RUSH LIMBAUGH is my clone!
2/26/2007, 06:38 PM
Perle: Bush Failed by his Own People
Dave Eberhart, NewsMax.com
Monday, Feb. 26, 2007
Richard Perle tells NewsMax that key members of the Bush administration have failed the president – and Perle names names.
In a wide-ranging interview, the former assistant Secretary of Defense under President Reagan and chairman of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee from 2001 to 2003 under President Bush calls former Secretary of State Colin Powell a "disaster" and says current Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice "was in way over her head from the beginning."
Others fall within his sights: Al Franken, Nancy Pelosi, John Murtha, and George Tenet, among others.
Surprising words from the man critics of the White House have dubbed "the Prince of Darkness" – a leading neo-conservative who was one of the key proponents of the 2002 invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
Speaking from his home in Chevy Chase, Md., Perle – the man who was credited with orchestrating the Reagan policies that led to the fall of the Soviet Union – is busy explaining his role in a less savory subject, the current situation in Iraq.
While Perle does see a silver lining and believes that our actions may have prevented greater evil, he worries that the situation is looking more and more like Vietnam, especially as that war was lost on the home front.
Perle will be featured in PBS's upcoming two-hour program "The Case for War: In Defense of Freedom."
It is one segment of a series called "America at a Crossroads." PBS says the series will explore the challenges confronting the world post-9/11, including the war on terrorism, the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the experience of American troops, the struggle for balance within the Muslim world, and perspectives on America's role globally.
The "Crossroads" series will launch on Sunday, April 15, and will run on PBS through Friday, April 20, 9-11 p.m. (ET). Perle's "The Case for War" segment will air on April 17.
Despite the airtime devoted to Perle, PBS never seems to offer him the opportunity to look at the camera and clearly explain how some of the best and the brightest in the Bush administration got it wrong.
Still, there are some surprising turns. In a particularly poignant segment of "The Case for War," Perle talks about the looming threat of Iran, giving this surprising take – from someone reputedly one of the nation's foremost saber-rattlers:
"I don't think we need to send in the Marines, and it's not being contemplated."
According to PBS, its "America at a Crossroads" initiative includes an extensive public outreach program designed to create a national dialogue. The outreach program encompasses screenings and discussions in more than 20 cities with U.S. military personnel, leading policy experts and Islamic leaders; an in-depth online presence; and educational initiatives.
NewsMax: What do you find most frustrating about this slow agony of progress in Iraq?
Perle: I have watched the president from the beginning and my sense is that his instincts have been pretty good and his policy decisions – the ones that he himself has acted on – are pretty good. But he has an administration that not only does not implement his policies, they are often hostile to his policies. He has failed to gain control of his own administration.
NewsMax: Rather than a documentary defending the decision to go to war in Iraq, perhaps folks would better appreciate Richard Perle doing something along the lines of David Halberstam's Vietnam-era tome "The Best and The Brightest" – similarly discussing how we got where we are in Iraq with the best and brightest leading the way.
Perle: We just don't have the best and the brightest. I think Colin Powell was a disaster. He never liked the president's policies. He did almost nothing to get them implemented. Condi [former head of the National Security Council and now Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice] was in way over her head from the beginning, and the president gave much too much weight to her views. The administration was full of people even in the White House at the National Security Council who were hostile to the president's policies.
NewsMax: On the subject of your "America at a Crossroads" segment for PBS: In one of your filmed confrontations with protestors on the National Mall, you tell a woman, "I'm sorry for your loss, but I'm not the president." You're saying to her that you are not the architect of the war and you didn't make the decisions. But you were a powerhouse on the Defense Policy Board.
Perle: As a matter of fact, I was not at all happy with the conduct of the board. Now people can differ about what approach would have been more effective. I think we got ourselves, unfortunately, into an occupation [of Iraq] that we could have avoided. We could have avoided it by turning things over to the Iraqis more or less immediately, which is what I was arguing for.
NewsMax: Inherent in that view would be the need to maintain the Iraqi army, even though the officer corps may have been riddled with Baathists.
Perle: Yes. I think it was a mistake to disband the [Iraqi] army the way it was done. But the big mistake was not handing things over to the Iraqis immediately. If you are in a position of occupation and you can't get the electricity going, you're bound to inspire an insurgency. I don't think that insurgency was inevitable.
NewsMax: One of the things that PBS is advertising is that it is hoped this unique series, "America at a Crossroads," is going to provoke a national dialogue, and yet, ironically, our own United States Senate is gridlocked.
Perle: They are having a screaming match, not a dialogue.
