Deceit on the Road to War

Presidents, Politics, and American Democracy

John M. Schuessler

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780801453595
• eBook ISBN: 9781501701610
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In Deceit on the Road to War, John M. Schuessler examines how U.S. presidents have deceived the American public about fundamental decisions of war and peace. Deception has been deliberate, he suggests, as presidents have sought to shift blame for war onto others in some cases and oversell its benefits in others. Such deceit is a natural outgrowth of the democratic process, in Schuessler's view, because elected leaders have powerful incentives to maximize domestic support for war and retain considerable ability to manipulate domestic audiences. They can exploit information and propaganda advantages to frame issues in misleading ways, cherry-pick supporting evidence, suppress damaging revelations, and otherwise skew the public debate to their benefit. These tactics are particularly effective before the outbreak of war, when the information gap between leaders and the public is greatest.When resorting to deception, leaders take a calculated risk that the outcome of war will be favorable, expecting the public to adopt a forgiving attitude after victory is secured. The three cases featured in the book—Franklin Roosevelt and World War II, Lyndon Johnson and the Vietnam War, and George W. Bush and the Iraq War—test these claims. Schuessler concludes that democracies are not as constrained in their ability to go to war as we might believe and that deception cannot be ruled out in all cases as contrary to the national interest.

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EXPLAINING DEMOCRATIC DECEPTION

This chapter answers a number of important questions about deception. First, what is deception? How should it be defined? Second, why do democratic leaders resort to deception, and what forms does that deception take? Third, when does deception pay off for leaders, and when does it backfire? Fourth, which debates in international relations are implicated by the deception issue? Finally, how should a theory of democratic deception be tested, and what research design and methodology are appropriate?

Defining Deception

I define deception as deliberate attempts on the part of leaders to mislead the public about the thrust of official thinking, in this case about the decision to go to war as well as the reasons to go to war. This definition is consistent with those found in the scholarly literature, but I have made it more specific to fit the research problem at hand. Sissela Bok, in her well-regarded book on lying, a form of deception, says, “When we undertake to deceive others intentionally, we communicate messages meant to mislead them, meant to make them believe what we ourselves do not believe.” ¹ John Mearsheimer defines deception in similar terms: it is “where an individual purposely takes steps that are designed to prevent others from knowing the full truth—as that individual understands it—about a particular matter.” Deception, in this sense, can be contrasted with truth-telling, when “an individual does his best to state the facts and tell a story in a straightforward and honest way.” ²

A few points of emphasis are in order. First, deception has to be deliberate. In other words, for a statement to be deceptive, leaders must intend for that statement to mislead. ³ If the intention is lacking, then the statement is not deceptive. For example, any number of misleading claims can be used to justify hawkish policies. Among them are the “myths of empire” that Jack Snyder identifies as primary drivers of great power overexpansion. ⁴ However misleading the myths of empire may be, they are deceptive only if leaders intend them to mislead. Otherwise, they are erroneous or biased, but not deceptive. As Bok puts it, “truth and truthfulness are not identical, any more than falsity and falsehood.” ⁵

Second, leaders appear to be more likely to deceive their own publics than other leaders. Interstate lying, as Mearsheimer finds, is surprisingly rare. ⁶ On occasion, leaders do deceive one another to gain strategic advantage. They may, for example, exaggerate their willingness to fight to deter or coerce an adversary. Alternatively, they might downplay their hostile intentions toward another state to disguise an attack on it. ⁷ Although there is potential overlap between deception targeted at other states and that targeted at domestic audiences, I limit my focus here to the latter.

Third, I am interested in strategic deception, or deception done in the service of what leaders consider the national interest. Strategic deception can be contrasted with selfish deception, or deception done in the service of parochial goals such as protecting bureaucratic turf or avoiding personal embarrassment. ⁸ However prevalent such deception might be, it is not the focus of this study.

