It’s fun watching Richard Haass preen about his vociferous “dissent” before the Iraq war:
Haass says it’s painful to hear the list of all the policies that he was against — including the Iraq war and U.S. policy on Afghanistan. “I believed in diplomacy, I believe in multilateralism, I believe in institutions,” he says. “I did not believe in the Iraq war….I found myself on a very different page from my colleagues.”
But here is Haass, in January 2003, not only setting forth the justification for the war, but doing so publicly [in remarks to the School of Foreign Service and the Mortara Center for International Studies at Georgetown University in Washington]:
When certain regimes with a history of aggression and support for terrorism pursue weapons of mass destruction, thereby endangering the international community, they jeopardize their sovereign immunity from intervention including anticipatory action to destroy this developing capability. The right to self-defense including the right to take “pre-emptive” action against a clear and imminent threat has long been recognized in international law and practice. The challenge today is to adapt the principle of self-defense to the unique dangers posed by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Traditionally, international lawyers have distinguished between pre-emption against an imminent threat, which they consider legitimate, and “preventive action” taken against a developing capability, which they regard as problematic. This conventional distinction has begun to break down, however. The deception practiced by rogue regimes has made it harder to discern either the capability or imminence of attack. It is also often difficult to interpret the intentions of certain states, forcing us to judge them against a backdrop of past aggressive behavior. Most fundamentally, the rise of catastrophic weapons means that the cost of underestimating these dangers is potentially enormous. In the face of such new threats and uncertainties, we must be more prepared than previously to contemplate what, a century and a half ago, Secretary of State Daniel Webster labeled “anticipatory self-defense.”
