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. On the contrary, he explains why he was for it.
CHARLIE ROSE: What’s the idea that drove us into war with Iraq? RICHARD HAASS: I think more than anything it was the concern about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, what they might do with them weather directly use them or indirectly hand them off to terrorists. I think also for some people there were additional reasons….I think you had a menu of arguments, the key one for me and the key one for the state department and indeed the U.S. Government was the weapons of mass destruction concern.
And a few months earlier with with Jim Lehrer:
JIM LEHRER: But you, Richard Haass, based on what you looked at before the war, were you personally convinced there were weapons of mass destruction on the ground that could in some ways jeopardize the security not only of the area, but our interests as well? RICHARD HAASS: Yes, sir. I had no doubt about the chemical and biological. And I think the key factor in my own thinking was, were we prepared to live with the uncertainty over what Iraq might do with it? Did we want to live in a world where Iraq could use it or where Iraq could hand it off to terrorists? And for me that was the strongest set of arguments on the side of the ledger that argued for going to 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.
