[A-List] US state: administration hawks strengthened

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Loss of key aide another setback for Powell
By Jim Lobe
Asia Times, June 7 2003

WASHINGTON - The announcement that the State Department's director for
policy planning, Richard Haass, is leaving to become the next president of
the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), marks the latest sign
of the eclipse of Secretary of State Colin Powell's influence in the Bush
administration. Next to Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Haass
was seen as Powell's closest adviser.

While there is no doubt that his new job, which begins on July 1, has real
attractions - a lengthy contract to direct the oldest and most prestigious
US foreign policy think tank - Haass has historically preferred to be in the
thick of the action. He played a key role on the National Security Council
(NSC) under George H W Bush during the Gulf War in 1991 and its aftermath,
including the Madrid peace talks in the early 1990s.

While no official announcement has been made, his most likely replacement is
said to be the current ambassador to Turkey, Robert Pearson, a career
foreign service officer who, while highly regarded as a diplomat and
administrator, lacks Haass' reputation as a thinker and grand strategist.

The fact that Powell has not nominated anyone of Haass' stature or with whom
he has a long-standing relationship as a replacement is being interpreted as
an indication that he probably intends to step down after next year's
election, if not before.

Long targeted by neo-conservative forces centered in the Pentagon and Vice
President Dick Cheney's office, as well as their counterparts outside the
administration, Haass has served as an influential voice in favor of
traditional Republican realism, a protege of Bush Sr's national security
adviser, retired General Brent Scowcroft.

During his mere two-and-a-half years in one of the State Department's most
coveted positions, Haass led efforts to define and argue Powell's positions
internally and to enunciate more general ideas about where he thought US
foreign policy should be headed.

A consummate "realist" in the conservative but pragmatic mould of Scowcroft
and Bush Sr's secretary of state James Baker, Haass argued in favor of
engaging Iran, a harder line with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and
treating China more as a partner than a rival, although he is best known for
his statement early in the first months of the administration that
Washington should pursue a general policy of "a la carte multilateralism".
That he would even use that noun, however, probably helped to confirm
administration hawks that he was far too sensitive to European and
international opinion for their taste.

Haass has been a fixture of Washington foreign policy politics for a
remarkably long time given his relatively youthful 51 years. After receiving
his doctorate, he worked in Congress, then briefly in the Pentagon under
Jimmy Carter and in various posts in the State Department under Ronald
Reagan.

He directed Mideast policy in the NSC throughout the first Bush
administration (1989-1993), work that earned him the lasting distrust of
neo-conservatives, many of whom had served in the Reagan administration and
have since returned under the younger Bush to senior policy making
positions.

Closely allied with Israel's right-wing Likud Party, neo-conservatives -
such as Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith; the former chairman of the
Pentagon Defense Policy Board, Richard Perle; and Elliott Abrams, who
currently holds Haass's old job on the NSC - strongly and publicly opposed
the elder Bush's efforts to force Israel to take part in the Madrid peace
conference that eventually led to a Labor-led government and the Oslo peace
process.

During the Bill Clinton administration, Haass remained a major player as
director of foreign policy studies at one of Washington's most established
think tanks, the Brookings Institution. He maintained his staunchly realist
outlook in his area of expertise, arguing in favor of an even-handed
approach to the Oslo process and engagement with Iran.

He also adopted a strong pro-business stance in foreign policy by
co-authoring a study on the use of unilateral US economic sanctions against
foreign countries, which concluded that in virtually every case they had
proved either ineffective or counter-productive and lost many billions of
dollars in trade and investment opportunities for US business.

In 1997, he published The Reluctant Sheriff, a book on future US foreign
policy that attacked the notion that Washington should try to establish and
preserve a "unipolar" world order in which it was hegemonic. "Primacy is not
to be confused with hegemony," he wrote. Calling for the return of
"great-power politics", he stressed that "the United States cannot compel
others to become more democratic".

The book even criticized a now-famous draft 1992 strategy document that
called for a global-dominance strategy, drafted by two of the most powerful
neo-conservatives in the current Bush administration, Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Cheney's Chief of Staff I Lewis Libby.

Virtually all of its recommendations - which were strongly rejected by
Scowcroft, Baker and Powell, who was then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff - were codified last September by the younger Bush in the National
Security Strategy (NSS).

By the time he was appointed to office, Haass had become in some ways like a
red flag to the neo-conservative bulls who were eager to put their 1992
strategy into practice, and were able to do so after the September 11
attacks.

As director of the policy planning office, Haass continued to argue his
positions. He opposed, for example, tightening sanctions against Iran early
in the administration. Neo-conservative columnists, such as the New
Republic's Lawrence Kaplan and The Weekly Standard's Marc Reuel Gerecht,
attacked him as a "shill for big oil".

His importance to Powell became clear after September 11 when he was made
the State Department's point man on Afghanistan. In April 2002, Haass gave a
major policy address on a new grand strategy that he said should aim to
"integrate other countries and organizations into arrangements to sustain a
world consistent with US interests and values". He called his approach
"hard-headed multilateralism", stressing that, while Washington could and
should lead, it could not do so without enduring allies.

Within six months, the administration released its NSS document on grand
strategy, and CFR had reportedly begun talking to Haass about changing jobs.
It appears that nothing happened in the intervening months - including the
road map for Middle East peace that Haass played a role in drafting - that
persuaded him to stay on.
In an interview reported in the New York Times on Thursday, Haass denied
that he was leaving because he was discouraged. "Obviously, in this job you
spend a lot of your time in debates," he said. "Of course, that isn't the
reason I'm leaving. The reason I'm leaving is that this offer came along,
and the opportunity to lead an organization with such tremendous influence
is not something anyone would lightly pass up."

Apparently, the State Department no longer fits that definition.