Perle Washes His Hands Of Iraq: I Was Not An ‘Architect Of That War,’ Neocons Had No Influence

[laststeamtrain]

Perle Washes His Hands Of Iraq: I Was Not An ‘Architect Of That War,’ Neocons Had No Influence»

Over the past few weeks, many Bush administration officials have begun rewriting history in an effort to burnish President Bush’s legacy. Following suit, neoconservative war hawk Richard Perle has taken the opportunity to polish his own record during the Bush years — mainly on Iraq.

In the latest issue of The National Interest, Perle devotes 4,600 words — not to congratulate President Bush for invading Iraq — but to wipe his, and the whole neoconservative movement’s, hands clean of the whole affair. In the essay, he categorically denies that both he — and neoconservative ideology in general — had any influence on the Bush administration in its decision to go to war:

"I have been widely but wrongly depicted as deeply involved in the making of administration policy, especially with respect to Iraq. Facts notwithstanding, there are some fifty thousand entries on Google in which I am described as an “architect,” and often as “the architect,” of the Iraq War. I certainly supported and argued publicly for the decision to remove Saddam, as I do in what follows. But had I been the architect of that war, our policy would have been very different. <…>

"But about the many mistakes made in Iraq, one thing is certain: they had nothing to do with ideology. They did not draw inspiration from or reflect neoconservative ideas and they were not the product of philosophical or ideological influences outside the government."

Perle is right. He strongly advocated publicly for the invasion of Iraq, especially after 9/11, even making claims that Saddam Hussein had links to Osama bin Laden (an assertion he later claimed he never said). But in fact, Perle had direct access to top administration officials during the run up to the war. Former CIA director George Tenet recalled that shortly after 9/11, Perle told him that “Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday, they bear responsibility.”

Moreover, the neoconservative influence on the Bush administration, particularly regarding Iraq, has been well documented. For Perle to claim otherwise is beyond absurd...http://thinkprogress.org/2009/01/08/perle-iraq-architect/

[Cassandra]

1. Out...

damn'd spot! out, I say!—One; two: why, then
'tis time to do't.—Hell is murky.—Fie, my lord, fie, a soldier, and
afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our
pow'r to accompt?—Yet who would have thought the old man to
have had so much blood in him?

[BridgeTheGap]

2. I think the "memory hole" is starting to over flow like a plugged toilet!!! n.t

[Vincardog]

3. Perle LIES again! be still my heart

[Dover]

4. Another 'urban legend'

A reference to Cheney's recent statement that the widely believed perception that he had 'unprecedented power as a VP' was an 'urban legend'.

[Fleshdancer]

5. he's nuts!

http://www.newamericancentury.org/Bushletter.htm

September 20, 2001

The Honorable George W. Bush
President of the United States
Washington, DC

Dear Mr. President,

We write to endorse your admirable commitment to “lead the world to victory” in the war against terrorism. We fully support your call for “a broad and sustained campaign” against the “terrorist organizations and those who harbor and support them.” We agree with Secretary of State Powell that the United States must find and punish the perpetrators of the horrific attack of September 11, and we must, as he said, “go after terrorism wherever we find it in the world” and “get it by its branch and root.” We agree with the Secretary of State that U.S. policy must aim not only at finding the people responsible for this incident, but must also target those “other groups out there that mean us no good” and “that have conducted attacks previously against U.S. personnel, U.S. interests and our allies.”

In order to carry out this “first war of the 21st century” successfully, and in order, as you have said, to do future “generations a favor by coming together and whipping terrorism,” we believe the following steps are necessary parts of a comprehensive strategy.

Osama bin Laden

We agree that a key goal, but by no means the only goal, of the current war on terrorism should be to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, and to destroy his network of associates. To this end, we support the necessary military action in Afghanistan and the provision of substantial financial and military assistance to the anti-Taliban forces in that country.

Iraq

We agree with Secretary of State Powell’s recent statement that Saddam Hussein “is one of the leading terrorists on the face of the Earth….” It may be that the Iraqi government provided assistance in some form to the recent attack on the United States. But even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism. The United States must therefore provide full military and financial support to the Iraqi opposition. American military force should be used to provide a “safe zone” in Iraq from which the opposition can operate. And American forces must be prepared to back up our commitment to the Iraqi opposition by all necessary means.

