Transcript
RICHARD HAAS: What I find so interesting about all this, and, in part, what led me to write the book, is not simply that I was lucky or at times unlucky enough to be involved in all this close-up. Just the kind of parallelism -- I mean who would have thought 20 years ago, when the Wall came down, that the two or two of the defining events of the Cold War era would be two wars between a guy named Bush and a guy named Saddam Hussein. Not a lot of people would have bet a lot of money on those things. So it’s just one of those, you know, curiosities that’s hard to resist. But also that in these two wars, to me, encapsulated the principal fault line of the American foreign policy debate. And by that I mean, when you take a step back, so much of American foreign policy, the dispute or the debate about our role in the world, is really over what it is we’re setting out to do, what we should set out to do.
And there’s one school of thought that talks about – that the principal business or focus of American foreign policy ought to be on the foreign policy of others, limited goals, adjustment and so forth, and this is very much the foreign policy of the 41st president, traditionally described or characterized or caricatured as realism, as opposed to the foreign policy of others, which essentially says the principal purpose of foreign policy is to change the domestic and internal nature of others, be it for moral reasons or also for reasons that mature democracies tend to make, tend to treat their neighbors better.
That may all be well and good, except it’s hard to bring about mature democracies, in the mean time, we have a foreign policy to conduct with many countries that are anything but mature democracies. And this is very much the policy of a Woodrow Wilson, and to some extent, became the foreign policy of George W. Bush. And in looking at the two Iraq wars, what you have is a good example, to me, of case studies that reflect this long standing debate with – over really the principal or correct purpose of American foreign policy. So I go to case studies; I think there’s lessons for the future about when and how to wage wars of choice in particular, about preventive and preemptive wars.
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