NewsMax: How do you see it playing out on Capitol Hill?
Perle: The House and the Democratic leadership have decided to make Iraq a partisan political issue. They are using it to rally Democrats, and it seems to me that they have lost all sight of the national interest.
NewsMax: Some have styled what's going on as a looming constitutional disaster – a potential historic war between two branches of government.
Perle: Despite all of the earlier claims about wanting a bipartisan approach to these issues, everything that they [Democrats] are doing is to the contrary. What's sad is getting this nonbinding resolution and then moving with this basically deceptive [Rep. John] Murtha approach, which is to pretend that all they are doing is putting restrictions on funding in the best interest of the troops.
In fact, they are trying to make it impossible for the commander-in-chief to dispatch the troops.
I've been in Washington now since 1969. I can't recall a more hypocritical coordinated assault by one party than this one. Even in the worse days of the Nixon administration it never reached this.
NewsMax: How do you suspect this is all going to end?
Perle: I think that the Democrats have injected a note of such bitter partisanship that it is going to backfire.
NewsMax: In the 2008 elections?
Perle: Even before that. I think that most Americans are unhappy with the situation in Iraq, but they do not want to see a humiliating withdrawal, and they don't want to see a bitter partisan dispute when they realize that the country needs to pull together.
Nancy Pelosi is overplaying her hand. Jack Murtha has just gone around the bend. I don't understand him at all, and I think in the end the public, broadly speaking, will say, "Enough of this."
NewsMax: Now that Al Franken has declared for the U.S. Senate, do you find him a more serious guy?
Perle: He tells me that he is out of a job [host on Air America Radio]. He actually has a decent sense of humor, so he tries to be funny, but he was reasonably serious with me. I didn't think, however, that he had a lot to say of importance.
Franken was hung up on the fact that we didn't find stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, and that whole thing gets a little tedious after a while.
The president didn't create [the intelligence organizations]. He made the mistake of keeping [former CIA chief George] Tenet in place, but that is another matter.
NewsMax: What about the U.S. intelligence efforts in the ramp-up to war in Iraq?
Perle: The intelligence that was available to [the president] after September 11 was that they were categorical in their belief that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. There was no deception. There was no cherry-picking. There was no pressure on the analysts. That whole line is rubbish. I was seeing the intelligence at the time.
I was then chairman of the Defense Policy Board, and we had briefings and so I heard the CIA briefings and the Defense Intelligence Agency briefings, and they never left any room for doubt. The idea that that intelligence product was manipulated by the administration is just completely without foundation. But the Democrats have embraced it because it is how they hope to explain the fact that most of them voted for the resolution authorizing force against Saddam.
NewsMax: Throughout your program, you adamantly say you were for the regime change in Iraq. The regime change was a good thing...
Perle: Saddam is gone, and I think that is a good thing. He was a menace. It is very popular now to suggest that because we didn't find WMD, he wasn't the threat. What we didn't find in truth was stockpiles of WMDs. He certainly had the capacity to produce chemical and biological weapons again when he wanted to do so, and so I believe he was a threat, and I think we had the right to respond to that threat.
You can't operate on the basis of what you know later. You've got to operate on the basis of what you know then.
NewsMax: So, the fact is that while the ramp-up to the war was clumsy and less than a smooth scholarly enterprise, we got there and it was justified?
Perle: Yes, I believe it was justified, and I wish we had handled it a little bit differently, but … if we were having a debate now about how effectively we handled the post-Saddam situation, it would be a very different debate than the one that we are having.
NewsMax: Reportedly, 70 percent of the American public wants the boys to come home...
Perle: It depends on how you ask the question. Of course, we all want the boys to come home. If the question you put was "Do you think that we should withdraw even if it means that Iraq subsides into chaos and we will have been defeated and humiliated in Iraq?" you will get an entirely different answer.
I think polls on a matter like that are pretty useless.
NewsMax: How about the analogy between Iraq and the Vietnam experience?
Perle: I think that there are, unfortunately, elements in Iraq that are a lot more reminiscent of Vietnam than I would have wished – and more reminiscent than was true in early Iraq. I mean, what is beginning to look a little bit familiar is the withdrawal of support on the home front. I don't see troops who were in Iraq demanding that we pull out.
NewsMax: How about the recent intelligence that Muqtada al-Sadr and members of his army left Baghdad in advance of the troop surge and fled to Tehran, Iran, where he has family?
Perle: It's an indication that we may be able to turn this thing around. One of the mistakes of the administration was in believing that you could deal with Iraq in isolation without a successful strategy for Iran and Syria. What the Iranians are doing now, they have been doing all along, and the administration just hasn't been willing to act on it.
