One hawk out of the office, just a few dozen more to go. CBC reporter in Washington just announced it. Here’s another news link: Latest news, sport and opinion from the Guardian
i am NOT certain how accurate this is. Apparently, according to that CBC reporter, Perle had some links with Saudi contractors - links that were deemed “inappropriate”. Is that true?
Re: Richard Perle to resign over “business row”
Its 100% accurate Nadia, I heard it also
R. Perle is jus ONE of the neo-cons...Paul Wolfowitz is another big gun in the Bush govt.
All praise to Seymour Hersch..
Thanks, Majestic. You are right, his involvement with some Saudi businessmen was accurate (see PakistaniAbroad's link above).
I wouldn't get too happy yet.. if people like this walk away from anything it is only because they have something else waiting. They'll probably appoint this guy proconsul of Iraq...
They're like vampires. You have to kill them the right way otherwise they just keep coming back...
Was about time that he leaves...now the other neos need to go..One by one.
Its amazing how a person like him can affect/dictate US foreign and defence policy. He was asst. sec of defence in Reagan admin. Others in the same cabal are: Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton.
He is the architect of Iraq war. (I tink Awam Ki Awaz, pointed out in several of his threads as well). So he left after he was finally able to achieve what he had been dreaming since before Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1991.
Thank God for the death of the UN
He is the Resident Fellow of American Enterprise Institute. Some of the articles he has written are:
Articles and Short Publications by Richard Perle
Coalitions of the Willing Are Our Best Hope
Posted: March 21, 2003
Take Out Saddam–It’s the Only Way
Posted: February 25, 2003
Why Blix Has Got It All Wrong
Posted: January 26, 2003
The Idealists’ War
Posted: September 20, 2002
Why the West Must Strike First Against Saddam Hussein
Posted: August 8, 2002
Why the West Must Strike First against Saddam Hussein
Posted: August 1, 2002
What do EU Know about the Fight on Terror, Mr. Patten?
Posted: February 16, 2002
The United States Must Strike at Saddam Hussein
Posted: January 1, 2002
The U.S. Must Strike at Saddam Hussein
Posted: December 28, 2001
Should Iraq Be Next?
Posted: December 16, 2001
Now an excerpt from his interview on PBS Richard Perle: The Making of a Neoconservative. Very interesting read into the mind of a neo-con.
Ben Wattenberg: You were calling attention to the Iraqi Regime under Saddam long before the Kuwait War. Is that right?
Richard Perle: Oh, long before. I was actually rather uncomfortable with the support that we gave Saddam during the war between Iraq and Iran…
Ben Wattenberg: Which we did sort of for geo-political balance?
Richard Perle: Yes, the view was that the mullahs in Tehran were worst than the tyrant in Baghdad, and I understand that argument. I don’t agree with it, but even for those who accepted that view, the right course immediately after the end of that war would have been to say to Saddam, now we’ve had enough of you too, and we’re not gonna to tolerate it.
Ben Wattenberg: And we didn’t do that?
Richard Perle: No, we didn’t do that, and the indulgence of Saddam led to the invasion of Kuwait.
Ben Wattenberg: Well, people say…they say two things. What are they gonna do to us and why now?
Richard Perle: Well, why now, because we’re late. We should have done it a long time ago. We should never have allowed the inspectors to be expelled four years ago. Bill Clinton didn’t want a confrontation, so he allowed the expulsion of the inspectors. We should have done this four years ago. In fact, we should have dealt with Saddam decisively in Nineteen Ninety-one but we didn’t. And in the years since, thousands of people have died at his hands and mostly his own citizens, and he’s been working away at weapons of mass destruction, so now, because every day that goes by, we are incurring the risks that he will use those weapons.
Ben Wattenberg: As this argument has gotten rancorous, there is also an undertone that says that these neoconservative hawks, that so many of them are Jewish. Is that valid and how do you handle that?
Richard Perle: Well, a number are. I see Trent Lott there and maybe that’s Newt Gingrich, I’m not sure, but by no means uniformily.
Ben Wattenberg: Well, and of course the people who are executing policy, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Connie Rice, they are not Jewish as last report.
Richard Perle: No, they’re not. Well, you’re going to find a disproportionate number of Jews in any sort of intellectual undertaking.
Ben Wattenberg: Well, and the linkage is that this war on Iraq if it comes about would help Israel and that that’s the hidden agenda, and that’s sort of the way that works.
