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Parallels are poor planning, overly ambitious goals, not thinking through the aftermath.
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Is Iran another Iraq? And where does Iran fit in the story of the Trump presidency and how he's remaking the rules based international order? This is Sources and Methods from npr. I'm Mary Louise Kelly. This is one of our special interview episodes that we share from time to time. We will be back here again as usual on Thursday to unpack the biggest natsec news of the week. Today our focus is Iran. And let's start with one of the many statements Donald Trump has made about Iran in recent days.
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If we didn't hit within two weeks, they would have had a nuclear weapon. If we didn't do the B2 attack a number of months ago, they would have a nuclear weapon.
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Two weeks, he's saying, he's saying Tehran was two weeks away from having a nuclear weapon. That is impossible to square with what Trump has said before, that Iran's nuclear program was obliterated by airstrikes last summer. That claim about two weeks. It also stirs memories for those of us old enough to remember another Republican president about to walk the US Into a war in the Middle east and warning of an urgent nuclear threat.
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We cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.
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George W. Bush back in 2002 talking about Iraq and that Saddam Hussein posed a grave and gathering danger, a claim based on intelligence that turned out to be wrong. Richard Haas is President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. He had a front row seat to the planning for war in Iraq as the number three official at the State Department. We called him to ask about that and to offer the long view on the mom the US now finds itself in. Richard Haass, welcome to Sources and Methods.
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Good to be with you.
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So we're not going to go way back in the time machine and relitigate the WMD that turned out not to have been there because they didn't exist. What I do want to understand is how a president and his team have traditionally prepared the nation to go to war. What do you remember of those days at the State Department as the Bush administration was planning to attack Iraq?
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In any case, when you go to war, you want to prepare the country. Wars are, you know, as Clausewitz, Churchill, and everyone else has said, once you start them, you never know how they're going to play out. There's always unexpected developments. There's always human costs, economic costs. So what you want to do, particularly when the war is discretionary, what I would call a War of choice, a war you don't have to fight. You want to build a cushion under yourself, a political cushion or a net under your high wire. This means going to Congress, going to allies, going to the American public to basically be honest with them, saying, going
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to the United nations, which we remember
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George W. Bush doing, and George H.W. bush did it repeatedly when we defended Kuwait against Iraq. You want to go and make the case again because wars are difficult things, they're dangerous things, they're expensive things. So you want to build yourself some understanding and support. So if and when things go badly and that sometimes they do, the bottom doesn't fall out. People are prepared for it and it gives you the ability to endure and sustain.
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What about just internally? Again, I'm wondering what it was like walking the hallways at the State Department in 2002, 2003, in terms of the pre meetings, the planning, the bureaucracy that is cranking into gear to try to pull off something like taking the nation to war.
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Even though you're good enough to have me with you today, I may not be the perfect person to ask because I was against it. I thought this was an ill advised war of choice. My perspective, shall we say, was not particularly valued or shared. But look, you're reading the intelligence, you're conscious of the policy debate. There was a sense of stakes. You are involved in an interagency process of great detail, enormous, elaborate planning. Though in 2003 we did not do nearly enough planning for the aftermath. And what planning we did, my office did. I was the head of policy. Planning was largely rejected in this administration. I'll be honest with you, I don't even get a sense they did the most rudimentary of planning. It's one of the reasons we're seeing this endless series of justifications and a kind. There's an improvisational quality to the handling of this war, which I would simply say, or to leave people uncomfortable.
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You're also describing an atmosphere in which there was dissent, there was debate. Your view. You said you opposed the war for the most part. It didn't sway the president and the vice president and the cabinet secretaries you were talking to. But you didn't get fired either. You were allowed to dissent from that and have a healthy internal debate. It sounds like from the outside. Can you glimpse that happening within the Trump administration today?
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If it's happening, I don't see it and I don't see evidence of it. But you make a really important point. Dissent should never be seen as disloyalty, by and large. Also, administrations are stronger when dissent is encouraged because what it does, it reduces the chance of surprise. Again, this administration suffers from two things. One is a lack of rigorous, orderly process. Doesn't help that the Secretary of State is also the National Security Advisor. Doesn't help that the two envoys who have been doing the negotiation, negotiations with Iran or outside essentially the US Government. This president, shall we say, is famously improvisational in his style. So none of that prepares them for what is to come to the point
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you just made that Marco Rubio is serving as head of the nsc, head of the National Security Council, as the President's National Security Advisor, while also doing a not small job as Secretary of State. He's presiding over a National Security Council that is a shadow of what it has been under previous administrations. The Trump administration has come in and hollowed it out from the outside. What can you glimpse about how that's working?
