Friday, Jul 4, 2008
Why don't Americans care that Bush may have lied to them about Iraq? The answer lies deep in our reptilian brains.
Jul 9, 2003 | The deep, almost spiritual conflict between honesty and lying is ingrained in our national psyche. Who doesn't remember as a schoolchild hearing the tale about George Washington father's discovering the young boy next to a felled cherry tree? When asked who had cut the tree, George is said to have replied, "I can't tell a lie, Pa; you know I can't tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet." As it turns out, that story was a lie concocted by an early 19th century biographer to embellish Washington's rather staid character.
But the story illustrates Americans' paradoxical approach to lies. Certainly most humans hold complicated and deep-seated views on deceit and candor; Americans, however, seem to have an especially bipolar one. At times, they assume a puritanical, absolutist stance on telling falsehoods: It is always bad. Other times, they're far more lenient: It's acceptable. This conflict is evident today when we look at how Americans have reacted to the fact that the Bush administration hyped, and perhaps in part fabricated, its case for invading Iraq, and that it grossly distorted who would benefit from its massive tax cuts. Americans put a premium on honesty and forthrightness, but they appear willing to forgive Bush's exaggerations and hype and the convoluted excuses his administration has offered in the aftermath of war. At one point -- in response to those who questioned the administration's assertions about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction -- Bush accused his critics of indulging in "revisionist history."
It's ironic that this is the very same populace that a few years ago was glued to its TV sets as Congress impeached then-President Bill Clinton for fibbing about his sexual dalliances with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Clinton was vilified, even though his lie was one many men caught in a similar position wouldn't have thought twice about committing. (In fact, some of his most vituperative opponents, including Newt Gingrich, hid their own sexual affairs.) Eventually, Americans wearied of the drawn-out impeachment process, and the Senate acquitted Clinton. Still, many Americans thought -- and still think -- that his lie undermined the integrity of the presidency. A more recent example is Martha Stewart. Many Americans believe Stewart should be punished for allegedly lying about the sale of roughly $240,000 in ImClone stock.
Why is it that Americans have given Bush a pass on his misleading and trumped-up evidence about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, when they pilloried Clinton and Stewart for far less devastating transgressions? The answer may be simple: It's human nature. We're hard-wired to forgive some lies -- and liars -- more than others.
"People don't focus as much on the sin as on the sinner," says Robert P. Lawry, a professor of law and the director of the Center for Professional Ethics at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law, in Cleveland. "Bush's popularity explains the shrugging of the shoulders. An awful lot of people seem to have a visceral, negative reaction to Martha Stewart; they don't like her. They like Bush, so they forgive him. It has nothing to do with the lie. Going to war is much more problematic a lie than one that nets you a small gain, relatively speaking, in the stock market. People are not paying attention to the implications and importance of the lie."
Lawry surmises people base their likes and dislikes on fairly superficial assessments: They see Martha as an uppity bitch and George W. as a regular guy. Yet, there are deeper, more complicated reasons why Americans are forgiving Bush -- and it has nothing to do with his magnetic personality and far more with the times we live in.
We're scared.
Since 9/11, Americans have been living in a state of fear and anxiety comparable to the Cold War in the '50s and early '60s, or to the World War II era. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon took more than 3,000 lives, making it the deadliest foreign attack on the U.S. since Pearl Harbor. Experts who study deceit in all of its forms and degrees contend that it therefore makes perfect sense that Americans are willing to accept and forgive, though not necessarily believe, Bush's statements, even if those were intentionally or otherwise misleading. Humans are more or less genetically programmed to accept falsehoods that comfort them during periods of extreme stress. Call it the fear factor: Being able to rally around a strong leader -- and the flag -- is reassuring to many Americans.
"An audience is softened up to believe information when they feel threatened or when they are aroused by anger or fear," says Carolyn Keating, a professor of psychology at Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y. "Two things happen when we are under threat: We focus on peripheral, superficial clues and we don't follow complex logic -- only what we feel."
Consider the now famous suggestion made by President Bush in his January State of the Union address that Iraq had tried to buy "significant quantities" of uranium from an unnamed African country, widely assumed to be Niger, for use in nuclear weapons. In the days before the war started, the documents on which the allegation was based were debunked as forgeries by United Nations weapons inspectors. Top administration officials insisted as recently as last month that they were not aware of the forgeries at the time of Bush's speech. But then, on Sunday, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV wrote in the New York Times that the CIA sent him to Niger in 2002 to assess the validity of the alleged uranium sale. Wilson wrote that he'd quickly determined the reports were false and that his findings were forwarded to Vice President Dick Cheney.
Finally, on Monday, the White House admitted the president relied on inaccurate, incomplete information for that crucial passage of his State of the Union address.
It is among the clearest evidence to date that the administration ignored critical information that didn't support its war cause and that it thereby misled the American people. But what Americans feel right now, according to psychologists and other experts, is that they want to support Bush whether he's right or wrong.
Of course, it remains possible that the administration received bad information from the intelligence agencies. And, too, the belief that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction or the materials and means to produce them extended far beyond the White House to many Western intelligence agencies and to past and current members of the United Nations weapons inspections team.
Or perhaps Americans were less concerned about WMD than about other justifications for war. Saddam was well known as a megalomaniacal dictator who gassed his own people, assassinated and tortured his political opponents, and waged war against neighboring Iran and Kuwait. Influential Times columnist Thomas Friedman summed up this the-ends-justify-the-means argument in an April piece: "Whether you were for or against this war, whether you preferred that the war be done with the United Nations' approval or without it, you have to feel good that right has triumphed over wrong. America did the right thing here."
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