Richard Perle: Well, sometimes there’s an out and out accusation that if you take the view that I take and some others take towards Saddam Hussein, we are somehow motivated not by the best interest of the United States but by Israel’s best interest. There’s not a logical argument underpinning that. In fact, Israel is probably more exposed and vulnerable in the context of a war with Saddam than we are because they’re right next door. Weapons that Saddam cannot today deliver against us could potentially be delivered against Israel. And for a long time the Israelis themselves were very reluctant to take on Saddam Hussein. I’ve argued this issue with Israelis. But it’s a nasty line of argument to suggest that somehow we’re confused about where our loyalties are.
Ben Wattenberg: Well, why is it important to an American citizen that we promote democracy in other lands? I mean, the easy argument is, it’s not our government, you know, let them do what they want.
Richard Perle: The lesson of history is that democracies don’t initiate wars of aggression, and if we want to live in a peaceful world, then there’s very little we can do to bring that about more effective than promoting a democracy. People who live in democratic societies don’t like to pay for massive military machines. Democratic societies don’t empower their executives to make unilateral decisions to plunge countries into war. Wars have been started by tyrants who have complete control and who can squander the resources of their people to build up military machines.**
Here is a good op/ed on the American Enterprise Institute’s (neocon thinktank) victory celebration last week and why they’re fools.
Riding alone into the sunset
William Pfaff IHT
Friday, March 28, 2003
but he still remains as a board member...
Perle was Rummys little boy who is the boy for phoren policy? I hear David Seinfeld is Bush’s favorite comedian, and therefore must have significant input on foreign affairs. 
**Bush planned Iraq ‘regime change’ before becoming President **
By Neil Mackay
A SECRET blueprint for US global domination reveals that President Bush and his cabinet were planning a premeditated attack on Iraq to secure ‘regime change’ even before he took power in January 2001.
The blueprint, uncovered by the Sunday Herald, for the creation of a ‘global Pax Americana’ was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice- president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld’s deputy), George W Bush’s younger brother Jeb and Lewis Libby (Cheney’s chief of staff). The document, entitled Rebuilding America’s Defences: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century, was written in September 2000 by the neo-conservative think-tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC).
The plan shows Bush’s cabinet intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. It says: ‘The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.’
The PNAC document supports a ‘blueprint for maintaining global US pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests’.
This ‘American grand strategy’ must be advanced for ‘as far into the future as possible’, the report says. It also calls for the US to ‘fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars’ as a ‘core mission’.
The report describes American armed forces abroad as ‘the cavalry on the new American frontier’. The PNAC blueprint supports an earlier document written by Wolfowitz and Libby that said the US must ‘discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role’.
The PNAC report also:
l refers to key allies such as the UK as ‘the most effective and efficient means of exercising American global leadership’;
l describes peace-keeping missions as ‘demanding American political leadership rather than that of the United Nations’;
l reveals worries in the administration that Europe could rival the USA;
l says ‘even should Saddam pass from the scene’ bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will remain permanently – despite domestic opposition in the Gulf regimes to the stationing of US troops – as ‘Iran may well prove as large a threat to US interests as Iraq has’;
l spotlights China for ‘regime change’ saying ‘it is time to increase the presence of American forces in southeast Asia’. This, it says, may lead to ‘American and allied power providing the spur to the process of democratisation in China’;
l calls for the creation of ‘US Space Forces’, to dominate space, and the total control of cyberspace to prevent ‘enemies’ using the internet against the US;
l hints that, despite threatening war against Iraq for developing weapons of mass destruction, the US may consider developing biological weapons – which the nation has banned – in decades to come. It says: ‘New methods of attack – electronic, ‘non-lethal’, biological – will be more widely available … combat likely will take place in new dimensions, in space, cyberspace, and perhaps the world of microbes … advanced forms of biological warfare that can ‘target’ specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool’;
l and pinpoints North Korea, Libya, Syria and Iran as dangerous regimes and says their existence justifies the creation of a ‘world-wide command-and-control system’.
Tam Dalyell, the Labour MP, father of the House of Commons and one of the leading rebel voices against war with Iraq, said: 'This is garbage from right-wing think-tanks stuffed with chicken-hawks – men who have never seen the horror of war but are in love with the idea of war. Men like Cheney, who were draft-dodgers in the Vietnam war.
‘This is a blueprint for US world domination – a new world order of their making. These are the thought processes of fantasist Americans who want to control the world. I am appalled that a British Labour Prime Minister should have got into bed with a crew which has this moral standing.’
**Rebuilding America’s Defences: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century **
Read this quote somewhere. This would be the best thread to share it.
"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor - with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it." -- Gen. Douglas MacArthur, 1957
And yes Aishaa you are right. He’s not leaving the DPB altogether, just giving up the chairmanship. Which means he still maintains his security clearance and his access, the tools he needs to leverage more sweetheart deals. He has milked all he can out the chairmanship anyway.
He got the war he has long craved, and raised his public profile along the way.