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Well, the short answer is I don't think it's working. It's certainly not working. Well, the whole idea is to have experienced hands on the National Security Council who have worked in various parts in the US government, also a few outsiders who bring a more independent academic type perspective and have them really monitor what the rest of the US Government is doing and where necessary, provide the President with independent ideas. I simply don't see that happen. I think your phrase is exactly right. It was hollowed out. And process is meant to protect the principles. We often see words like bureaucracy and we see them as dirty words or pejorative. Well, guess what? Experienced veteran hands inside government have institutional memory. You might have had a few people who knew about going to war with Iraq or Iran or what have you. They know how to do this sort of thing. They know the questions to ask. They also are thinking about implementation. It's not enough to think about should we be initiating a war? What about Day 2 or Day 10 or Day 20? What about the economic or strategic knock on effects? That's why you want experience. Hand. That's why you want process. Process can slow you down, but sometimes being slowed down a bit is a pretty good trade off. If it also protects you, it's also,
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I mean, you're describing work that perhaps isn't the sexiest happening within the US government, but is the roll up your sleeves nitty gritty? Okay, the President has a vision. Here's his ambition. How do we translate that into policy? That's what the National Security Council historically has done. That's what you're describing. You're not seeing it working the way it has in past 100%.
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When I used to teach at the Kennedy School of Government, I used to tell the students that, you know, they were all smart, congratulations, you got into Harvard. I wasn't smart enough to get into Harvard. But only 10% of successful and effective policymaking is ideas. 90% of effective government work is implementation. And the problem with this administration is way too much of the emphasis is on the 10%. It's a great idea to invade Iran or what have you. Where's the 90%? Where are people thinking about all the detail, all the dotted I's and crossed t's that come afterwards that will ultimately determine whether, on balance, this is a successful operation? I don't see that happening again. I kind of feel we're constantly playing catch up as a government with reality
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and that's never healthy to people listening who say, hold up, you're describing planning and procedure and a whole process that existed in previous administrations. But look how Iraq turned out. Quagmire is the word that comes to mind. So should we fault a president for trying to do it a different way?
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Well, you mentioned the one war where American planning broke down. There wasn't a National Security Council meeting before the decision was Afghanistan, too.
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We could also throw the word quagmire in. It wasn't just Iraq, wasn't just.
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But in both cases there was a lack of serious planning about follow up. In the case of Afghanistan, it's a longer conversation. What I would actually say that the decision to get out was done without the proper planning that was originally done by the first Trump administration, which signed the agreement with the Taliban that I would argue never should have been signed. Then you had the Biden administration implement it in a careless way. But no, US Policy is never better for a lack of serious planning. And we've paid the price in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and now in Iran.
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We'll take a quick break. When we come back, if the Iran war drags on, what could be the consequences for the U.S. that's ahead on sources and methods from NPR.
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This message comes from Wise, the app for international people. Using money around the globe, you can send, spend and receive in up to 40 currencies with only a few simple taps. Be smart.
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Get Wise. Download the Wise app today or visit
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wise.com Ts and Cs apply.
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I've tracked with interest the messaging on this Iran war where we have, for example, heard Secretary Rubio come out and say we knew Israel was going to strike, suggesting that maybe force the US Hand and President Trump coming out and saying, no, if anything, I forced Israel's hand. I mean, what have you made of how this war has been messaged publicly? And how does it compare to what you witnessed in, for example, again, the run up to war in Iraq?
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There's a difference between disarray and dissent. What you've just described, I would say, is disarray. The fact that different members of this administration, quite honestly, are staking out different positions either as to why we went to war, what our war aims are going to be, and so forth. And that's bad by any and every definition. But there's ways of institutionalizing dissent. I remember every Saturday morning when I was on the National Security Council staff, Brent Scowcroft, Bob Gates and I used to meet in Brent's office, and Brent would have put on the table, okay, guys, where might we have it wrong? What do we have to consider that we haven't spent time with? And when a dissent comes forward that's uncomfortable, that's exactly what you want the President to hear. Now, the president may say, I hear it. I disagree. We've made a decision or we're going to make a decision. Let's march forward. Fine. Then what you want to have, though, is a way to revisit assumptions as you implement. You don't want to go on autopilot. You want to say, okay, do we need a revisit any of our goals or any of our means because of what we've learned en route?
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We've been talking, Richard Haass, about planning about the run up to a war. What in an ideal world, it looks like, I guess here we are a week and a half into this latest war in the Middle East. We are where we are. Like, does the planning matter at this point, how we got here? Because shouldn't we be looking forward?
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Fair enough. I think the question now is on the conduct of the war and the grounds for war termination. That's the big conversation this administration ought to be having. What's good enough? What are we prepared to fight for? Where do we maybe have to consider compromising? How, by the way, do we get Israel and Iran on that page then? It only takes one to start a war. In this case, it's going to take three to end a war. Well, how should then our goals now reflect or affect how it is we fight this war? That really needs to be.
