Richard Perle

Richard Perle is Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, who has held a number of U.S. defense policy posts, and is recognized for his neoconservative ideology. A number of commentators refer to him, ironically, as the "Prince of Darkness."

He has been a member (1987-2004) chairman of the Defense Policy Board and its chairman between 2001 and 2003, assistant secretary of defense for international security policy (1981-1987), and a staff member to Senator Henry Jackson (D-WA) (1969-1980).

Perle has authored several books and many articles, and holds a M.A. in political science from Princeton. He was a high school classmate of the daughter of Albert Wohlstetter, who introduced him to strategic concepts. In the summer of 1969, new from graduate school, he and Paul Wolfowitz worked with Dean Acheson and Paul Nitze in the short-lived but influential Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy; these elder statesmen of containment policy were a lifelong influence. Afterwards, he went to work for Jackson, as the lead Congressional staffer on opposition to arms control agreements with the Soviet Union.

He and Wolfowitz remain friends and colleagues; Wolfowitz has tended to work inside the system while Perle is more an external advisor.

In a Public Broadcasting System interview with Ben Wattenberg, he described neoconservative thinking, in response to Wattenberg's comment "Irving Kristol said a neoconservative is a liberal who’s been mugged by reality."

Right. And I think that’s a fair description, and I suppose all of us were liberal at one time. I was liberal in high school and a little bit into college. But reality and rigor are important tonics, and if you got into the world of international affairs and you looked with some rigor at what was going on in the world, it was really hard to be liberal and naïve...Anyone who looked at the facts in Nineteen Thirty-six knew what was coming or could at least see that the balance of power was in the process of shifting from one in which the democracies could expect to contain this growing totalitarian threat in Nazi Germany to a balance in which they couldn’t...the indulgence of Saddam led to the invasion of Kuwait.

Arms Control

In 1975-1976, he was involved in creating "Team B", a group that internally challenged the Central Intelligence Agency estimates on Soviet power and intentions, based on a different set of assumptions about Soviet motivations.

Defense Policy Board

At the first Defense Policy Board meeting after the 9-11 attack, he had Ahmed Chalabi speak to the group, arguing that Iraq was behind it. He raised other controversy in the board, such as the appearance of a conflict of interest with a telecommunications company.

Recommendations on counterterrorism

He consistently regarded Saddam Hussein's Iraq is presented as at the core of terror and demonstrating the lack of American will, describing him as "probably the most dangerous individual in the world today...not only because he supports terrorism, not only because he trains terrorists and gives them refuge — but because he is the symbol of defiance of all Western values." in October 2001.

He said that the 2003 invasion of Iraq violated international law, but "I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing."

In a 2003 book, An End to Evil, coauthored with David Frum, he advocates a strong policy against terror:

For us, terrorism remains the great evil of our time, and the war against this evil, our generation's great cause. We do not believe that Americans are fighting this evil to minimize it or manage it. We believe they are fighting to win — to end this evil before it kills again and on a genocidal scale. There is no middle way for Americans: It is victory or holocaust. This book is a manual for victory.

The authors recognize there were reasons not to go to Baghdad in the Gulf War, and the conventional wisdom of the time was that Saddam would be overthrown by an internal coup. Failure to retaliate strongly against the 1993 Iraqi assassination attempt against former President George H. W. Bush, followed by support of compromised military coups in 1995 and 1996, and failure to support the Iraqi National Congress, led by Ahmed Chalabi, when Saddam attacked it in 1995, were regarded as signals of lack of American will. In particular, Operation DESERT FOX is considered one of Saddam's greatest victory, as it drove the UNSCOM inspectors, searching for weapons of mass destruction, out of the country.

The evidence of Iraqi WMD programs, as opposed to stockpiles, was judged to be justification for preventive war.

Domestic recommendations

• Deny terrorists entry into the US: improvements in U.S. border security and in the visa system are at the heart of the proposal, the introduction of a national identification document, and barring aliens based not only on terrorist activity, but sympathy.
• Curtail terrorists freedom of action: Allow appropriate domestic surveillance, making the observation that the US was quite able to distinguish patriots of German origin, such as Dwight D. Eisenhower and Chester Nimitz from Nazis; the authors do not note the somewhat greater confusion between West Coast Americans of Japanese ancestry and a Daniel Inouye in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team
• Denying terrorist material and moral support: this addresses lobbying and support groups that provide funds and other support; restrict "incitement to terror in schools and mosques".

Foreign recommendations

Iraq is treated separately. Perle and Frum distinguish the greatest risk from the nuclear weapons program of North Korea and Iran, and then from the terrorism support of the other three key countries.

• North Korea
• Iran
• Syria
• Libya
• Saudi Arabia

These are seen as the national threats. They write of "the dark places", where terrorists operate because political authority failed: Somalia or Sierra Leone. They argue, however, that Afghanistan under the Taliban was not a "failed state" from a terrorist perspective, nor is Lebanon from the perspective of Hezbollah and Syria. They also point that terrorists find sanctuary in areas that are simply inaccessible to the government, such as the jungles of Colombia, the Abu Sayyaf movement on Mindanao Island in the Phillipines, and Aceh in Indonesia.

Neoconservatives and the Iraq War

Perle has distanced himself from the George W. Bush Administration, and, indeed, neoconservatism. He distanced himself sufficiently to say, at a presentation sponsored by National Interest magazine, "There is no such thing as a neoconservative foreign policy...It is a left critique of what is believed by the commentator to be a right-wing policy."