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Richard PerleWashington's faceful bureaucrat.

By Chris SuellentropPosted Friday, Aug. 23, 2002, at 10:33 AM ET

Illustration by Charlie Powell Anyone who has listened to a single political speech knows that Washington, D.C., is a swampy morass controlled by pencil pushers, experts in bureaucratic intrigue. Richard Perle is one of these men. By dint of his mastery of the dark arts of memos and news leaks, Perle has become a Washington eminence, appearing on TV shows, publishing op-eds in the national dailies, and getting quoted (by name!) in news stories. He's something you don't hear about in politicians' speeches: the faceful bureaucrat.

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Consider his current appointment as chairman of the Defense Policy Board, the Pentagon's advisory panel. It's an important and influential job but typically a fairly anonymous post—the board, whose members are unpaid, is a pasture where washed-up politicos such as current board members Newt Gingrich and Tom Foley graze contentedly. Perle, however, has used the hitherto unremarked-upon position as a perch to establish himself as the official spokesman for neocon hawkishness, the leading voice calling on the Bush administration to topple Saddam Hussein. Like many Washington insiders, Perle influences the powerful. Unlike many, he achieves a certain celebrity for doing so.

It's a trick he's pulled before. As a staffer for the fiercely anti-Communist Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, D-Wash., in the 1970s, Perle established himself as "the quintessential Washington operator," as the Washington Post's Robert Kaiser described him in 1977 in a nearly 3,700-word profile, an unusual amount of space to devote to a Senate staffer, even the right-hand man for the senator from Boeing. (Like some other neocons, Perle sometimes reminds reporters that he's a registered Democrat, though he's been associated with Republican administrations and candidates for two decades.) Under Jackson's tutelage, Perle had become one of Washington's most powerful figures, a Cold Warrior who worked to squelch arms control agreements and pushed the Senate to adopt a hard line against the Soviet Union. He helped Jackson scuttle detente, particularly by tying trade benefits to the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate to Israel. Over time, Perle's influence extended beyond Jackson—during one unsuccessful effort to derail a Carter nominee whom Perle perceived as too soft on arms control, he wrote speeches for as many as 16 senators. And Perle's tentacles reached into the press, too, which he manipulated through careful leaks of sensitive information. He was said to frequently use Evans and Novak's column to push his agenda and to punish his foes. Later, Perle would add George Will and the Wall Street Journal's Robert Bartley to his list of friends in the media.

After President Reagan's election in 1980, Perle moved into the executive branch as an assistant defense secretary, a third-rank job where he again attained an unusual amount of notoriety. There were 10 other people with that title, but Perle was the only one to receive a three-part 11,000-word Post profile upon his resignation, not to mention the countless column inches dedicated to him in all the national dailies during his tenure. Using the skills and contacts he'd developed in Jackson's office, Perle became the Reagan administration's point man on arms control, becoming known as the "Prince of Darkness" by arms control advocates for his resistance to new treaties. Most notably, Perle devised the tough talk of the "zero option" for any agreement on medium-range nukes in Europe, which meant that the United States would not deploy any missiles in return for the Soviets withdrawing theirs. His influence was such that when Reagan headed to Reykjavik in 1986 for a summit with Mikhail Gorbachev, Perle was the Defense Department's sole representative. Some of his adversaries in the State Department viewed him, rather than Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, as the most powerful man in the Pentagon.

By the time he resigned as assistant secretary in 1987, Perle was well-known enough that Random House paid him $300,000 to write Hard Line, a roman à clef about his time in the Reagan administration. In it, Perle explained the methods he used to acquire so much clout. "Knowledge was power. The more you knew, the more you could use what you knew to expand your empire or advance your political agenda—or both," he wrote. It was a "surrogate war": "Since turf wars and ideological battles between the principals on such a high level attracted unwanted publicity, assistant secretaries did the fighting. Urbane guerrillas in dark suits, they fought not with AK-47s but with memos, position papers, talking points, and news leaks."

Fifteen years later, after leaving office to cash in with a variety of private-sector jobs, Perle is back at his old game, conducting another surrogate war by saying what fellow hawks like Paul Wolfowitz cannot because of political constraints. "Basically, Perle is serving as this ventriloquist's dummy and is making the administration's case publicly but in a deniable fashion," says John Pike, a defense policy expert and an old Perle foe. "Donald Rumsfeld adamantly refuses to talk about blowing up Iraq. Richard Perle talks about very little else."

