(Editor’s note: Alexander Haig speaks out on a number of historic subjects. The article is all too short. An excerpt and a link are below.)
From the WASHINGTON POST:
“….Haig, who served as secretary of state under Reagan and chief of staff in Nixon’s White House, died Feb. 20 at age 85. In the interview, he was in rare form: sharp of memory, combative in tone, unsparing in recounting the famous and obscure, civilian and military. Below are excerpts from the conversation:
On Ronald Reagan and the 1982 Lebanon war: The appalling part of it was that you assemble people around you to be on a team, and yet you tolerate it when they don’t play on that team. . . . Let me tell you now: There ain’t anybody else in America that I know that has quit three presidents — but I have. And I quit Ronald Reagan for exactly that reason. He’s sitting there, not knowing what the hell was going on, and he had [Deputy Chief of Staff Mike] Deaver and [Chief of Staff James] Baker and Mrs. Reagan running the government! And when it came to national security, there was a bit of [CIA Director] Bill Casey as well.
When we get into the Middle East war, in Lebanon, we could have settled that war, on terms in which we wouldn’t be confronted with what we were confronted with today. We would have returned Lebanon to the sovereign control of their people. . . . I went to the president and I said: “Hey, you’re going to have big, big problems. And I don’t want to be a part of it. Now you either are going to let me do what you hired me to do, or get another guy.” “Well,” he said, “well, Al, please stay here and settle this Middle East thing….”
Click here to read the full article.
