Friedman's reasoning might go a long way to explaining why, despite grumblings from a few Democrats, there hasn't been public outrage over the fact that the United States' preemptive attack on another country may have been based on errant or manipulated intelligence. In mid-June, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found that almost a third of the respondents didn't expect the United States to find WMD in Iraq. However, a poll in September 2002 showed that a large majority of Americans supported the Iraq war because they believed administration contentions that Saddam's regime had biological or chemical weapons, was developing nuclear weapons, and had harbored terrorists. At the time, Americans thought the war was justified because of Saddam's threatening weapon arsenal.

More than two months after U.S. Marines took control of Baghdad, no WMD have been located. Sure, a couple of tractor-trailers, stripped bare by looters, have been found, but even the State Department's intelligence division isn't sure those are the same mobile bioweapon factories that Secretary of State Colin Powell warned of when he spoke before the United Nations in February. The Iraqi nuclear arsenal? Parts of equipment that could be used to enrich uranium were found buried in a scientist's garden. The International Atomic Energy Agency says that the few pieces don't show that Saddam had resumed his nuclear weapons program.

That may be why Americans are willing to overlook Bush's statements about the WMD and instead accept that the war was necessary to topple a murderous, tyrannical dictator. "There's an odd sense that maybe they [the Bush administration officials] lied to us, but we still did the right thing, so it doesn't matter," says Evelin Sullivan, the author of "The Concise Book of Lying" and a lecturer at Stanford University.

It's not as though Americans don't take lying seriously. They do. According to a Gallup poll conducted in early June and released on June 24, a majority didn't think the federal government unfairly targeted Martha Stewart for allegedly selling ImClone stock on an inside tip. Her crime? Fibbing. Federal prosecutors charged Stewart with lying about her actions to federal investigators and her shareholders -- not insider trading. Only 35 percent of Americans believe Stewart is being unfairly singled out because she is a successful woman. Most didn't buy Stewart's lawyers' arguments -- presented on her Web site -- that the Department of Justice is attempting to divert attention away from Enron and WorldCom.

For those who may not be up on the Enron saga, Ken Lay, the former CEO of the energy company and a Bush political supporter, hasn't been indicted for his role in the financial scandal even though he publicly assured investors, employees and the press that his company was healthy only months before it was forced to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in December 2001.

And Americans' contradictory views on deceit have nothing to with the implications or relevance of the false statements in question. Hundreds of American and British soldiers have been killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom, along with several thousand Iraqi civilians and soldiers. More are being killed each week. An untold number have been either injured or maimed. And U.S. involvement in that country is not over. Establishing order and rebuilding the infrastructure during the occupation will cost billions of dollars and more American lives. The consequences of Stewart's mendacity, in comparison, seem, inconsequential.

Why, then, does Bush get a pass? The answer is that humans are hard-wired to believe their leaders, especially during times of anxiety and fear. Psychological studies show people are apt to identify with those who make them feel more powerful, says Keating, who studies charisma and leadership. In that sense, we're less likely to criticize a leader if it would make us feel worse about ourselves at a time when we already feel vulnerable. If you doubt Americans feel insecure, consider the duct tape fiasco earlier this year, when the new Department of Homeland Security advised citizens to stock tape and plastic sheeting to seal their homes in case of biological or chemical attacks.

In her studies, Keating found that people tended to describe themselves in positive terms after seeing images of Bush. Shortly after he took office in 2001, she showed participants in an experiment computer screens that flashed subliminal pictures of him. Later, she showed them screens that flashed subliminal pictures of an anonymous New Jersey pig farmer. Even though the participants weren't conscious of seeing either portrait, they were more apt to describe themselves in positive terms -- powerful, compassionate, and strong --after seeing Bush's face. This was even truer a couple of months after the al-Qaida attacks and the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.

After the September strikes, Bush took an aggressive stance against terrorists. At one point, he even invoked a line reminiscent of the Old West, saying the United States wanted Osama bin Laden "dead or alive." Bush also said that the largely Christian U.S. would wage a "crusade" against the Muslim terrorists. After the attacks, numerous news articles and TV commentaries extolled Bush's newfound leadership abilities. So it wasn't surprising to Keating that test participants thought of themselves in more positive terms after 9/11. Bush was being presented as a virile leader. "In the face of a threat," she says, "we are particularly susceptible to falling under the influence of powerful leaders."

When we're stressed, we also block out more complex thoughts and instead focus on easily assimilated information. It's as though our cognitive reasoning abilities fall asleep and our emotions take over. "Studies show that during those times they are more likely to process information that they have received on a very superficial level," Keating says. Not only are we more apt to support our leaders, then, but we're also not really discerning what we're being told.

The best evidence that the public doesn't make rational judgments during troubled periods is its acceptance of the administration's implication of a link between al-Qaida and Saddam. Though Bush administration officials never provided concrete evidence Saddam was behind the 9/11, they mentioned the two in the same breath often enough for most Americans to believe that there was a legitimate connection. It's almost as though it was a subliminal message -- and if it was, it worked. In a February CNN-Time poll, 76 percent of those surveyed felt Saddam provided aid to al-Qaida and 72 percent thought he was "personally involved" in the September attacks. This misconception served to bolster Bush's contention that Saddam was an immediate threat to the United States. At the end of June, a U.N. group charged with monitoring al-Qaida reported that so far it hadn't found evidence connecting the terrorist group to Saddam's regime.

The tactic of creating a menace to rally the populace around a cause isn't new. "This is the oldest trick in the book for politicians," Keating says, "even if they don't know how it works."

When Gustave Gilbert, a psychologist who interviewed the Nuremberg prisoners, talked to Hermann Goering, the former leader of the Third Reich's Luftwaffe, Goering volunteered that it was relatively easy to persuade a populace to go to war. As quoted in Gilbert's book "Nuremberg Diary," Goering said: "It is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship."

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