Demagoguery of Choice
I was present at a conference in Maryland sponsored by the NewsHour in November 2002 when Mr. Haass, then head of policy planning at the State Department, issued a ringing defense of the impending war, which evidently he now maintains that he already opposed as a war of choice, not necessity. At the time, he stirred together, in Cheneyesque fashion, claims about Saddam and al-Qaeda, about Iraqi WMD, and the rest. I arose to argue with him and called his presentation "demagogic," but my protest did not attract his interest or sympathy. I'm curious to know if Mr. Haass believed what he was saying to this audience of foreign policy influentials at the time; if his presentation was a presentation of necessity or of choice; if he agrees that he was demagogic; and if he has any regrets.
Wow. If Haas can't answer for this it brings his credibility into serious question.
June 10, 2009 9:06 AM | Reply | Permalink
Is there any transcript of the conference available?
June 10, 2009 9:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
Good question. I'm trying to find out.
June 10, 2009 10:12 AM | Reply | Permalink
The details of this particular case are pending, as prior commenters essentially have noted, but the principle is clear: the public should not tolerate a ex-post cover-up of the deliberate deception and chronic blunders of the Cheney-Bush administration, particularly as regards Iraq.
June 10, 2009 10:09 AM | Reply | Permalink
If this Mr. Haass is the same Mr. Richard Haass descibed below I am sure he has absolutely no regrets:
link
Maybe the CFR has gilded copies of all his words kept for posterity.
June 10, 2009 11:38 AM | Reply | Permalink
RE: "Richard N. Haass...serves as Director of Council on Foreign Relations Inc."
NOTE: "Elliott Abrams to Council on Foreign Relations", by Steve Clemons, 01/26/09
(EXCERPT) "Jim Lobe has just confirmed that outgoing Special Assistant to President George W. Bush and Senior Director for Near East and North African Affairs and Deputy National Security Adviser for Global Democracy Strategy Elliott Abrams will be joining the Council on Foreign Relations team in February.
Richard Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations, reportedly considered and declined a possible role as one of several Obama administration envoys to the Middle East.
Now, it is vital to keep Haass exactly where he is -- because the only thing worse than hearing that Elliott Abrams will be joining Max Boot and some others on the CFR payroll is learning that he might have become President of the organization as well..."
SOURCE - http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/2009/01/elliott_abrams/
June 11, 2009 2:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
What's really ironic is that State was castrated by the Cheney/Rumsfeld cabal, so at that time, I think Mr. Haass was trying out for a spot on the cheerleading squad.
And since he was Powell's Principal Advisor at the time, he was in a position to vet the phony Niger yellowcake and aluminum tubes stories, yet he apparently gave Powell the green light. That kind of mistake doesn't exactly cover Haass in glory either.
June 10, 2009 1:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
As Dick Clarke notably pointed out about his defenses of the W Administration against claims that he was a liar, he noted that he simply put the best face on the facts, without lying, and that 'sometimes you do that sort of thing'
It's "doing the job" -- 'we all shine on', as in justifying the lying. "Doing what has to be done". This whole model of having the shouts of truth on the street lead to 'whispers' in circles farther in, in turn those circles raise issues that those farther in raise even more discreetly (and ineffectually), with the overall effect that everybody covers their asses and maintains their image and that of their bosses, while trashing those in circles further out even when the latter are right, and ...
we end up w/melted polar caps and a society like the one Walt Whitman described in his must-read poem "Respondez! Respondez!" -- a society where civilization (and most of nature) are more or less dead, capitalism lives on, and Tory horseshit triumphs for a millenium
June 10, 2009 1:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
Haass acted correctly..
While in an Administration you support its actions or you resign in which case you remain silent for some period. I can imagine exceptions, such as the Holocaust ,but they are very few.
Despite having , for the first time in my life, having demonstrated against the War in a bitterly cold February march I don't think it was one of those exceptions.
The lies about wpm were not known then ;Josh's interview with Kenneth Pollack was essentially an endorsement;"This American Life" of all programs carried a moving series of interviews with victims of Saddam's secret police,ending with the correspondent saying that while he wasn't sure of all the politics involved he couldn't disagree with anything that would rid the world of the evil Saddam.
Harold Ickes' Diaries contains a relevant anecdote.
In 1933 FDR deliberately devalued the dollar, arbitarily increasing the price we paid for gold. Which Dean Acheson-as an important Treasury official, opposed . With no notice to Acheson an annoyed FDR appointed a replacement and announced it to the press. When the replacement was sworn in FDR opened his morning paper to see a photo of the ceremony including a beaming Acheson unmistakeable with his height, mustache and bowler.
When later FDR replaced another official -let's call him Hugh- he responded by attacking FDR who remarked "Someone should tell Hugh to talk to Dean Acheson and learn how a gentleman goes about leaving the Government."
June 11, 2009 11:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thank you Todd. You are a patriot and a Democrat (the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive, even though Gore didn't agree with you).
June 10, 2009 11:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
RE: "...Mr. Haass, then head of policy planning at the State Department, issued a ringing defense of the impending war, which evidently he now maintains that he already opposed as a war of choice, not necessity..."
FROM WIKIPEDIA:"Memory hole"
(EXCERPT) The memory hole generally refers to the alteration or outright disappearance of inconvenient or embarrassing documents, photographs, transcripts, or other records...
...The memory hole, as in the phrase "Going down the memory hole," refers to a small chute leading to a large incinerator used for censorship in George Orwell's novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four...
SOURCE - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_hole
ALSO FROM WIKIPEDIA:"Nineteen Eighty-Four"
(EXCERPT) Nineteen Eighty-Four (sometimes abbreviated to 1984) is a classic dystopian novel by English author George Orwell. Published in 1949, it is set in the eponymous year and focuses on a repressive, totalitarian regime. The story follows the life of one seemingly insignificant man, Winston Smith, a civil servant assigned the task of perpetuating the regime's propaganda by falsifying records and political literature...As in the Nazi and Stalinist regimes, propaganda is pervasive; Smith's job is rewriting historical documents to match the contemporaneous party line, the orthodoxy of which changes daily....
SOURCE - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four
June 11, 2009 2:10 AM | Reply | Permalink