« Viceroy Khalilzad? | Blog Home Page | Defining Peace in Palestine »
May 19, 2009Goldfarb's Google Gotcha on Richard Haass
Michael Goldfarb, on CFR President Richard N. Haass' "vociferous" opposition to the Iraq war:
It's amazing what Google turns up these days. Here is Haass on the Charlie Rose show in September 2003, two months after he left the administration to become president of the Council on Foreign Relations. Presumably free to speak his mind, and at a time when the war in Iraq was already going badly, Haass somehow does not take the opportunity to explain how he had opposed the war.[...]
But ask him now and he'll tell you he "believed in diplomacy, I believe in multilateralism, I believe in institutions...I did not believe in the Iraq war." It's amazing what six years and a shift in elite opinion can do to a man's memory.
This strikes me as a somewhat peculiar gripe. Haass has never publicly claimed to have been a "vociferous" war critic, as Goldfarb argues. Haass has written - and repeated in recent interviews - that his war stance was a modest 60/40 opposition based off of logistical policy concerns. These policy concerns are a documented matter of record.
It's certainly true that Haass could have, and perhaps should have resigned in protest if he felt so professional isolated at State, but he has explained his thinking on the matter at that time:
RCW: Why didn’t you resign?HAASS: I was only 60/40 against the war. I believed Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons. Never once, in all my years in government, did some analyst take me aside and say otherwise.
I thought the war was a mistake, but you can’t fall on your sword every time you oppose a certain decision. Had I known then that there were no WMD’s I probably would have resigned. I eventually did leave because – aside from the lure of my current job with the Council on Foreign Relations – Iraq wasn’t an isolated incident.
I argued for a new Iran policy and lost. I argued for a diplomatic approach to North Korea and lost. I argued for a serious approach to the Palestinian issue and lost. I wanted to deal with Syria, and I lost on that. I also didn’t understand the allergy to international institutions. At some point, you run out of fingers to add up your disagreements.
I wasn’t having meaningful influence, and due to the NSC system, rarely got to make the argument for alternative policies. So when another opportunity to leave presented itself, I took it.
Share