Who is more duplicitous, more inclined to deceive his own people as well as other nations for strategic advantage — current and past dictators such as Moammar Gaddafi, Hosni Mubarak and Saddam Hussein, or democratically elected Western leaders such as, say, Jimmy Carter, George W. Bush and Barack Obama?
Easy. Just look at Gaddafi, who early in the revolt against his regime claimed that the Libyan people still loved him, that the gunfire in his country was merely celebratory, and who announced a ceasefire only to continue his attacks on rebel forces. Or Mubarak, who tried to cling to power in Egypt by suggesting that nefarious foreign agents — rather than frustrated Egyptian citizens — were behind the Tahrir Square protests. It’s got to be the dictators, right?
‘Why Leaders Lie’ by John J. Mearsheimer (Oxford University Press142 pp. $21.95)
John J. Mearsheimer would disagree. The University of Chicago political scientist argues that the leaders most likely to lie are precisely those in Western democracies, those whose traditions of democracy perversely push them to mislead the very public that elected them. In fact, Mearsheimer says, leaders tend to lie to their own citizens more often than they lie to each other.
In his disheartening yet fascinating book, “Why Leaders Lie,” Mearsheimer offers a treatise on the biggest of big fat lies, breaking down the deceptions the world’s presidents and generals and strongmen engage in — when, why and how they lie, and how effective those falsehoods can be.
First are “inter-state lies,” deceptions aimed at other countries to gain or retain some advantage over them. Think of Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev grossly exaggerating the size of the Soviet Union’s ICBM arsenal — giving rise to the Cold War “missile gap” — in order to deter the United States from striking first. Or recall President Carter, whose press secretary had to lie to reporters at home when asked if the administration was preparing a rescue operation for the hostages in Iran. (Mearsheimer considers this an inter-state lie because the intended audience was Iran.) Or look at Greece, whose authorities misstated the size of the nation’s budget deficits in order to win admission to the European Union.
Such state-to-state lies are relatively uncommon, Mearsheimer contends, and successful ones are even less so. In a world where each state must fend for itself, leaders are unlikely to take each other’s word on serious stuff. (The world doesn’t buy Iran’s pronouncements that its nuclear program is peaceful, insisting instead that international inspectors verify the claims.) Also, if you lie too often, no one will trust you, so what’s the point?
Mearsheimer says that “fearmongering” — when leaders cannot convince the public of the threats they foresee and so deceive the people “for their own good” — is far more prevalent and effective. His Exhibit A is Bush and Iraq. With the public and Congress unconvinced of the case for war, “the Bush administration engaged in a deception campaign to inflate the threat posed by Saddam,” the author writes.
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