Hezbollah

Hezbollah is one of the leading terrorist organizations in the world. It is suspected of having been involved in the 1998 bombings of the American embassies in Africa, and implicated in the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983. Hezbollah clearly falls in the category cited by Secretary Powell of groups “that mean us no good” and “that have conducted attacks previously against U.S. personnel, U.S. interests and our allies.” Therefore, any war against terrorism must target Hezbollah. We believe the administration should demand that Iran and Syria immediately cease all military, financial, and political support for Hezbollah and its operations. Should Iran and Syria refuse to comply, the administration should consider appropriate measures of retaliation against these known state sponsors of terrorism.

Israel and the Palestinian Authority

Israel has been and remains America’s staunchest ally against international terrorism, especially in the Middle East. The United States should fully support our fellow democracy in its fight against terrorism. We should insist that the Palestinian Authority put a stop to terrorism emanating from territories under its control and imprison those planning terrorist attacks against Israel. Until the Palestinian Authority moves against terror, the United States should provide it no further assistance.

U.S. Defense Budget

A serious and victorious war on terrorism will require a large increase in defense spending. Fighting this war may well require the United States to engage a well-armed foe, and will also require that we remain capable of defending our interests elsewhere in the world. We urge that there be no hesitation in requesting whatever funds for defense are needed to allow us to win this war.

There is, of course, much more that will have to be done. Diplomatic efforts will be required to enlist other nations’ aid in this war on terrorism. Economic and financial tools at our disposal will have to be used. There are other actions of a military nature that may well be needed. However, in our judgement the steps outlined above constitute the minimum necessary if this war is to be fought effectively and brought to a successful conclusion. Our purpose in writing is to assure you of our support as you do what must be done to lead the nation to victory in this fight.


Sincerely,

William Kristol

Richard V. Allen Gary Bauer Jeffrey Bell William J. Bennett

Rudy Boshwitz Jeffrey Bergner Eliot Cohen Seth Cropsey

Midge Decter Thomas Donnelly Nicholas Eberstadt Hillel Fradkin

Aaron Friedberg Francis Fukuyama Frank Gaffney Jeffrey Gedmin

Reuel Marc Gerecht Charles Hill Bruce P. Jackson Eli S. Jacobs

Michael Joyce Donald Kagan Robert Kagan Jeane Kirkpatrick

Charles Krauthammer John Lehman Clifford May Martin Peretz

Richard Perle Norman Podhoretz Stephen P. Rosen Randy Scheunemann

Gary Schmitt William Schneider, Jr. Richard H. Shultz Henry Sokolski

Stephen J. Solarz Vin Weber Leon Wieseltier Marshall Wittmann

[peacetalksforall]

6. What a lying piece of bs!

[Raksha]

7. One of the hallmarks of a psychopath...

Lying about EVERYTHING on general principles, even things that are a matter of public record.

[ixion]

8. nice try, neocon ass clown

now it's off to the Hague with you and your buddies!

[driver8]

9. Ha Ha -- The Onion is so freakin' funny!!

Wait...that's not from The Onion?

Hey Perle -- fuck you, you lying piece of shit!!

Nothing that these people do surprises me anymore, but this came close.

[laststeamtrain]

12. Bingo! That's it.

The writers at The Onion are sometimes that good.

The American Enterprise Institute may morph into a farm team for The Onion.

Nothing surprises me.

[gratuitous]

10. "Our policy would have been very different"

See, if Richard Perle had truly been the architect of the Iraq invasion, it wouldn’t have failed, see? Q.E.D. and all that, at least in his own mind. But because the invasion and occupation have been such a miserable failure it’s obvious on its face that the policy couldn’t possibly be laid at Perle’s door.

:crazy:

[acmavm]

11. The guy's as pure as the driven slush. What a pig.

[truth2power]

25. Who air-brushed out those dark circles under his eyes

that make him look like Vlad the Impaler? :evilfrown:

[Sebastian Doyle]

13. Jesus Emmanuel Christ on a nuclear powered pogo stick

Richard Fucking Treasonous Bastard Agent of a Foreign Government Perle was not only one of the principle authors of the PNAC doctrine, he authored the (literally) God-damned doctrine several years before PNAC existed, as part of a similar manifesto for the Netanyahu Likud regime in Israel, which was called "A Clean Break - A New Strategy for Securing the Realm

It's his fucking doctrine. It was COMPLETELY based on his ideology. He should be tried and executed as a traitor, along with the rest of the neocons.

