Richard Haass: Misunderstanding Choice

Richard Haass can lay claim to being one of the current foreign policy wisemen. He’s head of the establishment Council on Foreign Relations after having served the last two Republican presidents, leaving in 2003 as Colin Powell’s policy planning chief.

Now he’s attempting to influence Obama’s foreign policy through a new book and a book-based Washington Post op-ed. He believes “We would have been better off without Bush’s war of choice” in Iraq, just as we shouldn’t have followed Gen. Douglas MacArthur into North Korea in 1950, we should avoid further escalation in that “ graveyard of empires” called Afghanistan, and that somehow (how, really?), we should allow Iran to enrich uranium, but not enrich enough to build a bomb (!).

Haass sees the world as “gray and nuanced.” In a recent interview, Haass defended his reasoning.

wars of choice are anything but straightforward - they pose some of the most fateful decisions for any president. [After 9.11,] the threat posed by Iraq and Saddam Hussein had in no way increased, [our] goals [weren’t] specific and limited. . . the idea was to transform Iraqi society, [but] it was never clearly stated how the U.S. would bring democracy to Iraq.

Iran’s strategic gain is . . . the principal strategic result of America’s Iraq policy. Iran is dominating in Lebanon through Hezbollah, they are dominating in Gaza through Hamas, and they are now closer to realizing their nuclear ambitions. . .The U.S. strategic position has worsened: Iran is much stronger, Iraq is weak and divided. . . We’re now in an era where Iran, various militias and terrorists now have a much larger share of power. We’re still the most important external actor in the region, but our position has clearly suffered. . . The [current] era of Middle Eastern history . . . will be worse for the United States. . . I think the prevailing view is that the Bush administration left things worse than they inherited.

(Why didn’t you resign?) 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.

Haass maintains the first Bush administration pursued a “Goldilocks outcome” in Iraq, wanting a weaker and more pliant Iraq, but not one so weak that it wouldn’t be able to balance Iran. But to me, this seems pretty far from where Bush 41 actually was. More accurately, 41 wanted Saddam out of power, but expected the Gulf War loser to fall of his own weight. Iran was a theocratic, anti-U.S. state in 1991 to be sure, but far from going nuclear and having barely fought Saddam to a standstill in 1980-88, Iran was less the problem than it was part of the anti-Saddam solution of that time. Iraq was the enemy.

Going back over 2002-07, after 9.11 we faced Islamic extremist threats from both al Qaeda and Iran. In Iraq, we took on and beat al Qaeda, leaving Iran the principal Middle East threat today. In my view, in the view of many others, we are safer today because Saddam no longer controls the world’s third-largest source of liquid petroleum, and because al Qaeda chose to take its stand in Iraq and lost.

The debate goes on. But given the danger Saddam posed to the world from 1990 on, including after 9.11, necessity (not choice) dictated we end his rule. Now we at least have the chance a democratic Iraq will help counter Iran’s extremism.