Dave Eberhart, NewsMax.com
Monday, Feb. 26, 2007
Richard Perle tells NewsMax that key members of the Bush administration have failed the president – and Perle names names.
In a wide-ranging interview, the former assistant Secretary of Defense under President Reagan and chairman of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee from 2001 to 2003 under President Bush calls former Secretary of State Colin Powell a "disaster" and says current Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice "was in way over her head from the beginning."
Others fall within his sights: Al Franken, Nancy Pelosi, John Murtha, and George Tenet, among others.
Surprising words from the man critics of the White House have dubbed "the Prince of Darkness" – a leading neo-conservative who was one of the key proponents of the 2002 invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
Speaking from his home in Chevy Chase, Md., Perle – the man who was credited with orchestrating the Reagan policies that led to the fall of the Soviet Union – is busy explaining his role in a less savory subject, the current situation in Iraq.
While Perle does see a silver lining and believes that our actions may have prevented greater evil, he worries that the situation is looking more and more like Vietnam, especially as that war was lost on the home front.
Perle will be featured in PBS's upcoming two-hour program "The Case for War: In Defense of Freedom."
It is one segment of a series called "America at a Crossroads." PBS says the series will explore the challenges confronting the world post-9/11, including the war on terrorism, the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the experience of American troops, the struggle for balance within the Muslim world, and perspectives on America's role globally.
The "Crossroads" series will launch on Sunday, April 15, and will run on PBS through Friday, April 20, 9-11 p.m. (ET). Perle's "The Case for War" segment will air on April 17.
Despite the airtime devoted to Perle, PBS never seems to offer him the opportunity to look at the camera and clearly explain how some of the best and the brightest in the Bush administration got it wrong.
Still, there are some surprising turns. In a particularly poignant segment of "The Case for War," Perle talks about the looming threat of Iran, giving this surprising take – from someone reputedly one of the nation's foremost saber-rattlers:
"I don't think we need to send in the Marines, and it's not being contemplated."
According to PBS, its "America at a Crossroads" initiative includes an extensive public outreach program designed to create a national dialogue. The outreach program encompasses screenings and discussions in more than 20 cities with U.S. military personnel, leading policy experts and Islamic leaders; an in-depth online presence; and educational initiatives.
NewsMax: What do you find most frustrating about this slow agony of progress in Iraq?
Perle: I have watched the president from the beginning and my sense is that his instincts have been pretty good and his policy decisions – the ones that he himself has acted on – are pretty good. But he has an administration that not only does not implement his policies, they are often hostile to his policies. He has failed to gain control of his own administration.
NewsMax: Rather than a documentary defending the decision to go to war in Iraq, perhaps folks would better appreciate Richard Perle doing something along the lines of David Halberstam's Vietnam-era tome "The Best and The Brightest" – similarly discussing how we got where we are in Iraq with the best and brightest leading the way.
Perle: We just don't have the best and the brightest. I think Colin Powell was a disaster. He never liked the president's policies. He did almost nothing to get them implemented. Condi [former head of the National Security Council and now Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice] was in way over her head from the beginning, and the president gave much too much weight to her views. The administration was full of people even in the White House at the National Security Council who were hostile to the president's policies.
NewsMax: On the subject of your "America at a Crossroads" segment for PBS: In one of your filmed confrontations with protestors on the National Mall, you tell a woman, "I'm sorry for your loss, but I'm not the president." You're saying to her that you are not the architect of the war and you didn't make the decisions. But you were a powerhouse on the Defense Policy Board.
Perle: As a matter of fact, I was not at all happy with the conduct of the board. Now people can differ about what approach would have been more effective. I think we got ourselves, unfortunately, into an occupation [of Iraq] that we could have avoided. We could have avoided it by turning things over to the Iraqis more or less immediately, which is what I was arguing for.
NewsMax: Inherent in that view would be the need to maintain the Iraqi army, even though the officer corps may have been riddled with Baathists.
Perle: Yes. I think it was a mistake to disband the [Iraqi] army the way it was done. But the big mistake was not handing things over to the Iraqis immediately. If you are in a position of occupation and you can't get the electricity going, you're bound to inspire an insurgency. I don't think that insurgency was inevitable.
NewsMax: One of the things that PBS is advertising is that it is hoped this unique series, "America at a Crossroads," is going to provoke a national dialogue, and yet, ironically, our own United States Senate is gridlocked.
Perle: They are having a screaming match, not a dialogue.
NewsMax: How do you see it playing out on Capitol Hill?