[bdamomma]

14. what scum, if we do not hold these criminals responsible they

will be back.

[tanyev]

15. It all depends on what the definition of "was" is, Richard.

[seafan]

16. "If we ... just wage a total war, our children will sing great songs about us years from now."

"No stages," he said. "This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq . . . this is entirely the wrong way to go about it. If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war . . . our children will sing great songs about us years from now." ---Richard Perle, to investigative journalist John Pilger




"The Prince of Darkness"


Now, Richard Perle has written a screed in the current issue of The National Interest, washing his hands of the tragedy that is Iraq.



Ambushed on the Potomac

January 6, 2009
By Richard Perle

I SHOULD say at once that while I believe Bush mostly failed to implement an effective foreign and defense policy, I also believe he got some very large issues right, especially the immediate response to 9/11 and a still-developing strategy for countering terrorism. And, right or wrong, he acted honestly and courageously, doing what he thought necessary to protect the country that elected him and the Constitution to which he swore fidelity. The charge that he lied about Iraq is itself a lie, and an unrelenting effort to show he was untruthful has not produced a shred of evidence. Guileless to a fault, George W. Bush has been among the most straightforward American presidents in my lifetime. And, contrary to his critics, he was far less inclined to play politics with national security than either his predecessors or his opponents in Congress. Becoming president at a moment of unprecedented American primacy, he could not have anticipated that he would lead a White House at war, a fractious, dysfunctional executive branch and a deeply divided nation.

Since it has been so widely and inaccurately reported, readers are entitled to a word about my own relationship to the Bush administration. During the 2000 campaign I was one of several people who worked, mostly at a distance, on foreign- and defense-policy issues. I would have been delighted to claim great influence but the truth is I cannot. During the campaign, the only issues I discussed at any length with the candidate were arms control and whether and how to enlarge the NATO alliance. The only time I saw President Bush after he took office was from my seat in the audience when he addressed the American Enterprise Institute on February 26, 2003.

At Donald Rumsfeld’s request, I served as chairman of the Defense Policy Board (DPB) from 2001 to 2003, having been a member of that advisory group since 1987. A bipartisan group that meets quarterly, the DPB’s twenty-two members review current issues in defense policy for a day and a half, then meet with the secretary of defense to share their independent views. Many of those members participate, and during the sixty or ninety minutes with the secretary, a broad variety of individual views are expressed. The board has no agreed-upon or collective view, and the frequent disagreements among the members are shared openly with the secretary. The board makes no findings and has neither the authority nor inclination to act as a decision-making body.

People familiar with zoning boards, draft boards, boards of directors and the like have wrongly thought that the DPB either makes or significantly influences Defense Department or even national policies. This is simply not the case. Outside the eight meetings of the DPB I attended between 2001 and 2003, I could count on one hand the times I saw Secretary Rumsfeld to discuss policy matters.

I have digressed to describe my relationship to the Bush administration because I have been widely but wrongly depicted as deeply involved in the making of administration policy, especially with respect to Iraq. Facts notwithstanding, there are some fifty thousand entries on Google in which I am described as an “architect,” and often as “the architect,” of the Iraq War. I certainly supported and argued publicly for the decision to remove Saddam, as I do in what follows. But had I been the architect of that war, our policy would have been very different.

UNDERSTANDING BUSH’S foreign and defense policy requires clarity about its origins and the thinking behind the administration’s key decisions. That means rejecting the false claim that the decision to remove Saddam, and Bush policies generally, were made or significantly influenced by a few neoconservative “ideologues” who are most often described as having hidden their agenda of imperial ambition or the imposition of democracy by force or the promotion of Israeli interests at the expense of American ones or the reshaping of the Middle East for oil—or all of the above. Despite its seemingly endless repetition by politicians, academics, journalists and bloggers, that is not a serious argument.