Finally, lying, when a leader makes a knowingly false statement, is the most blatant form of deception, but for that reason, it is also the least common. Democratic leaders have to reckon with the fact that their deceptions may be uncovered in the course of domestic debate. ⁹ Lying, therefore, should be less prevalent than other, subtler forms of deception such as spinning, when a leader uses exaggerated rhetoric, and concealment, when a leader withholds vital information. ¹⁰ Spinning and con cealment are pervasive in politics, so it is tempting to draw a sharp distinction between them and lying when it comes to defining deception. This would be a mistake, however. The deception campaigns featured in this book are characterized by a great deal of spinning and concealment but little outright lying; the cumulative effect is no less misleading. The key is to identify patterns of deceptive behavior, in which leaders are less truthful with the public than they could have been, since the line between deception and something more benign, such as persuasion, can be blurry in individual instances. The bottom line is that deception can be pervasive even while lying is rare.

Explaining Democratic Deception

Why do democratic leaders resort to deception? A reasonable starting assumption, which should be familiar from the liberal institutionalist literature, is that leaders want to secure as much domestic support for war as possible, both to provide political cover and to increase the odds that the public will see the war through to victory. ¹¹ With unified support as the goal, democratic leaders will be sensitive to stirrings of domestic opposition as they edge toward war and will go to some lengths to preempt it lest it intensify. The central argument follows: democratic leaders resort to deception to maximize domestic support for war. ¹² Exactly because “democratic decisions for war are determined and constrained by public consent,” ¹³ democratic leaders have powerful incentives to manufacture that consent through whatever means necessary.

Opposition to War

Although democratic leaders place a high value on domestic support for war, they cannot take it for granted. On rare occasions, we find unified support for war, for example when the homeland has been attacked or victory promises to be nearly costless, but those are the exceptions that prove the rule. As a general matter, the benefits of war are usually ambiguous enough and the potential costs substantial enough that leaders have to grapple with some level of domestic opposition, even if only latent.

The public, for starters, is rarely as firm in its support for war as leaders would like. Partly, this reflects differences in information levels and time horizons. Most people are not national security experts attuned to potential threats. ¹⁴ Quite understandably, they have more pressing claims on their attention and cannot be expected to share the same sense of urgency about the external situation as those charged with running the foreign policy apparatus. “Given limited information and high discount rates,” as Thomas Christensen has argued, “the public will judge the importance of international challenges by how immediately and clearly they seem to compromise national security” ¹⁵ By this standard, public consent for war should be most forthcoming when an adversary appears ready to launch an attack on the homeland or an important ally and least forthcoming when no such attack is on the horizon. For example, in the event that an adversary is geographically distant or does not have much in the way of an offensive capability, the public should be reluctant to pick a fight with it. Normative considerations should reinforce this tendency because force is generally viewed to be legitimate only as a last resort and only for defensive purposes. ¹⁶

When threats are diffuse or indeterminate, potential costs will loom large. A long-standing assumption is that the public is more sensitive to the costs of war than its leaders because it is the public that directly bears those costs. ¹⁷ How well supported is this assumption? A recurrent finding in the public opinion literature is that mass support for war declines as casualties accumulate. ¹⁸ This is not to suggest that the process is inexorable or that context does not matter. In their work on casualty sensitivity, Christopher Gelpi, Peter Feaver, and Jason Reifler find that the public is best described as “defeat phobic”; that is, beliefs about a war’s trajectory matter most in determining the public’s willingness to tolerate casualties. When the public is confident that victory is within reach, casualties will have little effect on popular support. But when the public comes to believe that a war could end in stalemate or defeat, its tolerance for casualties will diminish considerably. Gelpi, Feaver, and Reifler marshal a wealth of evidence to support their claims, reanalyzing polling data from a number of conflicts dating back to the Korean War and conducting original surveys designed explicitly to tap into public attitudes on casualties. ¹⁹ The implication of their work is that the public is going to be reluctant to pay the human cost of war when victory is uncertain, especially when that cost promises to be high.

