Goldfarb's Google Gotcha on Richard Haass

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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.

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