Weak Leaders and Self-Deception

Professor Beisel skillfully discusses the normal psychic element of consciously constructed self-deception and denial, using, as examples, the leadership of Hitler, Stalin, and George W. Bush. In my opinion, Stalin was more of a realist, and homicidal, whereas Hitler was suicidal. In fact, there are some psychohistorians who believe that the entire nation of Germany was suicidal. This thinking is not based on the fact that Hitler did eventually commit suicide, but rather because of the belief that Germany would have to have a death wish to attack two fronts, the West and the Soviet Union. Perhaps, instead of it being a “blind spot,” Stalin felt that Hitler would have to be insane (and suicidal) to attack the Soviet Union while already engaged in a full-blown war with the rest of the world. Of course, another possibility is that Hitler and his generals may have been living in a fantasy, where they were the chosen superior race and destined to dominate the rest of the world, on both eastern and western fronts.

Professor Beisel uses Hitler, Stalin, Johnson, and George W. Bush as examples of heads of state who surrounded themselves with a mentality of denial. I would like to add to this list the Shah of Iran. I grew up in Iran at the time of the dictatorship of the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and therefore experienced firsthand all of the indicators of the 1979 Islamic revolution. Just as President Bush instructed his staff not to deliver any bad news concerning Iraq and President Johnson surrounded himself with “yes men,” the Shah of Iran created an entire culture whose mentality included tiptoeing around the king, even to the point where it changed the perception of the truth to reflect news that would not displease the king.

Bad news is a narcissistic trauma to weak leaders because it causes a blow to their self-esteem, grandiosity, and exceptionalist tendencies, and may evoke symptoms similar to PTSD in the form of avoidance and dissociation as an ego defense. Thus, weak leaders may feel a psychological need to avoid bad news.

I would like to expound upon the ways in which this “denial reaction” affects other officials through a process similar to Darwinian natural selection. Weak leaders usually develop positive feelings toward those who are the bearers of good news, and may likewise develop disgust for those who bring attention to negative

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news or failure, even when this news may, in fact, be true. Those who bring good news get promoted, while messengers of negative information are filtered out. Therefore, officials quickly learn that in order to please a weak president/king they must distort the news. An Egyptian journalist observed, in comparing the Shah to his father, “No one would dare lie to the Shah’s father,” but, “No one would dare tell the truth” to the Shah. Consequently, the Shah did not realize the extent of the inflation his subjects were suffering from or the growth of the opposition to his oppressive regime.

A leader who cannot deal with any aspects of his mistakes or failure should not be in a position of leadership. I agree with Beisel when he states that Bush’s order to his staff to essentially censor any bad news about the Iraq war is astonishing and irresponsible coming from a head of state.

In regard to the concept of traumatic reenactment, I wonder if Watergate was an unconscious repetition of a childhood abandonment trauma for President Nixon. His final remarks at the White House upon resigning may be the only ones that his speechwriters did not craft. He spoke of his mother, and how consumed she had been with taking care of his older brother, who suffered from tuberculosis, even taking him to Arizona for treatment. Did Nixon experience his overworked mother’s absence as abandonment? Did he unconsciously repeat this trauma by setting up a situation in which his wrongdoing would be exposed and he would therefore be rejected by the nation?

My other question is whether the Gulf War falls into the traumatic reenactment category. What was the U.S. government’s underlying motive when our Ambassador April Glaspie informed Saddam Hussein that the United States had no interest in an Arab-Arab war? Did the United States’ ensuing defense of Kuwait provide us with an opportunity to rework our loss in Vietnam (the “Vietnam syndrome”) with a more positive outcome? After all, Iraq always claimed that Kuwait was part of Iraq. In Arab countries, it is believed that Churchill’s England did not want all of the oil to be in the hands of one nation. Therefore, the Middle East was divided into separate countries, one of which was Kuwait. In his diary, Churchill boasted, “One afternoon I created Jordan in my drawing room.” Every border of every Middle Eastern or North

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African country that is a perfectly straight line is considered to be an artificial border made in a drawing room by some superpower. The psychological issue connected to the creation of the first Gulf War was to repeat the trauma of Vietnam, this time with a better outcome. The United States government orchestrated this war to reverse the traumatic effects of Vietnam syndrome.

I fear that the next big war will involve America and China. It would not surprise me if the media were to be used to manufacture a military incident with China. This, we might use as an excuse not to pay them back the trillions of dollars that we owe them, claiming, instead, to spend that money to rebuild their bombed-out cities and bring democracy to their country. Let us hope that this is one traumatic reenactment that does not play out.

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