I may have missed something, but I know of no statement, public or private, by any neoconservative in or near government, advocating the invasion of Iraq primarily for the purpose of promoting democracy or advancing some grand neoconservative vision. As for oil, most neoconservatives believe in markets and think the best way to obtain oil is to buy it. And as for Israeli interests, well, the Israelis, who believed that Iran posed the greater threat, were strongly and often vociferously against the United States going into Iraq.

There are, however, a great many wrenched-from-context or even fabricated quotations in circulation. They are easy to spot since they are never sourced.1 Sometimes the attempt to defend these insupportable claims is laughable, as when Vice President Dick Cheney is first misrepresented and then described as a “neoconservative,” or when two subcabinet Defense Department officials, the vice president’s national-security adviser, one or two members of the NSC staff and a handful of commentators are said to have bamboozled the president, the vice president, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet, Condoleezza Rice and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

On the Left, George Packer’s Assassins Gate and Jacob Heilbrunn’s They Knew They Were Right share an obsession with neoconservative influence, but they fail utterly to describe or document that influence. The same is true of much of what has appeared in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, the Guardian and the New Yorker, among others. Pat Buchanan and his acolytes on the Right mirror the Left’s obsession, along with Lyndon LaRouche, David Duke, Paul Craig Roberts and any number of conspiracy theorists. This neoconservative conspiracy is nonsense, of course, and no serious observer of the Bush administration would argue such a thing, not least because there is not, and cannot be, any evidence to substantiate it.

.....

I BELIEVE the cost of removing Saddam and achieving a stable future for Iraq has turned out to be very much higher than it should have been, and certainly higher than it was reasonable to expect.

But about the many mistakes made in Iraq, one thing is certain: they had nothing to do with ideology. They did not draw inspiration from or reflect neoconservative ideas and they were not the product of philosophical or ideological influences outside the government.

The words of a madman.





John Pilger reveals the American plan

Published 16 December 2002

Two years ago a project set up by the men who now surround George W Bush said what America needed was "a new Pearl Harbor". Its published aims have come alarmingly true

The threat posed by US terrorism to the security of nations and individuals was outlined in prophetic detail in a document written more than two years ago and disclosed only recently. What was needed for America to dominate much of humanity and the world's resources, it said, was "some catastrophic and catalysing event - like a new Pearl Harbor".

The attacks of 11 September 2001 provided the "new Pearl Harbor", described as "the opportunity of ages". The extremists who have since exploited 11 September come from the era of Ronald Reagan, when far-right groups and "think-tanks" were established to avenge the American "defeat" in Vietnam. In the 1990s, there was an added agenda: to justify the denial of a "peace dividend" following the cold war. The Project for the New American Century was formed, along with the American Enterprise Institute, the Hudson Institute and others that have since merged the ambitions of the Reagan administration with those of the current Bush regime.

One of George W Bush's "thinkers" is Richard Perle. I interviewed Perle when he was advising Reagan; and when he spoke about "total war", I mistakenly dismissed him as mad. He recently used the term again in describing America's "war on terror". "No stages," he said. "This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq . . . this is entirely the wrong way to go about it. If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war . . . our children will sing great songs about us years from now."

Perle is one of the founders of the Project for the New American Century, the PNAC. Other founders include Dick Cheney, now vice-president, Donald Rumsfeld, defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, deputy defence secretary, I Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, William J Bennett, Reagan's education secretary, and Zalmay Khalilzad, Bush's ambassador to Afghanistan. These are the modern chartists of American terrorism.

.....

Not to be forgotten, another PNAC signatory is Jeb Bush.



John Pilger, renowned investigative journalist and documentary film-maker, is one of only two to have twice won British journalism's top award; his documentaries have won academy awards in both the UK and the US. In a New Statesman survey of the 50 heroes of our time, Pilger came fourth behind Aung San Suu Kyi and Nelson Mandela. "John Pilger," wrote Harold Pinter, "unearths, with steely attention facts, the filthy truth. I salute him."


John Pilger



The gathering storm around Richard Perle, November 26, 2003



Evil will always lurk among us. But it cannot thrive when we challenge it.

[seafan]

28. Doug "not me either" Feith frantically scrubs his hands of Iraq as well.

The Daily Beast reports on January 8, 2009:

Former Undersecretary for Defense Policy Douglas Feith may still support the war in Iraq, which he helped design, but President Bush? Not so much.