A defeat-phobic public, in turn, provides an opening for the political opposition to foment debate. Opposition parties, as Kenneth Schultz argues, publicly contest government policies to present voters with an alternative. In his words, “Opposition parties by their nature seek to highlight and exploit the government’s failings in order to convince voters that they would be better off with a change.” ²⁰ There is no benefit, however, in presenting an alternative to a policy that is popular or widely regarded as successful. The implication is that opposition parties will line up in support behind a war—or at the very least not be vocal in their criticisms—whenever a successful outcome seems assured, to rob the issue of whatever political salience it might have. When there is a risk that a war could be a costly failure, on the other hand, opposition parties will register their dissent so that they can harness antiwar sentiment at the next election. ²¹ The political opposition, in other words, reflects and amplifies the public’s defeat phobia.

Beyond the political opposition, democratic leaders must be wary of other segments of the elite that could aggravate their problems with the public. As John Zaller has argued, the more contentious the debate at the elite level, the more polarized the public will become as an issue gets politicized. ²² The media enable this process by indexing elite debate; when there is controversy surrounding an issue among elites, this controversy will be reflected in the media. ²³ The media is especially attuned to in-fighting among elites who are close to the center of power. ²⁴ For this reason, leaders will be acutely sensitive to signs of dissent among elites who have independent influence—powerful legislators, high-ranking bureaucrats, and senior military officers—and will work hard to make sure their misgivings do not spill over into the public domain. ²⁵

Three Scenarios

To summarize, democratic leaders want to secure as much domestic support for war as possible, but they can hardly count on unified backing. Instead, they expect to grapple with some level of opposition, both at the mass and elite levels, unless the benefits of war clearly outweigh the costs. As a general rule, the less substantial and imminent the threat and the less assured a quick and decisive victory, the more contentious a war will be. ²⁶ Three scenarios serve to illustrate the point, all drawn from the literature on great power politics.

The first is preventive war. As Jack Levy defines it, “The preventive motivation for war arises from the perception that one’s military power and potential are declining relative to that of a rising adversary, and from the fear of the consequences of that decline.” ²⁷ The stronger the preventive motivation, the more willing leaders will be to gamble on a war that holds out some hope of forestalling decline. The public, however, will be reluctant to absorb the costs of a major war when the threat is more potential than actual. What results is a gulf, identified by Randall Schweller, between what realpolitik requires of leaders and what the public is willing to sanction. ²⁸ Schweller’s original finding, that democracies do not wage preventive wars, has since been qualified. ²⁹ The logic of his argument remains compelling, however, and suggests that democratic leaders should have some difficulty securing public consent for war in the event that it is preventively motivated.

The second scenario is balancing, or allying with others against a hegemonic threat. If a state has aggressive intentions and enough offensive capability to overturn the balance of power, we would expect its potential victims to band together and, if necessary, to defeat the aggressor in war. ³⁰ As it turns out, even these defensive measures can be controversial, leading to underbalancing if leaders are unable to generate a political consensus for stronger action. ³¹ Offshore balancing is particularly controversial. It entails intervening in a distant region to forestall the rise of a powerful adversary when local states prove unequal to the task. ³² The political problem confronting leaders is that, in the event that war becomes necessary, the fighting can only be costly and protracted as the offshore balancer attempts to rollback a potential hegemon at the peak of its strength. The public can thus be expected to insist on evidence of direct provocation before it consents to a fight to the finish on the adversary’s turf. This is likely part of the explanation for offshore balancers such as Great Britain and the United States historically being prone to buckpassing and intervening only at the last moment. ³³

The third, and final, scenario is intervention. Great powers have regularly intervened in areas of little intrinsic value because of fears that their geopolitical position would erode otherwise. ³⁴ The justification has been provided by the domino theory, which warns that small setbacks in the periphery can snowball into a chain of defeats that threatens the core. ³⁵ Leaders have feared, especially, that if they project an image of weakness then their credibility will be damaged, discouraging allies and emboldening adversaries. ³⁶ The political problem they confront is that, however dire the consequences that...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Explaining Democratic Deception
• 2. Shifting Blame to the Axis
• 3. Shifting Blame to the Communists
• 4. Overselling the Iraq War
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index