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By Root 3101 0

life. Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor who indicted White House aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby in October 2006 for lying about his role in revealing the identity of a CIA aide, put the point well when he said: “The truth is the engine of our judicial system. And if you compromise the truth, the whole process is lost.”3 Of course, laws exist in part to punish lying, which means that some modicum of dishonesty is expected in any society. But lying cannot be widespread; there has to be a substantial amount of honesty and trust in public life for any legal system to work effectively. Consider, for example, that George Ryan, the former governor of Illinois, who initially favored capital punishment, felt that he had to suspend all executions in his state because there was convincing evidence that many of the inmates on death row were convicted on the basis of lies and other improprieties.4

Finally, if lying is pervasive in a democracy, it might alienate the public to the point where it loses faith in democratic government and is willing to countenance some form of authoritarian rule. After all, it is hard to see how a democracy can remain viable for long if the people have no respect for their leaders, because they think they are a bunch of liars, and no respect for their institutions, because they think that they are deeply corrupt. In short, too much lying can do serious damage to any body politic.

Switching gears, how might international lying adversely affect a country’s foreign policy? As emphasized, leaders lie to each other and to their own people because they believe that doing so serves the national interest. And the sad fact is that lying sometimes does make good strategic sense. If it did not, there would be no good justification for the various kinds of lies described in the previous chapters. Nevertheless, lying occasionally backfires, in which case a country might end up worse off rather than better off for having told a particular lie. Hence, the key question for assessing the ramifications of international lying is: which types of lies are most likely to backfire and have harmful strategic consequences?

In sum, the potential for blowback is the main criterion for assessing the consequences of international lying on the home front, while the potential for backfiring and doing a state more harm than good is the paramount criterion in the foreign-policy realm.

THE DANGERS OF INTER-STATE LYING

Inter-state lying is unlikely to cause serious trouble at home. The danger of blowback is minimal in part because leaders do not lie to each other very often. The main reason, however, is that most people understand that the rulebook for international politics is different from the one used in domestic politics. In particular, they understand that leaders sometimes have to lie and cheat in their dealings with other countries, especially when they are dealing with a dangerous adversary. For better or for worse, lying is widely accepted as a necessary, albeit distasteful, tool of foreign policy. This is why statesmen and diplomats are rarely punished when they get caught telling inter-state lies. In contrast, lying is generally considered to be wrong when the issue at hand is national in scope, mainly because a country’s survival is seldom at stake when domestic politics are at play.

It might seem unrealistic to think that inter-state lying can be compartmentalized the way I describe it without encouraging or legitimizing lying on the home front. But that would be wrong; reasonably clear boundaries can be drawn that stipulate when lying is acceptable and when it is not. Remember that most of us accept the fact that there are exceptional circumstances where we are allowed to lie in our daily lives without that becoming accepted behavior in ordinary circumstances. For example, when I was a cadet at West Point in the late 1960s, there was a strict honor code, which emphatically stated that a cadet does not lie, cheat, or steal, nor tolerate those who do. Nevertheless, we were allowed to tell white lies—it was