Perle: The House and the Democratic leadership have decided to make Iraq a partisan political issue. They are using it to rally Democrats, and it seems to me that they have lost all sight of the national interest.
NewsMax: Some have styled what's going on as a looming constitutional disaster – a potential historic war between two branches of government.
Perle: Despite all of the earlier claims about wanting a bipartisan approach to these issues, everything that they [Democrats] are doing is to the contrary. What's sad is getting this nonbinding resolution and then moving with this basically deceptive [Rep. John] Murtha approach, which is to pretend that all they are doing is putting restrictions on funding in the best interest of the troops.
In fact, they are trying to make it impossible for the commander-in-chief to dispatch the troops.
I've been in Washington now since 1969. I can't recall a more hypocritical coordinated assault by one party than this one. Even in the worse days of the Nixon administration it never reached this.
NewsMax: How do you suspect this is all going to end?
Perle: I think that the Democrats have injected a note of such bitter partisanship that it is going to backfire.
NewsMax: In the 2008 elections?
Perle: Even before that. I think that most Americans are unhappy with the situation in Iraq, but they do not want to see a humiliating withdrawal, and they don't want to see a bitter partisan dispute when they realize that the country needs to pull together.
Nancy Pelosi is overplaying her hand. Jack Murtha has just gone around the bend. I don't understand him at all, and I think in the end the public, broadly speaking, will say, "Enough of this."
NewsMax: Now that Al Franken has declared for the U.S. Senate, do you find him a more serious guy?
Perle: He tells me that he is out of a job [host on Air America Radio]. He actually has a decent sense of humor, so he tries to be funny, but he was reasonably serious with me. I didn't think, however, that he had a lot to say of importance.
Franken was hung up on the fact that we didn't find stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, and that whole thing gets a little tedious after a while.
The president didn't create [the intelligence organizations]. He made the mistake of keeping [former CIA chief George] Tenet in place, but that is another matter.
NewsMax: What about the U.S. intelligence efforts in the ramp-up to war in Iraq?
Perle: The intelligence that was available to [the president] after September 11 was that they were categorical in their belief that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. There was no deception. There was no cherry-picking. There was no pressure on the analysts. That whole line is rubbish. I was seeing the intelligence at the time.
I was then chairman of the Defense Policy Board, and we had briefings and so I heard the CIA briefings and the Defense Intelligence Agency briefings, and they never left any room for doubt. The idea that that intelligence product was manipulated by the administration is just completely without foundation. But the Democrats have embraced it because it is how they hope to explain the fact that most of them voted for the resolution authorizing force against Saddam.
NewsMax: Throughout your program, you adamantly say you were for the regime change in Iraq. The regime change was a good thing...
Perle: Saddam is gone, and I think that is a good thing. He was a menace. It is very popular now to suggest that because we didn't find WMD, he wasn't the threat. What we didn't find in truth was stockpiles of WMDs. He certainly had the capacity to produce chemical and biological weapons again when he wanted to do so, and so I believe he was a threat, and I think we had the right to respond to that threat.
You can't operate on the basis of what you know later. You've got to operate on the basis of what you know then.
NewsMax: So, the fact is that while the ramp-up to the war was clumsy and less than a smooth scholarly enterprise, we got there and it was justified?
Perle: Yes, I believe it was justified, and I wish we had handled it a little bit differently, but … if we were having a debate now about how effectively we handled the post-Saddam situation, it would be a very different debate than the one that we are having.
NewsMax: Reportedly, 70 percent of the American public wants the boys to come home...
Perle: It depends on how you ask the question. Of course, we all want the boys to come home. If the question you put was "Do you think that we should withdraw even if it means that Iraq subsides into chaos and we will have been defeated and humiliated in Iraq?" you will get an entirely different answer.
I think polls on a matter like that are pretty useless.
NewsMax: How about the analogy between Iraq and the Vietnam experience?
Perle: I think that there are, unfortunately, elements in Iraq that are a lot more reminiscent of Vietnam than I would have wished – and more reminiscent than was true in early Iraq. I mean, what is beginning to look a little bit familiar is the withdrawal of support on the home front. I don't see troops who were in Iraq demanding that we pull out.
NewsMax: How about the recent intelligence that Muqtada al-Sadr and members of his army left Baghdad in advance of the troop surge and fled to Tehran, Iran, where he has family?
Perle: It's an indication that we may be able to turn this thing around. One of the mistakes of the administration was in believing that you could deal with Iraq in isolation without a successful strategy for Iran and Syria. What the Iranians are doing now, they have been doing all along, and the administration just hasn't been willing to act on it.