Born Liars (17 page)

Following the war, Custer's star waned. He was involved in botched campaigns against Native Americans. By the time that President Ulysses Grant ordered the army to deal with the Sioux and Cheyenne forces occupying land between the Yellowstone River and Montana's Bighorn Mountains, Custer was yearning to restore the shine to his reputation. On 25 June 1876, he waved away the suggestion that he arm his regiment with Gatling guns, disdained the pleas for caution from men who knew the terrain and enemy better than he did, ignored the carefully planned orders of his commanding officers, and led his men to their deaths.

The Duke of Wellington remarked that, ‘There is nothing on earth so stupid as a gallant officer.' If Pizarro had lost his audacious gamble we might regard him as we regard Custer, or the hundreds of lesser known commanders who led small forces of men into the jaws of larger armies: as an irresponsible, delusional fool. Throughout military history there have been many more Custers than Pizarros, enough for a whole field of study to be devoted to their blunders – that of ‘military incompetence'. Again and again, generals deceive themselves, and often their civilian masters, into thinking that unlikely victories are possible. Sometimes they are right; more often they are proved wrong. According to Norman Dixon, one of a handful of historians to apply a psychological analysis to military history, the tendency of military leaders to ‘under-estimate the enemy and over-estimate the capabilities of one's own side' is a persistent feature of military disasters. Unrealistic over-confidence in rapid victory was a significant cause of the second Boer War, the First World War, the Second World War, and the Bay of Pigs fiasco.

The problem is not just that a tendency to over-confidence seems to be built into normal human psychology; it's that military leaders are even more prone to it than the rest of us. Like Starek's championship swimmers, an exceptionally successful soldier is likely to be good at deceiving himself – it would help him perform well under stress, and to instil confidence in himself and others that victory is possible even in desperate situations. If he makes the odd mistake then, with luck, little harm is done. But when he's acclaimed by his peers, promoted to the senior ranks of command and involved in decisions about battles and wars, his natural over-confidence can cost hundreds or even thousands of lives

In democratic societies, the civilians in charge of the military may also be cut from this cloth; successful politicians are likely to be particularly talented self-deceivers. During his 2008 campaign for the presidency, Barack Obama remarked that, at some level, anybody who runs for president is a megalomaniac; you have to be at least half-crazy to think you should be in charge of the country, and that enough other people will agree for it to come true. Of course, if nobody convinced themselves of this, nobody would be president, but it leaves us with a ruling class that is unusually prone to excessive optimism. Indeed, Michael Handel, a scholar of military strategy, has suggested that when it comes to war, politicians are even more likely to self-deceive than generals, because politicians are often dealing with vague matters like an adversary's intentions or long-term policy rather than with ‘hard' evidence like aerial photographs and tank and troop concentrations. Perhaps they are also even more likely to think of the contest in moral terms, as a battle between good and evil in which they are, invariably, on the side of righteousness.

Dominic Johnson, author of
Overconfidence and War; the Havoc and Glory of Positive Illusions
, has designed a scale of self-deception (see overleaf). Should the military only promote officers who don't appear to be over-confident, and should voters do the same with politicians? Not necessarily; a generous measure of self-deception, when combined with other qualities, can certainly make for a better leader. ‘Force, and fraud, are in war the cardinal virtues,' said Thomas Hobbes, and a measure of self-deception helps with both. Deceiving yourself about your ability to win a fight enhances your combat performance; it also helps to bluff better, and thus to inspire confidence in your troops and fear in your opponents. The most efficient way to see off a rival, or group of rivals, is to bluff them into backing down. If the bluff works, then one side may ‘win' but both have been saved loss of life. When two sets of over-confident bluffers come into conflict, however, a catastrophic war is more likely, because both sides are over-estimating their chances of victory and will stop at nothing to prove themselves right. The biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham argues that this helps explain why there have been so many irrationally destructive wars in human history.

‘Always remember,' said Winston Churchill, ‘however sure you are that you can easily win, that there would not be a war if the other man did not think he also had a chance.' It's a warning our leaders tend to be inclined, by nature, to ignore. We are left with a troubling paradox: self-deception may be useful to the individual and even beneficial to the group, but deadly for the species as a whole.

The better part of war is deceiving.

Saddam Hussein

The 2003 Iraq war was a grisly example of two sets of illusions coming together to produce catastrophe. Much effort has already been expended in analysing the West's miscalculations; here I'm going to focus on the Iraqi perspective because, for all the mistakes made by the US and its allies, Saddam's were at least as significant.

After 11 September 2001, a steady drumbeat of pronouncements from the American government signalled that the US was preparing to disarm and overthrow by force a regime it had already declared its intention to remove. As we now know, Saddam didn't pursue a serious weapons of mass destruction programme after 1998. Yet he managed to convince everyone, including Western intelligence agencies, his neighbours in the region, and his own people, that he was doing so. If he had acted quickly, Saddam might have struck an agreement with the US and its allies, enabling him to stay in power. But he made no such attempt, and never backed down from his bluff, even when it was clear to everyone that the United States, under the second President Bush, was serious about removing him. Neither did Saddam do much to prepare his military for war; the swift collapse of Iraq's defences came as a welcome but baffling surprise to the invaders. He didn't even arrange his own escape: seven months after the invasion, the dictator was found hiding in a rabbit-hole near his family home. For over twenty-three years, Saddam had survived internal revolts, assassination attempts, two wars, destabilising defections, and concerted international efforts to remove him. Why did this master of self-preservation simply walk into the fire in 2003? The answer has much to do with the dynamics of deceit.

