Tuesday at noon, John Schuessler will be at Cato to discuss his new book, Deceit on the Road to War: Presidents, Politics, and American Democracy. Its subject is U.S. leaders’ manipulation of public opinion to win support for wars, particularly World War II, Vietnam and Iraq. With help from Elizabeth Saunders and Trevor Thrall, we’ll discuss whether the United States is especially prone to this kind of deceit, why that might be, and deceit’s dangers.
If that sounds overly theoretical, consider the 2011 war in Libya. If you believed the Obama administration then, bombing Libyan troops would be geopolitical magic. The cost would be tiny: no U.S. ground forces, minimal risk to pilots, expenses amounting to federal pocket change. That minor effort would produce bountiful returns: democratic transition in Libya once the rebels took power, stronger U.S. alliances, prevention of refugee flows that would destabilize neighboring states, a cowing of dictators that would invigorate the Arab Spring, accelerating the region’s transformation to liberalism, and hundreds of thousands of lives spared from Gaddafi, who had promised to crush innocents like “cockroaches,” “showing “no mercy and pity.”
Those claims all relied on combinations of dubious logic, wishful thinking, and the case of the last, deceit. Gaffafi’s bloody threats explicitly excluded non‐combatants. His forces committed war crimes but did not engage in mass slaughter of civilians in areas they captured. As critics predicted, the war’s chaotic results undermined its purported benefits. None of its rationales seem right in hindsight.
An unfortunate conclusion here is that, as with the Iraq War, democracy’s free marketplace of ideas is mythical or at least overrated. That theory says that democracy, by forcing debate, prevents leaders from launching reckless wars. Divided power and a free press mean that vigorous debate should expose faulty arguments and block the foolish policies they promote. Anticipating resistance and evaluation, leaders avoid making bad or dishonest arguments in the first place.
In Libya, the president offered just about every half plausible argument for war. Debate stayed anemic and largely unofficial. War advocates, especially powerful ones, basically ignored the few pundits and academics criticizing their arguments. Congress paid little attention, even once it took up the Benghazi attack. There was neither a congressional authorization nor an appropriation vote. The Pentagon transferred already‐appropriated funds to cover the bill. In the few relevant hearings, Congressional consideration of the issues raised above was limited, at best.