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.

The second part of this book changes from being a how-I-won-the-war memoir to being a nobody-would-listen-to-me tale. The trouble is that the brave voice of dissent who was "not shy" of pushing his own views in the first, good war becomes a largely mute Cassandra in the second, bad war. He does tell his boss of his misgivings (and now publishes a cautionary 2002 memo about post-war Iraq), but Mr Powell and the entire State Department are isolated. Eventually, at the start of 2003-the war began on March 19th-he decides he must act. But his "last-ditch effort" is simply "at slowing things down", and this bold venture takes the form of typing another memo to his boss. This Mr Powell reads and tucks in his pocket, where it may still be today.

In truth, wise and prescient though he often seemed, Mr Haass was only "60/40 against going to war". It took some unconnected gibes, notably his wife's comment that he had become an "enabler", to make him see that he was being used, and in July 2003 he slipped away from the administration. His book will be of some interest to students of the Washington bureaucracy, but of much more to those who worry about when public servants should resign. It is a tale of a good man doggedly working for a bad end, an end that was not simply a war of choice, or a preventive war of dubious legality, but a war of revenge. Not a great paragraph in the CV.

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