Why Leaders Lie (7 page)

Furthermore, inter-state lying is likely to be much more prevalent in wartime than peacetime. In his 1928 book on lying during World War I, the British politician Arthur Ponsonby writes that “there must have been more deliberate lying in the world from 1914 to 1918 than in any other period of the world’s history.”
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Although it would be virtually impossible to prove that claim because of the impracticality of counting all of the international lies told over time, there surely was a substantial amount of lying during the Great War, as Ponsonby and others make clear. At the same time, it is hard to think of a five-year period during the century before 1914—when few wars were fought in Europe—where there is evidence of lying on the scale we see in World War I.

It is not surprising that leaders often turn to lying when shooting starts. War is a deadly serious business in which foreign-policy elites often think that their states’ survival is at stake. But even in conflicts where the stakes are lower—like the United States in Vietnam or the Soviet Union in Afghanistan—leaders usually believe that defeat would do serious damage to their national interest. That kind of thinking makes it easy for leaders to justify lying. There are also many opportunities to lie in wartime, since wars consist of numerous political and military engagements in which there are powerful incentives to deceive the other side. This is why deception is considered an integral part of war.

Finally, leaders are more likely to lie to rival states than allies. “Truth for friends and lies for enemies,” as one scholar put it many years ago.
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By definition, a rival is more dangerous than an ally, which means that it is more important to find ways to gain an advantage over an adversary than a friendly country. Lying sometimes serves that purpose. And because allies can help a state deal with a formidable rival, there are strong incentives for countries to have good relations with their allies and to build a modicum of trust with them, which is hardly served by lying to them. Of course, the fact that allies tend to trust each other more than their rivals makes it somewhat easier for allies to lie to each other than to their rivals, who are naturally more suspicious of their adversaries’ pronouncements. Still, lying to an ally comes at a stiff price if it is discovered, as it surely would undermine trust and damage the partnership, which would ultimately hurt the country that told the lie.

This is not to deny that states occasionally conclude that it makes good strategic sense to bamboozle an ally. No two countries always have the same interests—including allies—and it is possible in a crisis that one ally will abandon another or even turn on its partner. Moreover, today’s friends can morph into tomorrow’s enemy. Remember that the Soviet Union attacked Japan at the end of World War II after falsely promising Tokyo a few months earlier that it had no such intentions. The absence of permanent allies explains why the international system is ultimately a self-help world. This basic logic also explains why Israel lied to the United States during the 1960s about the fact that it was developing nuclear weapons. Israeli leaders have long believed that it is essential to have good relations with the United States. But they obviously felt more strongly that Israel needed its own nuclear deterrent to insure its survival, even if it was necessary to lie to the United States to acquire that capability.

Fearmongering occurs when a state’s leaders see a threat emerging but think that they cannot make the public see the wolf at the door without resorting to a deception campaign. Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who worried that the American people might not fully appreciate the danger posed by the Soviet Union in the late 1940s, argued that it was necessary for American leaders to make their arguments “clearer than truth,” because otherwise the public would not support the measures that he thought were necessary to deal with the threat.
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The aim is not just to deceive the average person in the street, but also to target educated elites, including outside experts who might be inclined to downplay the relevant threat in dangerous ways. Fearmongering campaigns can even be directed at government bureaucrats who might be disposed to soft-pedal a threat that their leaders think is particularly menacing. As distasteful as this behavior might be, leaders do it because they believe that it serves the public interest, not to exploit their fellow citizens for personal gain.
The essence of fearmongering is captured by Kemal Atatürk’s famous phrase: “For the people, despite the people.”
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Leaders engaged in fearmongering might work to create a threat that hardly exists in the public’s mind, or more likely, they will exaggerate or “hype” a recognized threat that is not causing much alarm outside of government circles. The ultimate goal could be to build support for a containment policy by getting the public to back increased defense spending, enlist in the military, or support a draft. Threat inflation might also be used to mobilize support for launching a war against a dangerous adversary. Although fearmongering usually occurs in peacetime, it can take place in the midst of a war if leaders feel that their public or their military forces are wavering in their commitment to the fight.

Fearmongering has played an important role in U.S. foreign policy over the past seventy years. Indeed, three administrations have employed that strategy in hopes of dragging a reluctant American public into war. As noted, Franklin Roosevelt lied about the USS
Greer
incident in the late summer of 1941 to mobilize public opinion against Germany and hopefully get the United States into World War II.
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The USS
Greer
, an American destroyer operating in the North Atlantic, joined up with a British military aircraft that was pursuing a German submarine. The plane eventually dropped depth charges, but then had to return to its base because it was running low on fuel. The
Greer
, however, continued to pursue the submarine, which had not been disabled by the British plane’s depth charges. The submarine then fired a torpedo at the
Greer
, which responded with its own depth charges. Neither side hit its target. There was a final engagement between the
Greer
and the German submarine a few hours later, but again neither side hit the other.

