E-mail a friendRichard Haass
airdate May 18, 2009
A widely respected foreign policy expert, Richard Haas has been president of the Council on Foreign Relations since '03. He previously served in various posts in the Defense and State Departments and was a principal adviser to Colin Powell. He also served as U.S. coordinator for policy on the future of Afghanistan and as the lead U.S. official for Northern Ireland's peace process. Haass is a Rhodes Scholar and author/editor of numerous books, including his latest, War of Necessity, War of Choice.
Foreign policy expert examines the lessons the U.S. needs to learn from its foreign wars. (1:35)
Full Interview. (10:03)
Richard Haass
Tavis: We kick off this program this week tonight with Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, who previously served as a State Department adviser to then-secretary of State Colin Powell. His new book is called "War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars." Richard, nice to have you on the program.
Richard Haass: Thank you, sir.
Tavis: Good to see you.
Haass: Good to see you.
Tavis: We'll come to the book in just a second, if I might. Let me start, though, with the news of the day. So Prime Minister Netanyahu - prime minister again, I should say - has his first visit with President Obama in the White House. What do you make of this conversation today?
Haass: Pretty much what I thought. No explosives, nothing really decisive. When an Israeli prime minister comes here for the first time, what's important is that he shows to the people back home he can manage Israel's most important bilateral relationship.
Barack Obama's got enough in his inbox without picking fights with the Israeli prime minister off the bat. So it was in some ways less decisive or important than many people suspected. They clearly focused on Iran and on the so-called peace process. But I think now each goes back to his own government and talks about okay, where do we go from here?
Tavis: On those two issues, then, how far apart are Obama and Netanyahu on Iran, number one; on the Middle East peace process, number two?
Haass: On Iran, the short answer is we don't quite know. The real question is how much tolerance the Israelis have for Iran's continued enrichment of uranium, whatever else they might do. So we haven't reached a point where we diverge. What this Israelis keep telling us, though, is the clock is ticking, we're not comfortable. The pace of what the Iranians are doing technically is outpacing, going faster than diplomacy.
That's true. My hunch is the Obama administration, though, still has a year or so to get diplomacy in gear and to see what happens.
Tavis: What's your sense of whether, where the peace process is concerned, and a solution, if I can use that word, whether Netanyahu is still as - my word, not yours - hawkish as we have known him to be, or whether or not this time around as prime minister, given that things have changed since he was first prime minister, whether he's softening, changing, shifting on this issue?
Haass: We haven't seen signs that he's shifting. On the other hand, his past shows that he's willing to be pragmatic. The bigger problem right now might be his government. He's more constrained than ever. This was not the government he wanted. He wanted to form a more centrist government. He was forced, even by Israeli standards, to form a more right-wing government.
So it's not really clear how much room he has. That said, to be honest, he doesn't have much of a Palestinian partner. The Palestinians are divided. A more interesting test might be to see what he does with Syria - whether he's willing to get serious about a negotiation there, where there are some interesting possibilities.
Tavis: One last question on that, since he is in our country today. Your assessment here, quickly, of how President Obama thus far is handling, or not handling, as it were, his involvement, his engagement, regarding the peace process in the Middle East.
Haass: Well, so far he hasn't really had to do much. It's teeing the ball up. It hasn't been a priority. It's interesting. His priorities are Afghanistan, Pakistan, North Korea, China, the world economy. And the peace process, the Israeli-Palestinian issue, hasn't moved to the fore.
Tavis: Although he did put Mitchell out there pretty quick, though. He didn't take a long time to appoint George Mitchell.
Haass: He put them out there, but whenever you appoint somebody it can have two meanings. One is it's a priority and the other is you want the other guy to handle it. And at the moment, it's not ripe. The Israelis and Palestinians, the prerequisites aren't in place. So I'd be real surprised if the president made this a major priority, unless he had things lined up better. And right now, they can't be.
Tavis: Let me jump to the book now, "War of Necessity, War of Choice." Let me start with a confession. I wanted to have you on the program because I always enjoy your insights, and yet I will tell you honestly that I'm sick of these books, and here's what I'm sick of. I'm sick of everybody in the administration writing a book when they get out, trying to excuse themselves, trying to explain themselves, trying to rationalize what they did.
We're in a war, it's a hellhole, people are dying, still. They've lost their lives. And I'm talking about Americans; I ain't talking about Iraqis as yet. Why should I or anybody else want to read another book from somebody in the administration trying to explain away what happened?
Haass: First of all, I think I'm one of the few people who served at a senior level in both Bush administrations - Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Bob Gates, and myself. I'm not sure there's any others. Second of all, I'm not making excuses; I'm trying to be honest. I'm trying to be as straight as I can about why policies happened.
And just think for a second - there were two wars between a President Bush and Saddam Hussein's Iraq. They could not have been more different. Why was that? Why was it in one case people and ideas came together to do the kind of war we did, lots of international support, a limited war, and why was it in the other case the United States was on its own, essentially, used military force when it didn't have to, and things did not turn as well.
