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This is a pretty long, thought out comment. Thank you for engaging.
I'm familiar with Mearsheimer's work. I've argued against the man's perception of "Russia invading Ukraine is entirely the USA's fault" and was exposed by proxy to his stuff on lying.
Conflating "lying" with "spinning" is a big old motte and bailey. When you accuse someone (or an institution) of lying, that's a quite aggressive claim of something that's clearly wrong. Like 1984's "we've always been at war with Eastasia" sort of thing. Bush and Powell lying about Iraqi WMD's was a good example here, as it became clear after the fact that they were pulling stuff out of their asses, and it served as a major part of plunging us into a pointless war. Spinning, by contrast, is something that everyone does all the time. You can accuse the government of spinning facts all you want, and you'd be 100% correct, but you didn't do that, likely because you knew it lacked the same punch as an accusation of "lying".
Your examples given in the last two decades amount to very little. The link on Biden came in the runup to the Ukraine war, when a lot of people thought the US was needlessly saber-rattling by saying Russia would invade. Of course, Russia did invade a few weeks after that article was published. Other than that, it gives an example of a US strike in Afghanistan which it claimed was legitimate until the NYT wrote some articles, and then it said "oh, maybe not". The examples on Trump are likewise lacking. Yeah, he presented himself as a peace president while actively throwing a bit of gasoline on some international fires, but again that's pretty mild. The stuff on Obama is just some spinning of the benefits of the Iran Nuclear Deal. Again, calling it "spin" is fine, but I wouldn't call any of those "lies".
Mearsheimer's work came out in 2011 and he sticks mostly to examples that took decades to find the truth of the matter because it's a bad look for a government to be caught lying in the technical definition of a lie. Iraq is his most recent prominent example in his book and that's because that was such a tremendous fuck up. Do you think the government is going to release information that sheds light on recent events anytime soon unless it helps them push an agenda or policy and is so far removed from the party in power to resolve them of any legitimate criticism that would follow?
And furthermore, governments are now more sophisticated in how they propagate information to the population. Proving someone told a lie is extremely difficult because the defendant in question can always claim they thought they were telling the truth and just had the wrong facts. You'd need to be a certain level of incompetence to have a documented recording of you admitting you know something was a lie.
No, I didn't. After reading your comment I'll acknowledge I just had poor logic and was not using the word "lying" in a strict, legal-lawyer-like definition. In my head I went the opposite of truth is lies. The government is not telling the truth, therefore they are lying. I'll concede this is a technical got-ya that I'm not ready to defend because I'm mixing a lot of sentiments in that statement I made. In recent years I think the government lied about Covid, they're lying about the state of the economy to the people by saying it's better than it is with tactics such as redefining how inflation is measured, they perpetuate lies such as commemorating George Floyd and playing defense for the BLM movement, they lied about the Trump Russia collusion. You asked specifically for foreign policy examples and I don't consider myself particularly knowledgeable on matters of foreign policy.
That was me literally searching on Google and just copy-pasting the 1st example I got for each president. You asked for examples of lies in regard to policy, I did provide and then you dismiss some of them as just saying those are "mild". Are you looking specifically for a fully exhaustive list of other examples that was as disastrous as Iraq? The government is never going to fuck up on a level of Iraq ever again if they have half a brain. As much as people like to fling shit about our politicians as being incompetent idiots they're not actual literal idiots and most of them have higher IQ than the average population. They're also skilled with words and framing which is why many people find politicians to be slimy weasels.
Look, I appreciate you helping me better refine my position with more accurate words, but at this point we are just talking about technical definitions and I'm not really interested in having that conversation any further, especially since you reframed it specifically in the context of foreign policy and then dismiss some examples of actual lies as "mild". I'll edit my comment to say "deception" instead of lies. Happy? I don't think it substantially changes the core of my argument one way or the other. I'm still going to choose to believe the government is lying to the people and that we won't know the truth on many of these topics until decades later.
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Bush and Powell weren’t lying about WMDs. They honestly believed they were there.
Was there a bunch of motivated reasoning and shoddy analysis of poor evidence that got them (and many others) to hold those beliefs? Yes.
The US intel community failed to resist “spin” on various reports and assessments, but it was basically taken for granted that Saddam had had a WMD program before and still was pursuing one in 2003. There wasn’t definitive evidence that he didn’t, and there was crappy evidence that he did. Motivated reasoning and the emotional environment after 9/11 did the rest.
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