Two Bushes, Two Wars

Hadi Mizban / AP Photo In a candid interview, Richard Haass talks to Warren Hoge about what he learned on the policy frontlines of both Iraq conflicts—and why he finally decided to quit W.’s administration.

Richard Haass was a senior Washington policymaker during both Iraq wars—a member of the National Security Council staff in the George H.W. Bush administration and the director of policy planning for Secretary of State Colin Powell under George W. Bush. During beach strolls with me on Martha’s Vineyard in the summer of 2000, he suggested he would return to government if a second Bush administration happened. It did, and he did, but the experiences turned out to be very different. His new book, War of Necessity, War of Choice, tells the story of the two wars and the two Bushes in a richly anecdotal style to delight an old journalist. I caught up with Richard to talk about it last month in his offices at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he has become a president himself.

Why was the first Iraq War one of necessity and the second one of choice?

The first Iraq War was one of necessity because vital U.S. interests were at stake and we reached the point where no other national-security instruments were likely to achieve the necessary goal, which was the reversal of Saddam Hussein’s invasion and occupation of Kuwait. The second was a war of choice simply because U.S. vital interests were not engaged at that point. I thought there were other policy instruments that the U.S. could lean on, largely using diplomacy, strengthening sanctions and so on.

“There’s a pattern in Bush 43’s presidency of being attracted to the big and the bold, and my whole reading of him is that he was instinctively uncomfortable with what you might call a modulated foreign policy.”

You say in the book that Vice President Cheney or someone on his staff was reading U.S. intelligence accounts of your conversations abroad because they thought you might be having unauthorized contacts with Iranian officials. Were they trying to get you fired?

I would have thought that with all the things on his plate, the vice president had bigger things to worry about than me, particularly since he was winning almost all the arguments in the administration, and I was losing all of them. But if I had been doing something unauthorized, that would have given people grounds for canning me. I thought we were making a tremendous mistake by not talking to Iran. The administration had what it thought was a strategy that somehow regime change was going to come, and if only we isolated them enough, the Iranian government and the revolutionary Islamic regime were going to disappear. I thought that was just a fantasy.

To what extent was the son’s persistent desire to topple Saddam motivated by the wish to make the younger Bush appear stronger and more resolute than the father ?

I never heard him talk in those terms. There’s a pattern in Bush 43’s presidency of being attracted to the big and the bold, and my whole reading of him is that he was instinctively uncomfortable with what you might call a modulated foreign policy—a foreign policy of adjustment, of degree. So I don’t think you have to put someone on a couch to say he wanted to complete what his father began. He was conscious about not becoming a second and third term of his father’s foreign policy.

Click Here To Read An Excerpt of War of Necessity, War of Choice

War of Necessity, War of Choice. By Richard N. Haas. 352 pages. Simon & Schuster. $27. Why did the first President Bush stop the war and not take out Saddam and go all the way in 1991? You say in the book that that was a decision about which there was no internal dissent.

We were very afraid that many of the things that did happen a decade later would happen if we had marched on to Baghdad. Indeed there were some eerie similarities between some of the memos I wrote in the spring of 1991 and what I wrote in 2002 and 2003. There wasn’t an advocate for toppling Saddam in the room, and that includes Dick Cheney when he was secretary of Defense and Paul Wolfowitz when he was undersecretary of Defense.

Why do you think Colin Powell didn’t resign, and if he had, would it have made a difference ?

Powell is an optimist. He thought that over time things would swing his way. Ironically, they did, but it was after he had left. I think as a military man he had a real sense of responsibility, of loyalty. He also had a powerfully developed sense of public service and a belief in what he could do. Not in the arrogant sense but in the optimistic sense. Had he resigned, I'm not sure it would have turned things around. My hunch is that if Powell had resigned, he would have resigned quietly. That's his style, it’s in the man's DNA.