Following his capture, Saddam himself provided his interrogators with little insight about his pre-war calculations – he was too intent on presenting himself as heir to the great Arab heroes of the past. But we now have a much clearer idea of his thinking than we did at the time. After Baghdad fell, the US military scooped up many of the regime's most sensitive documents from government ministries and Saddam's palaces, including thousands of hours of recorded conversations between Saddam and his inner circle (Saddam had the Nixonian habit of taping all of his meetings and phone calls). As part of a ‘lessons learned' exercise, the army handed over this vast dossier to a team led by Kevin Woods, a defence analyst, retired army officer, and former member of the US Joint Forces Command.

Woods also spent more than three months in Baghdad in the summer of 2003 talking to former members of the Iraqi army and government, who were by then in the custody of the coalition. He would sit down, put a map on the table and invite them to tell him everything. ‘I'm not here to interrogate you,' he assured them. ‘I'm here to get your story.' These were experienced, proud men who were keen to take this chance to let the world know about the sacrifices they and their troops had made in impossible circumstances, and most were happy to talk.
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Over a period of more than five years, Woods pieced together their testimony with the documentary evidence to create a detailed picture of how Saddam's regime prepared – or didn't prepare – for war. Woods discovered that the world from the point of view of Saddam in early 2003 looked very different to the world as seen by the West.

When American soldiers entered Iraq, they were surprised and grateful that the Iraqis were not better prepared to defend themselves. For instance, the Iraqi army failed to blow up bridges across the Euphrates, enabling their enemies to advance at much greater speed than they would otherwise have done. After the fall of Baghdad, a senior Iraqi official was asked what he had imagined would happen when the coalition invaded. The official recalled that he and his colleagues had given little thought to it, being more concerned with potential threats from Turkey and Iran than any threat from America. It was a stunning insight into the delusional mindset of the whole regime, a mindset that had melded with that of Iraq's leader.

Most of the world viewed the 1991 Gulf War (Desert Storm) as a humiliation for Saddam. But faced with two contradictory cognitions – his army was devastated by the Americans and he was forced to withdraw from Kuwait, versus his self-perception as an invincible leader of the Arab world – Saddam chose to see it as a victory. After all, he and his regime had survived in the face of accumulated Western might. This belief was reinforced when the first President Bush lost his 1992 re-election attempt, a defeat for which Saddam took credit. In the face of America's renewed threats, Saddam remained sceptical and unperturbed. He reminded his advisers that even if the Americans were serious, this time they had only half the number of troops and fewer allies, even though ‘Little Bush' wanted to go further than his father and occupy Baghdad itself. To Saddam,
America vs Iraq: The Sequel
would be a pale retread of the first, but with an even more glorious ending for Iraq.

Saddam's officials, rather than telling him the truth – that America seemed quite willing and more than able to remove him by force – told him what they knew he wanted to hear. He was reassured by his foreign ministers that America and Britain would never go to war without Russia and France, and by his generals that non-existent state-of-the-art weapons systems were coming along nicely. The military internalised Saddam's views, focusing more on threats from within the country and from their neighbours than from the US and UK. This delusion was sustained even after the invasion; the reason the army didn't blow up the Euphrates bridges was because they anticipated having to quell an internal rebellion after the war once the Americans had stopped or retreated. Saddam's personal secretary told Woods that even ten days after the US invasion, Saddam was sublimely confident of prevailing.

Admiral John Godfrey, Britain's head of Naval Intelligence during World War II, noted that when presented with two items of contradictory information, Nazi leaders were always ‘inclined to believe the one that fits in best with their own previously formed conceptions'. Hitler's officers would deliberately distort and even invent evidence to confirm what he already believed. Stalin famously refused to believe that the Nazis were about to invade in 1941, despite the massive build-up of German troops on his border. Saddam's regime was beset by the weaknesses that Godfrey identified as ‘wishfulness' and ‘yesmanship'. Everyone knew the legendary story of Riyadh Ibrahim, the former health minister. During a low point in the Iraq–Iran war Saddam asked his ministers for candid advice. Ibrahim had the temerity to suggest that Saddam might consider stepping down temporarily, and resume his presidency once a peace deal was brokered. Saddam had him carted away immediately. The next day, pieces of the minister's chopped-up body were delivered to his wife. In the delicate words of one of Ibrahim's former colleagues, ‘this powerfully concentrated the minds of ministers'. Twenty years after it happened this story continued to haunt those officials who considered telling Saddam anything he might not want to hear.

Nevertheless, at least one of them did so. Four years after the first Gulf War, a senior Republican Guard dared to challenge the regime's military orthodoxy. This is how he described the moment to Woods:

There was a big military science lecture and conference. Saddam attended along with most of the military leadership. Three of us were scheduled to make presentations. The central idea of my presentation was simple . . . our capabilities were weakening. The Americans' technological capabilities were growing . . . By 1995 we knew we were moving towards conflict and lacked the capability. I said we should change the picture of the whole Iraqi military. We need to change from a heavy mechanised force to a light infantry force. We should make simple light infantry formations and start fighting right away in a guerrilla war. Like in Vietnam – fight and withdraw. I was the first presenter and Saddam became very angry at my thesis. I was singled out as being a mental hostage of American thinking . . . Saddam was so mad at my presentation that the other presenters who were going to say something similar became too scared and changed their reports . . . It was around this time that everyone started lying.