And once again, Perle has received the notice of the nation's capital for his efforts. The Post's Dana Milbank divided the capital's Republicans into two camps in May, one led by Perle and one led by Brent Scowcroft, who fired the most recent volley when he argued on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page that the U.S. war on terrorism should remain just that—a counterterrorism effort. An attack on Iraq "would seriously jeopardize, if not destroy, the global counterterrorist campaign we have undertaken," Scowcroft wrote. Fellow Bush I administration member Lawrence Eagleburger piled on during this past week's Fox News Sunday, calling Perle and Wolfowitz "devious" for their efforts to persuade the president to go to war with Iraq. (To which longtime Perle friend Michael Ledeen responded in an interview, "I think for Larry Eagleburger to use the word 'devious' about other people is rather like the Ayatollah Khomeini calling someone an extremist.")

It's a strange fight—Scowcroft, a two-time national security adviser, waging an all-out war against a man who's never had an A-list Washington job. But never bet against an entrenched Washington bureaucrat, even one who's only recently come out of retirement. Perle gets points for consistency and for prescience—in a 1985 memo to Weinberger he noted, "There is a body of evidence indicating that Iraq continues to actively pursue an interest in nuclear weapons." Since Sept. 11, Perle's talking points have never wavered: Sept. 11 has "nothing to do" with the reasons why the United States should attack Saddam, so the limited evidence provided by the administration to demonstrate Saddam's links with al-Qaida is irrelevant. "What's relevant here is that he hates the United States," he told the American Spectator last fall. "He has weapons of mass destruction. He has used them against his own people and would not hesitate to use them against us."

But Perle has also consistently fallen prey to the delusion that if only Saddam Hussein can be removed from Iraq, the seas will turn to chocolate, candy will rain down from the sky, and the international community will sing as America buys the world a Coke in celebration. It's the kind of simplistic, doe-eyed fantasizing that liberals sometimes bring to domestic issues. Visions of sugarplums aren't enough to justify a dangerous and deadly pre-emptive war.

"Trust me," Perle said when The Nation's David Corn asked for evidence that Saddam poses an immediate threat to the United States. As an old Cold Warrior, Perle should know better. Trust, but verify.

If you liked this Assessment column, check out Backstabbers, Crazed Geniuses, and Animals We Hate, a collection of our all-time funniest, meanest, sweetest, and weirdest profiles.

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Illustration by Charlie Powell.

COMMENTS

Notes From The Fray Editor:

When not busy circling around the invasion good/invasion bad question, the Assessment Fray . Rehashed some old Cold War history—note how both Abre los Ojos and doodahman think in 30-year timeframes—and the nagging (now historical) question of whether the Reaganite hawks were right about the USSR. In that frame of mind, Beverly Mann and John debated whether a coherent American threat of force could deter Saddam Hussein as it deterred Soviet dictators or whether his alliance with terrorist organizations changes the equation. Finally, swimming hard against the riptide of conventional wisdom RMD thinks the administration's incoherence means any attack is unlikely. The debate between The Count and doodahman on this issue had its low points, but this was not one of them. Observer spins quite a tale of "Chicken Hawk" Perle in the UK here.

Remarks From The Fray:

…Sullentrop does, however, fail to appreciate---perhaps because he doesn't really know----that Perle truly is one of the most knowledgeable and consistently visionary defense policy strategists over the past 3 decades or so. He has been one of the early advocates for a change of anti-ballistic missile defense strategy toward a interception at boost phase through emplacement and rapid deployment of ABM's close to likely launching positions of adversaries. He had a major role in the hardline defense strategy during the Reagan-eighties, which many(not all) contend(or concede) was vindicated by the collapse of a Soviet Union, trying but failing to stay up in armaments, and finally imploding. He knows China policy, he knows NATO strategy, backwards and forwards. He was an early advocate of dealing firmly with Saddam Hussein, in 1990 and even before, before the Gulf War success.

