Richard Perle Again

Richard Perle in La-la-land. Neocon Iraq war architect, believer that rogue states (read, Iraq) must be confronted with pre-emptive action and former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle told Vanity Fair writer David Rose in November, 2006 that the US shouldn’t have gone into Iraq. "I think if I had been delphic,” he told Rose, “and had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?' I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.” Today the New York Sun writer Nicholas Wapshott reported, “Richard Perle offered a withering assessment of the president's impotence at a meeting of the Hudson Institute in New York, saying American foreign policy is being applied by an out-of-control State Department.” Perle said that Bush had appointed people who are not allowing Bush to do what he wants to do. According to Richard Perle, Colin Powell didn’t allow Bush to do what he wanted to do, Rumsfeld kept Bush from doing what he wanted to do and Condi Rice is keeping Bush from doing what he wants to do. Bush is not “getting his own way” Perle says. This is because Bush was inexperienced when he came into office. "He came ill-equipped for the job and has failed to master it…I do not meet the president, but from the people I meet who are close to him and from his speeches, I believe the gap between the president and his administration is without precedent." Perle says Bush was weak in his response to Syria and “he (Bush) failed to convincingly condemn the visit of the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, to Damascus because he had authorized some Republicans to talk to Assad.” What then, is it that Bush is being kept from doing? Being tough on Iran, for one thing. Perle said, “Mr. Bush is routinely frustrated by ‘establishment’ thinking within Washington and that the failure to respond to the president's “more radical thinking” has harmed American policy in Iraq.” Perle told Wapshott that the U.S. Army is not terribly well equipped to fight the insurgency in Iraq. He said, “The Defense Department is still planning an army to fight a Russian advance in Central Europe,“ adding, "we sent over the only Army we had (to Iraq) but the coalition should have handed the country over to the Iraqis in October 2003, when the insurgency began.” This is the man who planned the Iraq war with his neocon buddies and then profited from improper sweetheart deals with major munitions contractors while he was a government employee. And now he says we should have turned Iraq over to the Iraqis in 2003? However you look at it—whether Perle thinks he can reinvent himself and make it stick or whether he has lost his mind, the fact is, he has lost his mind.