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Has it become clear to you what the end goal is for the us?
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Has it become clear? No, absolutely not. All this talk about regime change has really confused things. You know, we've seen a lot of Iranian leaders killed. We still have a system though, where a religious leader, a cleric sits on top of things. You have this massive security apparatus led by the Revolutionary Guards. They're still largely in place. So one question is, what are we trying to accomplish with regime? What's good enough with the ballistic missile force? What's good enough with the nuclear program? What's good enough with Iranian support for terrorism and proxies? Again, no, I do not see any type of intellectual clarity emerging from the administration.
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It strikes me, listening to you, there's the what question, the what is the end goal? There's also the how does history offer up any pertinent, relevant examples of one country being able to guide and shape events on the ground without boots on the ground?
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Short answer is no. If you think about World War II, where we had both unconditional surrender, which is a phrase essentially the president has unfortunately bandied about here, it took years of war and then years of occupation. Well, we're talking about days of war and no occupation. So the idea that we are going to totally be able to dictate conditions on the ground I think is far fetched, short of a total transformation of Iran, where essentially it becomes a Western oriented democracy. And I think the chances of that happening are unfortunately far fetched. So I think we're likely to face a situation in which you often face at the end of wars. We faced it after the Gulf War, we faced it in Afghanistan, any number of recent wars where we don't have control, we're not in a position to dictate. So we have to ask ourselves, where are we prepared to compromise? What are we prepared to insist on if we don't get what we want? Are we prepared to resume or continue fighting? Those are the questions we need to be asking and answering now.
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Anything you like about how the Trump administration is waging this war?
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Look, the military prowess is impressive as an institution, the US Military is second to none, and the mastery of modern technology is beyond impressive. I think the collaboration between Israel and the United States is impressive tactically, where I have fundamental questions over the strategy of it.
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But no, you're describing a disconnect between operational successes and clarity about what the objective of those operations are.100%.
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And that's one of the Achilles heels of this entire operation. It's possible one and the same time to say Iran is much degraded and diminished militarily, which it is. But to say so far at least, the costs of this war far outweigh the Benefits.
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So what echoes do you hear or not? What parallels from two decades ago and the run up to war and then the beginning of the war in Iraq.
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Parallels are poor planning, overly ambitious goals, not thinking through the aftermath. And what really worries me is what happened after the last war in Iraq and Afghanistan. It really gave energy, if you will, to a surge of isolationism in this country. Americans got disillusioned with the costs of war and the likely yield on that investment. Another failed war of choice. I worry that it's going to have us really turn inwards to a point that there's things we should be worried about in the world. Chinese threats to Taiwan, Taiwan, Russian threats to Ukraine and Europe and so forth. And we're not going to have either the military ability anymore because we will have used so many of our munitions and weapons. And more important, we won't have the political consensus or will to continue to act and lead in the world. And that would be an unfortunate parallel to what happened after Iraq and Afghanistan.
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So I introduced you by saying I wanted to ask you to take the long view. Let me start to bring us to a close by asking you to take an even longer view. Does the last week and a half, the events of the last week and a half bring us closer to the demise of the rules based international order that governed, as you know well, the second half of the 20th century and at least the early years of the 21st?
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My concern is, as you call it, the long view. It does bring us to a world of much greater disarray, much more disorder, in part because of how the United States has done this unilaterally, without consultation, a preventive war which has no legal foundation, no consultations, the assassination of a large number of foreign leaders. All that worries me as a precedent and the fact that then it weakens the United States both in will and capability and could create opportunities for Russia and China, conceivably North Korea. All this is bad for the future state of the world. And it worries me that one day, you know, we're going to look back on this, whether it's the two of us or you'll have some other guests, and we're going to see this as one of those forks in the road. And we are going to measure in many ways the decline, as you put it, of world order, of stability in the world and the decline of the American will and ability to be a large constructive force in the world. I worry that we're going to trace a lot of it back to the Iran war.
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Richard Haas, this was depressing.
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I apologize. You knew that when you asked me
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to come on, but I am coming away the wiser for it. Thank you.
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Thank you.
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Richard Haass. He served in posts at the Pentagon, the White House and the State Department, and then for 20 years as president of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is author of the Substack Home, in a way. Thank you so much.
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Thank you.
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Before we go, a reminder to follow the show wherever you listen, so you can always get new episodes like this one as soon as we put them out. And a thank you to those of you who email us your questions and your feedback. Our email address is sourcesandmethodspr.org you can find it in our episode notes, too. I'm Mary Louise Kelly, back with you on Thursday with more sources and methods from npr.
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Sam.