A week later President Roosevelt went on radio and told the American people three lies about the
Greer
incident. He
clearly implied that the attack on the
Greer
was unprovoked. He did not mention the British aircraft, much less that the
Greer
was pursuing the German submarine in tandem with that plane, which dropped depth charges against the submarine before it fired on the
Greer
.
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Instead, he simply said that the German submarine “fired first upon this American destroyer without warning, and with deliberate design to sink her” in American “defensive waters.” This attack, he said, was “piracy—piracy legally and morally.”
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Furthermore, Roosevelt maintained that the
Greer
’s identity as an American ship was “unmistakable” to the German submarine. In fact, Navy officials had told Roosevelt two days earlier that there was “no positive evidence that [the] submarine knew [the] nationality of [the] ship at which it was firing.” Finally, Roosevelt proclaimed that, “We have sought no shooting war with Hitler. We do not seek it now.” In fact, he met Churchill the previous month (August), and according to the British prime minister, Roosevelt “said that he would wage war, but not declare it, and that he would become more and more provocative.… Everything was to be done to force an ‘incident.’ … The President … made it clear that he would look for an ‘incident’ which would justify him in opening hostilities.” The
Greer
obviously provided the requisite incident, although it did not lead to American entry into World War II. The Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, coupled with Hitler’s declaration of war against the United States four days later, made that happen.

The behavior of President Lyndon Johnson and his principal foreign policy advisors during the infamous Gulf of Tonkin incident in early August 1964 is strikingly similar to Roosevelt’s conduct in the
Greer
incident.
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The state of affairs in South Vietnam at the time was going from bad to worse for the United States. Johnson hoped to rescue the
situation by significantly escalating the fight against North Vietnam, but he recognized that the American public had little enthusiasm for fighting a major war in Southeast Asia. Thus the president concluded that he needed a mandate from Congress that sanctioned the use of massive and sustained force against North Vietnam. An opportunity to get Congress to back any escalatory steps Johnson might make came on August 4, 1964, when Washington received word that North Vietnamese patrol boats had attacked an American destroyer, the USS
Maddox
, in the Gulf of Tonkin. The president used this incident to ram the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution through Congress on August 7. It effectively gave him carte blanche to wage war against North Vietnam.

The Johnson administration told two lies about what happened in the waters off the coast of North Vietnam. First, the President and his aides purposely gave the impression that there was no doubt that the August 4 attack had actually taken place. Johnson, for example, responded on August 7 to an official protest from the Soviet leader Khrushchev by saying that there was “complete and incontrovertible evidence” that the North Vietnamese had attacked the
Maddox
.
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Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara told Senator Bourke Hickenlooper (R-IA) on August 4 that “the evidence was absolutely clear on the attack.”
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The proposed resolution that the administration sent to Capitol Hill on August 5 confidently stated that the North Vietnamese had “deliberately and repeatedly attacked United States naval vessels.”
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In fact, within hours of the reported attack, the commander of the
Maddox
was reporting that there were good reasons to question whether there actually had been an attack.
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On August 4, according to historian Fredrik Logevall, Johnson put pressure on McNamara “to find verification of the … incident,” surely because he knew that there were doubts about whether the attack had ever occurred.
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The following morning, the president’s national security advisor, McGeorge Bundy, told his staff that “the amount of evidence we have today is less than we had yesterday.”
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The next day (August 6), Bundy’s deputy, Walt Rostow, told a luncheon at the State Department that “it seemed unlikely that there had actually been an attack on … August 4.”
¹³
When Bundy heard about Rostow’s remarks, he said that his deputy should be told to “button his lip.”
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In short, it was a falsehood to say or even imply that the United States had no doubts about whether the
Maddox
had been attacked on August 4.

The second lie concerns the Johnson administration’s claim that the
Maddox
was on a “routine patrol” in the Gulf of Tonkin and that the alleged attack was “deliberate and unprovoked.”
¹⁵
In fact, one reason that the
Maddox
was in those waters was to collect intelligence in support of South Vietnamese forces that were attacking the North Vietnamese coast at the time, and, not surprisingly, almost every top-level American policymaker understood that Hanoi would view the
Maddox
as a party to those attacks.
¹⁶
Although the evidence is not air tight, a plausible case can be made that the United States was trying to provoke the North Vietnamese to strike the
Maddox
.
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Regardless, Robert McNamara was clearly lying when he told the Senate on August 4: “Our navy played absolutely no part in, was not associated with, was not aware of, any South Vietnamese actions, if there were any.… I say this flatly. This is a fact.”
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The Bush administration engaged in fearmongering before the United States attacked Iraq on March 19, 2003. There is no question that the president and his principal advisors sincerely believed that Saddam Hussein was a dangerous threat who had to be removed from office sooner rather than later. At the same time, they understood that there was not much enthusiasm for invading Iraq in the broader
public. Moreover, the American military, the intelligence community, the State Department, and the U.S. Congress were not keen for war. To overcome this reluctance to attack Iraq, the Bush administration engaged in a deception campaign to inflate the threat posed by Saddam. It involved spinning, concealing, and lying to the American people. I will describe four key lies.

First, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said on September 27, 2002 that he had “bulletproof” evidence that Saddam was closely allied with Osama bin Laden.
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In fact, he had no such evidence, which he admitted on October 4, 2004, when he told the Council on Foreign Relations, “To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two.”
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Similarly, Secretary of State Colin Powell, who claimed before the war that bin Laden was in “partnership with Iraq” and that there was a “sinister nexus between Iraq and the Al Qaeda terrorist network,” admitted in January 2004: “I have not seen smoking-gun, concrete evidence about the connection, but I think the possibility of such connections did exist and it was prudent to consider them at the time that we did.”
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The Bush administration actually had solid evidence before the war that Saddam and bin Laden were not working together. As noted, two high-level Al Qaeda operatives captured after September 11 independently told their interrogators that there was no link between the two. Moreover, neither the CIA nor the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) could find conclusive evidence of a meaningful link between bin Laden and Saddam before the United States invaded Iraq.
²²
Nor was the 9/11 Commission able to uncover evidence of a “collaborative relationship” between those two leaders.
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