Say this about Richard Perle: He is not hobbled by
inconsistencies, and he keeps his eye on the big picture. Perle,
who stepped down recently as chairman of the Defense Policy Board
after allegations he had a conflict of interest, although he will
still remain on the board, is a longtime advocate of regime change
in the Middle East: Iraq today, and Syria and Saudi Arabia
tomorrow. The precise ways of doing this, however, have been
unclear, and to Perle and his like-minded colleagues they seem to
be irrelevant. The important thing is the big picture, and they
insist on their superior knowledge. Their record, though, is not
inspiring.
In 1998, for example, Perle told a Senate committee that “it
would be neither wise nor necessary to send ground forces into Iraq
when patriotic Iraqis are willing to fight to liberate their
country.” The key in the war of liberation, he insisted, would be
Basra. “Once Basra changed hands,” he declared, things would
“change dramatically.” Apparently rebellion would break out all
over Iraq. And whose troops, Perle was asked, would bring about
this change of hands? “I think opposition elements with relatively
light armament could accomplish that,” he replied, “provided they
were backed up by air power.”
But Perle, of course, was wrong about this. As this is being
written, heavily armed British troops, amply backed by air power,
have been besieging Basra for two weeks, and only now have just
begun to move into the city. Perle’s confident assertion about the
“opposition elements” was absurd.
Perle, in fact, was always a dubious choice as chairman of the
Pentagon advisory board. In place of judgment, he substitutes
hubris. (“The Iraqi opposition is kind of like an MRE [meal ready
to eat],” he also has said. “The ingredients are there, and you
just have to add water, in this case U.S. support.”) The recent
criticism of Perle, however, has focused on his financial dealings
and not his Middle East expertise. The New Yorker reported
that in January he had met with two Saudi businessmen — one of
them alleged to be Adnan Kashoggi, the old Iran-Contra fixer — in
an attempt to get funding for his venture capital outfit, Trireme
Partners, which invests in defense and security companies.
Perle, however, has denied any improprieties, and might have
escaped further criticism. But then it was disclosed that he was to
be paid $750,000 by Global Crossing, the bankrupt
telecommunications company that wants approval to sell its assets
to a Chinese company. The Defense Department and the FBI, though,
object to the sale on the ground that the Chinese company would
control the fiber-optic network that the U.S. government uses. For
$750,000, Perle would presumably persuade the Defense Department
and the FBI to suspend its objections.
But Perle has once again denied any improprieties, and suggested
that the allegations of conflict of interest stem from a leftist
conspiracy. Whatever the truth behind any of this, there is no
question but that Perle has done very well for himself in that
interstice where policy makers and the people who want to influence
them meet. In 1983, it was disclosed that he had been paid for
representing an Israeli arms company. He has also had Turkey as a
client. A visitor to Perle’s house in Provence has described it as
“luxurious.”
BUT THE MORE IMPORTANT ISSUE NOW is Perle’s role in foreign policy.
He is, of course, a prominent hawk, and his views are well known.
Long before 9/11 and the White House’s shaky contention that Iraq
had a part in it, Perle wanted to topple Saddam Hussein. Indeed
that was to be only a way station on the road to other things. In
1996, Perle and Douglas Feith, who is now undersecretary of defense
for policy, collaborated on a now celebrated briefing paper for
Benjamin Netanyahu, then the new Israeli prime minister, that was
more or less a blueprint for rearranging the Middle East.
The briefing paper, entitled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for
Securing the Realm,” urged Israel to adopt a more aggressive
posture while it forged closer ties with Turkey and Jordan. “This
effort,” it said, “can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power
in Iraq, an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right,
as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.”
Meanwhile Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has now put Syria
on his watch list, and so most likely he agrees. There is not much
disagreement among hawks these days, and in the Pentagon, in
particular, dissent is not tolerated, and so very little is found.
In a BBC interview the other day, when a timorous news presenter
asked Perle whether there was “a military/civilian split” over U.S.
war policy, he neatly sidestepped the question. There was only, he
said, “a certain amount of disgruntlement from retired
officers.”