My straight forward opinion on Bush is mixed. I think he did some very important things that helped make the country more secure and I think he made some serious errors that undermined his own strategy and his own policy. One of the things he got wrong was he did a terrible job of explaining to the American public and the world what he was doing and why. It wasn't just a matter of how he explained the rationale for the war in Iraq. It was how he talked about Iraq for years.

The essence of the problem was that when the critics of the administration started saying things like “the whole war was built on an error,” and then they escalated their rhetoric and said “the whole war was built on a lie,” the administration did an abominable job of answering that. They often refused to engage their critics, and that is something that I condemn in my book. The administration just fell down on the job of strategic communications and allowed a lot of very important issues to be defined by its critics, to the detriment of the country. When the political heat fades, and people look to the facts, I think there will be a reevaluation of this administration.

Described by General Tommy Franks as either "the dumbest fucking guy on the planet" (according to Franks' autobiography) or "the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the Earth" (according to Bob Woodward's book Plan of Attack), Douglas Feith began his long Washington career as a Middle East specialist under Richard V. Allen at the National Security Council (1981-82), then he spent two years at the Pentagon as the staff lawyer for Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle. Then in 1984 Feith was promoted to Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Negotiations Policy, where he stayed for another two-and-a-half years before leaving for the private sector.

Feith co-founded a Washington law firm where he spent the next 15 years, along with a little lobbying for Turkey on the side via Feith's corporation International Advisers, Inc. Then President George W. Bush tapped him for Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. Feith's primary responsibility was to formulate Pentagon policy and assist in its relations with other federal agencies and foreign nations. Also, Feith was responsible for overseeing the work of the Office of Special Plans, the group set up by Donald Rumsfeld to accumulate interesting intelligence data and send them straight to Vice President Dick Cheney without wasting effort on time-consuming CIA analysis.

Feith's office was also responsible for the oversight of military prisons, including Abu Ghraib. And it turns out that Feith himself masterminded the policy of ignoring the Geneva Conventions against torture. Nevertheless, Secretary Rumsfeld defended his deputy in August 2004 when he told the press that Feith is "just a rare talent. He is one of the intellectual leaders in the administration" and "without question one of the most brilliant individuals in government." After his 2005 resignation, the Pentagon's Inspector General investigated Feith's office for supplying pre-war intelligence assessments -- at odds with findings of the intelligence community -- outlining strong ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda. The Inspector General's office found Feith's work "inappropriate" but not illegal.

http://www.nndb.com/people/100/000047956/

Perle, Feith and Rumsfeld.



"Stuff happens." ----Donald Rumsfeld, April 12, 2003

[Virginia Dare]

17. Another "I am not a crook" moment....pardon me while I barf...n/t

[Marr]

18. Part of the neocons' philosophy is the idea that the populace is a stupid, useful beast.

Comments like these are just illustrations of how stupid they think we are.

[ShadesOfGrey]

19. Sorry Richard. It's going to take a whole lot more...

than words to get THOSE stains off your hands.

PS. Can you do something about your smell as well?

[PerfectSage]

20. Someone should flush Richard Perle's ideology down the toilet of history.

"If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war... our children will sing great songs about us years from now." Richard Perle

:rofl:


Fuck You lying POS Neo Con

[spanone]

21. please please please god let these criminals be prosecuted please please please please please please

please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please

[applegrove]

22. They have no shame. The myth-making really never stops does it?

[spiritual_gunfighter]

23. Perle will never be able to wash the blood from his hands n/t

[Individualist]

24. Lying PNAC SOB

[bridgit]

26. Once a pasty chicken-hawk always a pasty chicken-hawk, neither he nor Kristol

have any intention of apologizing for draining the American treasury, and spilling American blood in ancillary support of Likud

http://dir.salon.com/story/books/review/2004/01/30/frum_perle

http://www.csmonitor.com/specials/neocon/index.html

Eat your crepes, Richard, be happy somehow the world is choking on your gibberish

[Bulletin Justin]

27. Yeah, and Hitler had nothing to do with World War Two

Perle is already practicing for his testimony at the Hague.