Lies, Damn Lies and Diplomats

by John Thompson

December 16, 2002

Sometime in the early 20^th Century, an American diplomat observed of a professional encounter that "He lied; I knew that he lied; and he knew that I knew that he lied; and that my friends, was diplomacy."

Honesty might be the best policy, but anybody with any pretence to sophistication knows better than to always practice it. We are told as children to be honest, and then almost every experience we get between grade school and our death beds tells us to practice what Churchill once described as "terminological inexactitude".

Still, experience also tells us that there are times when one really should tell the truth — we also get a lot of experience in recognizing a lie when we hear one. Still, we have to live with ourselves, with our families, our neighbors and our co-workers. So we extend and receive credibility on credit. Every ‘little white lie’, every desperate excuse and even the occasional bald-faced fabrication will reduce that credibility, but careful management allows one’s credit rating to remain high.

The funny thing is that some people have completely over-extended their credibility account and yet still have their word taken at face value — and there is stranger news still. In our media saturated society, we extend even more credit than may be wise; so much so that we expect some (like "spin doctors", advertisers and Federal cabinet ministers) to be misleading us even when they are being totally honest. However, there are a privileged few who we know are lying like champions, and to whom it is considered rude to ever call in their credit.

Consider, for example, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. The most charitable way to describe him is as an aging megalomaniac who is not going to go quietly. Technically, Zimbabwe is a democracy — only so long as Mugabe’s party won the elections. Currently, two decades of corruption and mismanagement have completely undermined the economy to the extent that virtually the entire country (Black and White alike) is desperate to seem him go before the nation collapses into famine and economic ruin.

Mugabe’s reaction is to blame all of Zimbabwe’s ills on a handful of White farmers and he insists on land "reform" over all else. Never mind that these reforms consist of handing over gigantic well-organized farms to Mugabe’s minions and mistresses — not the "peasants" this practice is supposedly aimed at improving. Another lie: the "war veterans" who constitute his political militia are not survivors of the 1964-79 civil war — for a start, only a miniscule handful of guerrillas survived the fighting (while Mugabe and his cadres were far away from the combat zone) and most of the so-called veterans are under twenty years of age. When news of beaten black labour union leaders or murdered black farm workers comes out of Zimbabwe, the grand poobah prefers to wrap himself in the tattered fifty year old rags of "anti-colonialism" and lies about how he is championing the independence of the nation he is bringing to the edge of ruin.

Another liar with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of credibility is Tariq Aziz, the Iraqi Foreign Minister. To be fair to the poor man, he is among the many who are riding a dictatorial tiger behind a despotic Saddam Hussein — whose will Aziz cannot dare question if he hopes to live. Yet, with every pronouncement, there is another lie coming. Aziz declares Iraq has honored its 1991 Ceasefire Agreement — it hasn’t. He declares that Iraq does not have weapons of mass destruction — they do. He will describe historical facts, such as Iraq’s 1980 invasion of Iran and 1990 invasion of Kuwait, as a "tissue of lies". Iraq just handed another bundle of distortions to the UN by handing in thousands of documents (most saying nothing at all) and declaring that they had come clean.

Yet, when talking to reporters or making a speech to some international audience, nobody calls in the credit of the likes of Mugabe and Aziz. They are international figures, not lying SOBs whose every word should be automatically suspect.

But then, some sort of come-clean campaign for international leaders might never have to leave Ottawa. It is what a soldier might call a ‘target rich environment’. Just think of some of the howlers presented to us with blank-faced sincerity by senior civil servants, cabinet ministers and our leader in the sure knowledge that the lie would not be challenged.

Over 2,000 years ago, a blind Greek named Diogenes stumbled around the streets of Athens with a lit lamp, searching for an honest man. I think I understand him now…

John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: mackenzieinstitute@bellnet.ca