Richard Haass is a good man. Thoughtful, intelligent, scholarly and often even wise, he is usually persuasive about foreign policy, both in its formulation and in its execution. He understands that the world is complex and that issues have to be seen in context. But he sees the big picture, too. He can recognise a despot, and the occasions when despotism has to be checked, by force if necessary. Yet he also believes in diplomacy, multilateralism and the United Nations. He is, in short, just the sort of man who should be running America's foreign policy.

How fortunate, then, that Mr Haass was doing just that during the first Gulf war. One or two others were involved in the events that led up to the expulsion of Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991, but Mr Haass, as special assistant to President George Bush senior and director on the staff of the National Security Council, played a pretty big part in this rather successful enterprise. It was, as he correctly saw, a war of necessity, both for America and for the new world order Mr Bush was proclaiming. And Mr Haass was also right to see that necessity stopped well short of Baghdad and the removal of Saddam. The principle at stake was the inviolability of a sovereign state, not the creation of a democracy in the aggressor country.

Mr Haass's next war was different. This was a war of choice, since Saddam was "a nuisance, not a mortal threat", who should simply have been contained. Again Mr Haass was right. So what was he doing as director of policy planning in the State Department and working as a principal adviser to the secretary of state, Colin Powell? He was critical of the war on terrorism, the administration's policies on Afghanistan, Israel-Palestine, Iran, North Korea, the Kyoto protocol and the International Criminal Court. He was shocked not just by Dick Cheney's views but also by the way the vice-president could make public speeches whose fantastical claims about Saddam's imminent acquisition of nuclear weapons had been given no vetting by the CIA or the National Security Council. He saw how the White House cynically used the popularity of his boss, Mr Powell, while being wildly jealous of it. He saw the creation of policy-based evidence. Above all, he was from the outset opposed to regime change in Iraq. Yet he did not resign.

... contd.