A Tale of Two Wars

Title War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars

Author Richard N. Haass

Publisher Simon & Schuster

Year 2009

Pages 336 pp.

Price $27.00

Letter to the Editor

The Necessary and the Chosen

Richard N. Haass

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War of Necessity, War of Choice -- part recent history, part wide-ranging personal memoir, part case study in decision-making -- deserves to be read carefully. This is so not only because Richard Haass has impressive credentials -- he was a top foreign policy official and is now president of the Council on Foreign Relations -- or because he provides a perceptive insider's account of deliberations at the top of the U.S. government that, within a dozen years, resulted in U.S. engagement in two significant wars with Iraq. The book's additional significance is to be found in the wider lesson that a future U.S. secretary of state or U.S. national security adviser should draw for U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Haass took part in the decision to wage the 1991 war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq in his capacity as the senior National Security Council staffer for the Middle East. In that role, he helped the national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, define Saddam's sudden seizure of Kuwait as an unacceptable act of aggression that threatened the stability of the Middle East and the survival of the pro-U.S. regime in Saudi Arabia. Haass makes it clear that President George H. W. Bush himself held this view from day one. Both Bush and Scowcroft are the heroes of the memoir.

Critical to the U.S. response, as Haass recounts, was the fact that Washington undertook a systematic diplomatic campaign to mobilize international support in order to prevail on Saddam to withdraw -- and, eventually, to compel him by force to do so. In the end, when force was used, the U.S.-led military campaign involved significant European and (geopolitically more important) Arab and Muslim military contingents. Even Syria took part.

The military campaign itself -- the "war of necessity" -- was focused on the clearly limited strategic objective of destroying Saddam's military capability and evicting Iraq from Kuwait. Both goals, it was clear in advance, were attainable, and they were attained. Neither objective was driven by extraneous motivations, and the policy itself reflected a cold calculus of the potentially grand costs of inaction versus the more limited costs of a clearly focused military reaction. It bears noting here that prior to the 1991 collision, the United States had quietly supported Iraq in its war against Iran; that, as Haass writes, the United States did not object to Iraq's using chemical weapons against Iran; and that Haass himself favored expanding the U.S. relationship with Iraq. U.S. policy, in brief, was guided by hard-nosed textbook realism.

JUST AND UNJUST WAR

Haass was -- as he himself describes it -- a "peripheral" player in the decisions that led to the second war, undertaken a little more than a decade later. By then, he was director of policy planning in the State Department, under Secretary of State Colin Powell. Over the years, the influence of the policy planning office had waned. By the time Haass took over, its responsibilities ranged from speechwriting for the secretary of state to occasionally recommending specific policy initiatives, but never again would it reach the hallowed status associated with actually shaping U.S. grand strategy, as it had done under the directorship of George Kennan, at the outset of the Cold War.

Powell himself was not the dominant figure in the small cluster of officials whom President George W. Bush consulted about his post-9/11 fixation on Saddam and his alleged weapons of mass destruction. Already by July 2002, according to Haass, the president -- driven by the dynamics of a "war on terror" that he had declared -- had decided to go to war against Saddam, come what may. Condoleezza Rice, then serving as the national security adviser (in the first Bush administration, she had been Haass' colleague and friend on the National Security Council), bristled when she dismissed Haass' misgivings about the rush to war. The issue of war or peace, she indicated firmly, was closed.

It is now abundantly clear -- and Haass' account provides a powerful confirmation -- that the "war of choice" was not the product of careful deliberation but a choice based on conviction. It was made by the great "Decider," who was prone to Manichaean oversimplifications, and it was passionately promoted within his administration by a cluster of neoconservative advocates. In Haass' telling, the antiheroes -- in addition to the younger Bush -- are Rice, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and Paul Bremer, who headed the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad.

Especially damning is Haass' account of the inadequacy of the decision-making process. Haass notes repeatedly that the State Department was marginalized (unlike when James Baker ran it during the first Iraq war), with Bush holding it in "low regard." In early 2003, Haass himself produced a memorandum for Powell in which possible alternatives to immediate military action were outlined. He reports, "I wanted Bush to know he retained a way out." But the memorandum went nowhere.

The credibility of Haass' account is heightened by his honest admission that initially he was open to considering the "war of choice." As he puts it, "I myself harbored no doubts" regarding Saddam's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction. Although troubled by the arbitrary and one-sided character of the decision-making process, his uneasiness "was not fundamental."