Richard Perle: "Is not and never has been a member of the Neocon Party"
The man once known as the Prince of Darkness is undergoing a metamorphosis. Some speculate he’s in a state of ‘Neocon Denial’.
Whatever the true explanation, Richard Perle, a leading luminary of the neocons during the Bush era, seems to be having trouble remembering a thing about it!
For those of us who have memories, this recent article by Dana Milbank in the Washington Post is one long barrel of laughs:
Washington Sketch: Richard Perle in Wonderland
Dana Milbank sketches the intellectual godfather of the Bush doctrine and the Iraq war as he disavows neoconservatism; Friday, February 20, 2009; Page A03
Listening to neoconservative mastermind Richard Perle at the Nixon Center yesterday, there was a sense of falling down the rabbit hole.
In real life, Perle was the ideological architect of the Iraq war and of the Bush doctrine of preemptive attack. But at yesterday’s forum of foreign policy intellectuals, he created a fantastic world in which:
- Perle is not a neoconservative.
- Neoconservatives do not exist.
- Even if neoconservatives did exist, they certainly couldn’t be blamed for the disasters of the past eight years.
“There is no such thing as a neoconservative foreign policy,” Perle informed the gathering, hosted by National Interest magazine. “It is a left critique of what is believed by the commentator to be a right-wing policy.”
So what about the 1996 report he co-authored that is widely seen as the cornerstone of neoconservative foreign policy? “My name was on it because I signed up for the study group,” Perle explained. “I didn’t approve it. I didn’t read it.”
Mm-hmm. And the two letters to the president, signed by Perle, giving a “moral” basis to Middle East policy and demanding military means to remove Saddam Hussein? “I don’t have the letters in front of me,” Perle replied.
Right. And the Bush administration National Security Strategy, enshrining the neoconservative themes of preemptive war and using American power to spread freedom? “I don’t know whether President Bush ever read any of those statements,” Perle maintained. “My guess is he didn’t.”
The Prince of Darkness — so dubbed during his days opposing arms control in the Reagan Pentagon — was not about to let details get in the way of his argument that “50 million conspiracy theorists have it wrong,” as the subtitle of his article for National Interest put it. “I see a number of people here who believe and have expressed themselves abundantly that there is a neoconservative foreign policy and it was the policy that dominated the Bush administration, and they ascribe to it responsibility for the deplorable state of the world,” Perle told the foreign policy luminaries at yesterday’s lunch. “None of that is true, of course.”
Of course.
He had been a leading cheerleader for the Iraq war, predicting that the effort would take few troops and last only a few days, and that Iraq would pay for its own reconstruction. Perle was chairman of Bush’s Defense Policy Board — and the president clearly took the advice of Perle and his fellow neocons. And Perle, in turn, said back then that Bush “knows exactly what he’s doing”
Yesterday, however, Perle said Bush’s foreign policy had “no philosophical underpinnings and certainly nothing like the demonic influence of neoconservatives that is alleged.” He also took issue with the common view that neocons favored using American might to spread democratic values. “There’s no documentation!” he argued. “I can’t find a single example of a neoconservative supposed to have influence over the Bush administration arguing that we should impose democracy by force.”
"Alice was not a bit hurt"
This takes Zionist dissembling to a wholly new level. Is post-neocon Perle morphing into a new lifeform? Will he become a frog – or a princess?
Uncharitable types have suggested Mr Perle’s underlying identity is that of a foreign agent, working more or less in plain sight. They suggest he has been one of Israel’s leading spooks in Washington for decades.
Such a suggestion is most unfair at a time when Mr Perle has memory lapses and can’t defend himself.
I have a dream that Mr Perle might wake up one morning and remember he’s a human being, just like the rest of us (such as the Palestinians and Iraqis). Then he might go beyond denial to free confession of the full extent of his criminal, war-mongering misdeeds – and those of his devious associates.