But that was not at all true. Many Pentagon professionals —
civilian and military — have been unhappy ever since Rumsfeld took
office. They have been superseded by political appointees committed
to a single point of view, and they have been given a choice: They
can either get with the program, or get out. The three-week, $250
million war game called “Operation Millennium” that the Pentagon
staged last summer was revealing about this, although the press
hardly noticed.
The war game pitted the Blue, or U.S. forces, against the Red,
or Iraqi forces. But the fix was in, and the result was
pre-ordained. When Paul Van Riper, the retired Marine lieutenant
general who commanded the Red forces, attacked first and sank most
of the Blue fleet in the Persian Gulf, the control group overruled
him. It restored the ships to duty as if the attack had never
occurred. Then it determined that electronic warfare planes had
disrupted the Red microwave communication systems, and that the Red
forces would have to use cell phones and satellite phones to
transmit messages.
But Van Riper said no; the Red forces would use motorcycle
messengers, and make announcements from mosques. It is not clear
what the control group did next, although from then on Van Riper
apparently spent his time on the sidelines. He told a British
newspaper later that “nothing was learned from this,” meaning the
war game, and then added: “A culture not willing to think hard and
test itself does not augur well for the future.”
That no doubt is true, especially on matters of war, and it is
remarkable how little informed discussion there has been about the
Iraqi invasion and what will follow it. There was never any
question but that the U.S. would defeat Iraq, or that American
troops would behave bravely and well. That, however, was never the
issue. But it was argued
in this column recently that the Iraqi invasion could
destabilize the Middle East, much to our disadvantage, and that
rather than deterring terrorism it would more likely promote it;
and while I will not reprise the argument now, it is a view I still
hold. At the same time I think there are reasons for the absence of
informed discussion.
For one thing, our elected politicians do not seem to know very
much; a fog hangs over Congress. The CIA held a closed-door
briefing on Capitol Hill last week about the rising tide of
anti-Americanism in the Middle East, and, as Newsweek reported:
“As agency officials discussed the depth of hatred for U.S.
actions, the senators fell silent. There were delicate discussions
about the uncertainty, if the war was protracted, of ‘regime
stability.’ After the briefing, ‘there were senators who were
ashen-faced,’ said one staff member. ‘They were absolutely
depressed.’ Much of what the agency briefed would not have been
news to any close watcher of the BBC or almost any foreign news
broadcast. ‘But they [the senators] only watch American TV,’ said
the staffer.”
But the larger reason, I think, that Perle and his neocon
colleagues are ascendant is that they pretend to certainty, and in
doing so they fill a void. Iraq has been mostly a blank spot to
U.S. policy makers, and few voices arise to contradict them. In his
book, See No Evil, Bob Baer, the former CIA agent who
worked with the Iraqi opposition to Saddam in the mid-1990s, wrote
this:
“The CIA didn’t have a single source in Iraq…Not only were
there no human sources in the country, the CIA didn’t have any in
the neighboring countries — Iran, Jordan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia
— who reported on Iraq. Like the rest of the U.S. government, its
intelligence-gathering apparatus was blind when it came to
Iraq.”
Baer worked principally with the Iraqi National Congress, whose
leader is Ahmad Chaladi, the one-time banker with a doctorate in
mathematics from the University of Chicago; he is also the Iraqi
opposition leader most favored by the neocons and other
conservatives, and while the CIA and the State Department are said
to distrust him, the Pentagon holds him in high regard, and has
relied on him for intelligence. He once wrote a paper that said
“Iraq is on the verge of spontaneous combustion,” and that fit in
nicely with neocon thinking. (And Baer, incidentally, is also the
“Bob from the CIA” who told a House staffer in 1997 about Roger
Tamraz, the oil pipeline promoter and Democratic party donor who
was trying to get to Bill Clinton.)
Meanwhile the end of the war is now in sight, and, according to
the White House, we will now remake Iraq into a beacon of democracy
for all the rest of the Arab world. This is an absolutely mad idea,
but any number of supposedly bright people now embrace it, and that
is the kind of thing that happens when there is no informed
discussion.
