http://brendastardom.com/arch.asp?ArchID=143
25-3-2003
another PERLE HARBOR?
I've been trying for weeks to get a bead on Richard Perle, as his name kept leaping out at me, piquing my curiosity. Not having been in the states since Clinton, I'm not too hip on who's who, but the stuff I've dug up on this guy has me agreeing with those who are calling him the Prince of Darkness or Bush's Svengali. That appears to be right on the money.
I've hit on conservative columnist Jude Wanniski for an insight, as he seems to know the most about the Perle. " A word about Richard Perle: I've known him since 1969 and have for many years considered him a friend and ally in our fight against the Communists in Moscow and Beijing. He has a high IQ, but I have not heard him say anything about foreign policy that struck me as being thought through. Colin Powell privately refers to him and Wolfowitz as "the bombers." The reason, I think, is that Perle's mentor and father-in-law, Albert Wohlstetter, was the brains in the family, and when Albert died, Richard inherited his global network of political supporters. I have likened Richard to the Sorcerer's Apprentice, a Mickey Mouse who thinks he can do magic by using the Sorcerer's wand. If you scratch Perle, you will find a mediocre strategist, a checker player at best."
Also, just a week after 9-11, Wanniski sent a memo to Henry Kissinger. "I was surprised to see you on television last night making arguments I associate with the world’s No. 1 hawk, Richard Perle, who has been the chief architect of our policy toward the Arab/Islamic world. There is no single American more responsible for inciting outrage among Muslims globally than Richard, whose maniacal prescriptions led inexorably to last week’s cataclysm. It was no surprise to me to see Richard on CNN’s Evans&Novak, Hunt& Shields program on Sunday, calling for all-out war against the Arab world with a coalition entirely composed of western Europeans. If he were just an ordinary maniac, we could live with him, Henry, but he is chairman of the Defense Policy Board, which advises the Pentagon, and which gives him total access to all military secrets. Do you have any doubt that he is now in constant communication with Ariel Sharon and Binjamin Netanyahu, the leaders of the coo-coo wing of the Likud Party in Israel."
This info is quite revealing if you take it from a psychological profile angle. "A little-known fact about Richard Perle, the leading advocate of hardline policies at the Pentagon, is that he once wrote a political thriller. The book, appropriately called Hard Line, is set in the days of the cold war with the Soviet Union. Its hero is a male senior official at the Pentagon, working late into the night and battling almost single-handedly to rescue the US from liberal wimps at the state department who want to sign away America's nuclear deterrent in a disarmament deal with the Russians. Ten years on Mr Perle finds himself cast in the real-life role of his fictional hero - except that the Russians are no longer a threat, so he has to make do with the Iraqis, the Saudis and terrorism in general."
Seven months ago this was said of him.
"Anyone who has listened to a single political speech knows that Washington, D.C., is a swampy morass controlled by pencil pushers, experts in bureaucratic intrigue. Richard Perle is one of these men. By dint of his mastery of the dark arts of memos and news leaks, Perle has become a Washington eminence, appearing on TV shows, publishing op-eds in the national dailies, and getting quoted (by name!) in news stories. He's something you don't hear about in politicians' speeches: the faceful bureaucrat.
Forward to November 2002.
"George Bush's top security adviser last night admitted the US would attack Iraq even if UN inspectors fail to find weapons. Dr Richard Perle stunned MPs by insisting a "clean bill of health" from UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix would not halt America's war machine.
December. This guy is too much. 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."
George Paine of warblogging.com had this to say last month. "Perle is the Department of Defense's most senior civilian advisor. He is not technically a member of the Bush Administration, but he is certainly a mouthpiece for Bush. He is, if nothing else, a testing ground — if the outcry over Perle's statement isn't strong enough then it will become official US government policy."
Perle made the statement that France is no longer America's ally at a gathering sponsored by a New York public relations firm, as UPI describes it. He also had strong things to say about Germany, although not nearly as strong as what he said about France."
Oh yeah. "But Perle has also consistently fallen prey to the delusion that if only Saddam Hussein can be removed from Iraq, the seas will turn to chocolate, candy will rain down from the sky, and the international community will sing as America buys the world a Coke in celebration. It's the kind of simplistic, doe-eyed fantasizing that liberals sometimes bring to domestic issues. Visions of sugarplums aren't enough to justify a dangerous and deadly pre-emptive war.
This was good. Bummer the New Yorker doesn't keep archives. "Despite his familiarity with the media, Perle found a piece by veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh a little hard to take. Hersh's New Yorker report, "A Hawk's Business," targets Perle's hush-hush meeting with Saudi industrialist Saleh al-Zuhair, a meeting arranged with the help of Iran/contra figure Adnan Khashoggi. Hersh explored the possibility of a conflict of interest for Perle, one of whose businesses is Trireme Partners LP, a venture capital firm that invests in technology, goods, and services related to homeland security and defense. Trireme also created International Advisors Inc., a lobbying firm whose main client is Turkey. Henry Kissinger is a Trireme adviser, and Perle is a managing partner.[5] Kissinger, who was forced to resign as head of the independent commission to investigate the 9/11 attacks, has been using his influence to try to keep the Saudis calm during the buildup to war. The subject of the al-Zuhair meeting is in dispute, but Perle is fighting off the impression that he was trying to use his Pentagon influence to profit from a war that he is doing all he can to implement. Hersh criticized Perle's relationship with Trireme as an ethical conflict of interest, to which Perle responded by calling Hersh "the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist."[6]
He recently duked it out verbally with Daniel Cohn-Bendit, head of the European Parliment's Green Party
"The United States and the European Union both want peace in the Middle East—but that’s about all they agree upon. While Washington believes that regime change in Iraq will usher in an era of regional peace and stability, Brussels worries that U.S. adventurism will make the clash of civilizations a self-fulfilling prophecy. Will war in Iraq prove to be an act of creative destruction, or simply destruction?
Perle: If my prediction—that everything will go well with Iraq—becomes reality, then the damage recently done to trans-Atlantic relations will rapidly be repaired. We will still have the problem of French ambitions to build a Europe in opposition to the United States. And if the French are indeed creating a counterweight, do not call their relationship with the United States an alliance anymore. In that case we, as Americans, will have to consider how we deal with this European departure from the trans-Atlantic axis."
The best Perle piece recently is one by Maureen Dowd of the New York Times. Read it, please. It begins like this. "It's Richard Perle's world. We're just fighting in it."
I'm convinced. He's a bad guy. The reason for this mostly copy/paste is for those who don't know who the hell this guy is. He's not called The Prince of Darkness for nothing. You can blame him for the war in Iraq and see him as one of the first in line to cash-in post war. Whore!
There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.
--John Adams
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