficient wisdom to recognize the policy’s virtues. Therefore, it makes sense for the leaders to adopt the policy but conceal that fact from their people; otherwise, public opinion might force the government to abandon the policy, to the country’s detriment. The same harsh assessment of the public’s ability to think wisely that underpins fearmongering underpins strategic cover-ups.
President John F. Kennedy’s efforts to bring the Cuban Missile Crisis to a peaceful conclusion provide a good example of a leader lying to cover up a controversial policy.7 To end that crisis before it escalated into a war between the superpowers, Kennedy agreed to the Soviet demand that the United States pull its nuclear-armed Jupiter missiles out of Turkey in return for the Soviets pulling their missiles out of Cuba. The president understood that this concession would not play well with the American public, especially with the political right, and would also damage Washington’s relations with its NATO allies, especially Turkey. So he told the Soviets that they could not speak openly about the deal, or else he would have to deny it and ultimately renege on it. Still, there were suspicions in the West that such a deal had been cut, and the Kennedy administration was queried on the matter. The president and his principal advisors lied and denied that there had been an agreement to take the Jupiters out of Turkey. In retrospect, it appears to have been a noble lie, since it helped defuse an extremely dangerous confrontation between two states armed with nuclear weapons.
Between 1922 and 1933, the German military trained in the Soviet Union in clear violation of the Versailles Treaty.8 German leaders were fearful that if these activities were exposed, they would be heavily criticized by Weimar Germany’s political left, as well as by Britain and France, who would all push hard