The Foreign Service Journal, April 2010

A P R I L 2 0 1 0 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 63 Realist or Ideologue? War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars Richard N. Haass, Simon and Schus- ter, 2009, $27, hardcover, 278 pages. R EVIEWED BY S TEPHEN B UCK This is an important and wise book from a foreign policy insider who has been president of the Council on For- eign Relations for nearly seven years. Having been a key White House offi- cial during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and director of policy planning at the State Department in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Richard Haass provides unique insights into the roots, conduct and aftermath of both wars. Throughout this book, the latest of 11 he has written or edited, Haass gives some riveting descriptions of crisis de- cision-making at the White House level. (To his credit, the author is forth- right in admitting that he was on the in- side prior to the first war, and on the margins before the second.) While he lets President George H.W. Bush off lightly for giving Iraqi’s Shia population little support after his 1991 remarks that appeared to call for an uprising, he is otherwise candid and thorough. That he makes no mention at all of State’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs in his discussion of decision-making is dis- couraging to this veteran of NEA. Haass includes the full text of a top- secret memo he wrote in September 2002, long before the invasion, outlin- ing in great detail lessons from the past and the likely cost of an invasion of Iraq. He even made some of these concerns public at the January 2003 Davos World Economic Forum, but ruefully concludes that “I was not rep- rimanded so much as I was ignored.” In his final chapter, Haass candidly compares the Iraq wars of Bush 41 and 43, finding that the latter “contributed significantly to the deterioration of the absolute and relative position of the United States in the world.” It is quite possible, he concludes, that “history will judge the [2003] war’s greatest cost to be opportunity cost, the squandering by the United States of a rare and in many ways unprecedented opportunity to shape the world and the nature of inter- national relations for decades to come.” Haass is at his best when he pithily compares the two wars as one of “ne- cessity” and the other of “choice.” He is also to be commended for being so honest about his inability to stop GeorgeW. Bush from launching the in- vasion. Still, while his dispassionate analysis was badly needed to counter the neocons’ cherry-picking of “intelli- gence” in their rush to war, one can ask whether some of the passion Haass musters here would have been even better used in a public resignation on principle against a war he rightly saw as ill-considered and likely to have disas- trous consequences. As Afghanistan replaces Iraq in pub- lic debate, one wishes that this elegant and insightful book had come out in 2006, rather than three years later. Sadly, however, there is reason to be- lieve that Haass has not yet absorbed his own lessons. On Jan. 22, he published a com- mentary in Newsweek , “Enough Is Enough,” in which he claims to be a “card-carrying realist,” yet advocates more active U.S. support of regime change in Iran. It sparked a fiery de- bate and prompted accusations that, rather than cautioning Sec. Powell be- fore his now-infamous United Nations speech portraying Iraq as an imminent threat, Haass went along. It is also sadly ironic, for the U.S. invasion led to the installation of Iran-backed Iraqi Shia religious parties and politicians, delivering a significant boost to the very Iranian regime Haass now decries. The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq over- turned 1,400 years of Sunni control and Sadly, Haass himself has not absorbed the lessons of this elegant and insightful book. B OOKS