Richard N. Haass Quotes

It is one thing to be against unilateralism and against nonhumanitarian interventionism - but it is quite another thing to be against humanitarian interventionism.

The Great Seal was an early proclamation of 'humanitarian intervention,' to use the currently fashionable phrase.

And, perhaps most importantly, regional conflicts will again and again confront us with a cruel choice between costly engagement and costly indifference.

So while I will never minimize the costs involved in military action, I am convinced that a failure to act in Libya would have carried a far greater price for America.

There are, however, cases in which, while our own interests are not greatly involved, strong appeal is made to our sympathies.... in extreme cases action may be justifiable and proper. What form the action shall take must depend upon the circumstances of the case; that is, upon the degree of the atrocity and upon our power to remedy it.

I'm not saying it was wrong to intervene in Kosovo.

We've made some mistakes in this country in times past - the Korean conflict proceeding that, some say proceeding the Persian Gulf War, where we were ambiguous as to what we would do.

The major wars that the U.S. became involved in are all ethically defensible.

What I've learned, and will try to remember from now on, is that defending your country's credibility is never sufficient reason to fight a war.

The international community unfortunately did take sides in Libya, and we would never allow the Security Council to authorise anything similar to what happened in Libya.

As a Republican, I voted with President Clinton consistently in our efforts to bail out our European friends in Kosovo to stop genocide. I am proud of those votes. I am proud of President Clinton for that.

Today, war of necessity is used by critics of military action to describe unavoidable response to an attack like that on Pearl Harbor that led to our prompt, official declaration of war, while they characterize as unwise wars of choice the wars in Korea, Vietnam and the current war in Iraq.

In time it will become clear to everyone that support for the policies of pre-emptive war and interventionist nation-building will have much greater significance than the removal of Saddam Hussein itself.

It's not the job of the U.S. military to do nation-building or produce democratic utopias.

The disagreeable reality for those who believe in human rights is that there are some occasions - and Iraq may be one of them - when war is the only real remedy for regimes that live by terror.

I think that war is diplomacy by other means, for sure, and there have been wars that have been fought for righteous reasons. There are wars that have had to be fought, and there will probably continue to be.

Most wars, after all, present themselves as humanitarian endeavors to help people.

I'm a national security liberal, which I tell people because it's meant to sound absurd.

I think it's appropriate for the international community in situations like this to intervene in Kosovo. I am in favor of an intervention. On some level, you have to say that at least somebody is doing something.

It depends on the situation. I mean, on one hand there's the argument that people should be left alone on the other hand, there's the argument to wade in a stop slaughters in places like Bosnia and Kosovo and what we probably should have done in Rwanda.

When you decide to get involved in a military operation in a place like Syria, you've got to be prepared, as we learned from Iraq and Afghanistan, to become the government, and I'm not sure any country, either the United States or I don't hear of anyone else, who's willing to take on that responsibility.

A democracy is severely restricted in its use of armed forces as a weapon of peacetime foreign policy. It cannot manipulate them tactically on any extensive scale for the accomplishment of measures short of war.

Regime change cannot be the objective of military action.

The United States can't go in and impose order on chaos every place in the world.

I don’t like genocide, but I would not commit our troops [to stop it.]