Richard Perle
MA, Princeton University
During the Carter administration, Richard Perle began his adventures in government as a senior staff member for Henry “Scoop” (“The Senator from Boeing”) Jackson on the Senate Armed Services Committee. When Reagan took office, Perle enthusiastically helped him promote physicist/madman Edward Teller’s idea for a “missile shield,” the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Amusingly—sort of—this scheme involved shooting down Russian ICBMs using fricking laser beams, both land-based and on platforms in outer fucking space. In the end, scientists announced that the technology for SDI was at least ten years away,* and the project was sent to the backest of burners. It was during Reagan’s administration that Perle acquired the nickname “The Prince of Darkness.” He didn’t like it, but it stuck.
Then the Soviet Union dissolved, the Cold War ended, and Perle looked around for some other cause. He found it in the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a neoconservative think tank cofounded in 1997 by Ivy League Monster Extraordinaire William Kristol. PNAC’s mission was to urge more aggressive use of US military force around the world—specifically in Iraq.
When George W. Bush was selected president and 9/11 happened, everybody’s dreams—of “preemptive” military attack, of deposing Saddam Hussein and “liberating” Iraq, of swaggering around on the world stage as the brain trust guiding the United States to global domination—came true. As early as 1990, Perle had been working with Iraqi businessman (and secret Iranian operative) Ahmed Chalabi to remove Saddam. Once the Twin Towers came down, Perle, Douglas Feith, and the gang established not one but two secret offices in the Pentagon to find, buff up, if necessary invent, and channel intelligence about Iraq to support arguments in favor of invasion. Perle insisted, on media large and small, that Saddam “had ties” to the terrorists, which he didn’t, since most of them were from Saudi Arabia.
In this, Perle and the other neocons acted in service of a worldview dominated, as one writer put it, by “warrior worship, existential conflict, and extreme moral righteousness.” Sounds thrilling, yes, especially if the warriors being worshipped aren’t you or your children. In an interview he gave shortly before the invasion of Iraq, Perle invoked the term he had used during Reagan’s presidency: “total war.”
No stages.… This is total war.… 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.
It’s worth noting, now and forever, that with W’s installation—especially after 9/11—the neocons got everything they wanted: a malleable president, a powerful and conscience-free vice president, a complaisant Congress, a fully mobilized military, an unlimited budget, a credulous press, and enough public support to fulfill their wettest of dreams.
The war began. The Iraqis were shocked and awed. Then, after the military walkover, the occupation began and Americans at home were awed and shocked at the mendacity underlying the war’s rationale and the conquerors’ inept management of the aftermath. Within a few years, Perle expressed regret at having supported the invasion but denied responsibility for having promoted it. “Huge mistakes were made,” he said, employing the famous passive voice. “And I want to be very clear on this: They were not made by neoconservatives, who had almost no voice* in what happened.”
Well. It’s true that the implementation of the invasion and the conduct of the occupation were the domains of W, RUMMY, and the State Department. But it was Perle, along with the other neocons, who blamed 9/11 on Saddam Hussein; who predicted a quick and easy victory; who denied any real Shiite–Sunni tensions; who insisted we’d be greeted as liberators. No voice in what happened? Surely you’re too modest, Mr. Perle. (May we call you Dick?)
Of course, promoting America’s global dominance is good clean fun, but it’s also necessary to, as George W. Bush once said, “put food on your family.” In this regard—the methodology behind the putting of food on his family—Perle’s record is spotty, if not fully checkered. He was criticized for recommending that the army buy gear from an Israeli company that a year earlier had paid him $50,000. In 2003, while chairman of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, Perle was accused by the journalist Seymour Hersh of having improper business dealings with Saudi investors. In March 2004, Perle took money from a company to promote its sale of assets to a Hong Kong–based firm in spite of the FBI’s and Pentagon’s opposition. He was accused of having breached his fiduciary responsibilities as a director of another company; the SEC called for him to return his compensation. He demanded payments for interviews. Finally, Politico reported in 2011 that Perle traveled twice to Libya with the Monitor Group, a consulting firm of which he was a senior advisor, as part of an effort to “burnish Libya’s and [Muamar] Qadhafi’s image” in the United States.
Still, what’s a little influence peddling and hypocrisy among friends? Perle’s legacy will be the Iraq war he promoted with half-truths and dire warnings. Ten years after the launch of the war, when NPR reporter Renee Montagne asked Perle whether it had been worth it, he replied: “I’ve got to say I think that is not a reasonable question. What we did at the time was done with the belief that it was necessary to protect this nation. You can’t a decade later go back and say we shouldn’t have done that.”
This is contemptibly self-serving and, frankly, monstrous—and certainly something for our children to sing great songs about years from now.