I want to make it clear why it happened. I'm not out to settle scores. This is not a mean-spirited thing. But I do want to make it transparent, and I think Americans not only have a right to know, they've got a necessity to learn. How is it we apply the lessons of Iraq to things like Afghanistan? Or what if Iraq unravels, or what about Iran, what we were just talking about?
We don't have the luxury, to be honest, to forget about Iraq. Not only is Iraq still with us, the sorts of challenges we faced in Iraq are still with us and will be with us for years to come.
Tavis: Let's go to the first time around in this war with Iraq. Why was the first one under the first President Bush a war of necessity?
Haass: I think for two reasons. One is Saddam Hussein, Iraq's 10 percent of the world's oil. Kuwait gave him another 10 percent - 20 percent. If he had been able to get away with that, he would have really controlled Saudi Arabia. It would have given him the lion's share over this world's commodity.
Secondly, don't forget this was 20 years ago, right after the Berlin Wall came down. This was the beginning of a new era and what happened or didn't happen and how it happened was going to set the personality. Imagine how history would have turned out different if the United States had said, okay, Saddam, you can get away with absorbing this other country. Don't you think others would have taken note?
Tavis: And the second war, a war of choice with Iraq. You call it a war of choice why?
Haass: We had other policies we could have turned to - for example, working on sanctions more, working on diplomacy. Also, Saddam hadn't done anything new. It wasn't like somehow we'd woken up and he was a new threat, that he had things he didn't have before, he was threatening to use them. No, what had changed was peoples' mind-sets here. What had changed was 9/11. But we didn't have to do what we did and we certainly didn't have to do it the way we did it.
Tavis: You've just now started to answer the question I want to ask now, but I'll ask it anyway - if it is, in fact, a war of choice, why did we choose to go to war?
Haass: It took me a long time to uncover it. I think I'm right now. I think that after 9/11, the president and those around him first of all wanted to show the United States could be more than a victim. We could shape history as much as be hurt by it. And secondly, they led themselves to believe, somehow persuaded themselves that it would be easy. That they would turn Iraq into a shining city on a hill, and the day after they did that then they could spread democracy all around the Middle East.
So if you were the president and people basically persuaded you you can accomplish great things and you could do it at bargain basement prices, sounds pretty good.
Tavis: In the book you argue - not argue; you make the case that during this second war, former Vice President Dick Cheney was famously tight-lipped. And now we all know that he is famously or infamously motormouth of late. What do you make of that shift in his strategy, if I can use that word?
Haass: It's interesting. I've been watching it too. What's consistent is the line. Dick Cheney is always extremely conservative. He was conservative under the first Bush, but then he was the odd man out so you didn't see it much. For example, he didn't argue that we should march to Baghdad or anything like that.
In the second Bush administration, Colin Powell was the odd man out. Dick Cheney was at the core of things and he was clearly a worst possible case kind of guy, if something could go wrong, or if there was any chance, the so-called 1 percent chance that something bad could happen, Cheney wanted to do something about it.
I do think he was somewhat influenced by 9/11. It's interesting, though. I don't have a great answer for you. Why has he suddenly emerged as the voice in this Republican debate? It could be to defend the past, but I also get the sense that he's fighting for what he thinks is where the party ought to go.
The Republican party is right now wide open as to its future, where it's going to position itself on the political spectrum, and I get the sense that Dick Cheney, who's always been quite ideological, wants to make sure those views prevail.
Tavis: I don't know how much scholarship there is on this, Richard, but there certainly is a lot of talk about it on the Internet and beyond - has been for years, about whether or not the second war, the war of choice, was about revenging the father's legacy where the war of necessity was concerned. Your thoughts about that?
Haass: I don't think so at any basic level, and I line up the reasons. I never picked up on that. On the other hand, I think there is one place where some of that comes in, where the younger President Bush wanted to be bold and decisive where he thought his father was not. And for him, this offered a chance to put his stamp on history.
It's ironic - he wanted to be a consequential president in ways that his father was not, and the good news is he became a consequential president. The bad news, there's a big negative in front of the consequences. The history, I believe, is going to be far more negative about the son and it's going to be quite positive about the father.
Tavis: Speaking of the father, the son, and these two wars, what lessons could we have learned, should we have learned, from the war of necessity that might have prevented, if at all possible, the war of choice?
Haass: One is to be very careful about your assumptions. We were wrong the first time around; we didn't think Saddam was going to invade. Well, we were wrong the second time around; we were convinced he had weapons of mass destruction. You've really got to vet your assumptions.
Second of all, you'd really better know deeply about a country before you invade it. That was something we should have learned from Vietnam as well as from the first Iraq war. We didn't know enough about Iraq to go to war with it, what was really going on in Iraqi society. Those are two things that quickly come to mind.
Tavis: He was there - one of the few people there for both the first war, which he calls a war of necessity, and the second one, which he calls a war of choice. His name, Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations. You won't get a better insider's perspective and view than you will from this new book by Richard Haass - " A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars." Richard, nice to have you on the program.
Haass: Thank you, great to see you.
Tavis: It's good to see you, man.
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