And now, he strongly, and---to my mind--eloquently, advocates pre-emptive action in Iraq. To deal with the WMD that Iraqi defectors, and former UNSCOM Chief inspector Richard Butler and others, repeatedly and assiduously assert with credibility are being rapidly replenished. To liberate the Iraqi people from one of the most brutal, murderous dictators---he's killed more Muslims--within and beyond Iraq's borders--- than any other man in the past several decades----that wretched region has ever seen.

And, yes, in a hope that such a regime change in Iraq--where a relatively-well-educated but oppressed population stands ready to blossom--- could maybe, just maybe, initiate a positive, domino-style change in that tragic Middle East region. A region which currently stands as a lagging, backwater wasteland viz. human rights, liberty, freedom, market-based economics.

-- Abre los Ojos

(To reply, click here.)

Here's why I think we should stick Perle into semi-permanent administrative detention: the Iraq situation is a problem largely created by idiotic cold warriors such as Perle. As a Reaganite defense advisor (along with Ken "I Never Met A Warhead I Didn't Get A Hardon Over" Adelman), Perle was part of the hawk establishment that scuttled international efforts to limit the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Whether it was bio or chemical weapons treaties, protocols and regimes, or restrictions on nuclear tests, or restrictions on the transfer of nuclear technology, those boys eschewed international control efforts. Worse, by accelerating the pace of WMD R&D, production and deployment, they created a set of conditions that further accelerated the effort of other nations to acquire, produce and deploy such weapons.

The Iraq situation is nothing more than the nightmare that policy analysts, liberal and conservative, were warning about for over THIRTY YEARS. Yet, rather than focus on the threats anticipated for this century, the cold warriors persisted in dealing with "threats" that were on the verge of collapsing from their own weight. They declared, at the onset of the Reagan years, that the Soviets were on the verge of world dominance; a military juggernaut that could only be deterred by massive military procurement here, aggressive diplomatic tactics abroad, and the rejection of any international agreement which could conceivably tie the hands of American leaders in some nuclear or other war of the future. Remember MAD? Under Reagan, it evaporated in favor of NUTS (Nuclear Use Theory) which envisioned winning a nuclear war through escalation dominance. Unfortunately, the tools necessary to put us on a nuclear war fighting (and winning) footing undermined our ability to limit the proliferation of nuclear technology and exacerbated the efforts of nations, rogue and otherwise, to obtain it.

And for what? Every liberal/leftist international scholar had been predicting the imminent collapse of the Soviet system for years while the war hawks insisted that they were more powerful than ever. And who turned out to be right? Looking back to that time, who could really expect the Soviets to conquer Europe when they could barely maintain control of Afghanistan? Only an idiot. An idiot named Perle.

-- doodahman

(To reply, click here.)

…The premise for the argument for a preemptive invasion of Iraq is almost entirely that Hussein has used weapons of mass destruction against his own people. But the premise doesn't account for the critical difference between the retaliatory capacity of his own people (zero) and the retaliatory capacity of the United States and of Israel (devastating) in response to an attack on themselves or on a defenseless third country or people. Back in the 1980s, when Hussein was chemically poisoning the Kurdish population in Iraq, the United States should have intervened with a threat to retaliate in kind. Had we done so, we likely would have the evidence now that Hussein is as susceptible to credible retaliatory threat as were the succession of leaders of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Or, alternatively and only remotely plausibly, we -- and the rest of the world -- would know that we have little rational choice but to invade Iraq and overthrow his regime.

-- Beverly Mann's ghost

(To reply, click here.)

No one seriously believes that Hussein will use his military forces to launch an attack on U.S. interests (precisely because of our retaliatory capability). But add up these facts:

1. Hussein hates the U.S.
2. He has or is developing weapons of mass destruction
3. He harbors terrorists in his country (e.g., Abu Nidal) and proudly works to advance their causes (e.g., he pays the families of Palestinian suicide bombers)

This looks like a potential problem to me. Or are you assuming that out of fear of our military capabilities that Hussein will zealously and effectively work to ensure that his weapons (or his weapons know-how) will not fall into the hands of raging, irrational, self-destructive terrorists? Is small pox technology, for example, as safe in his hands as it is in the hands of, say, the Canadian military?

I don't think that you can work in intimate association with terrorist organizations, acquire the means to develop chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, and yet keep a solid wall between the two activities. And that's the problem that a war with Iraq would address.

-- John

(To reply, click here.)

The usual necessary condition for the kind of public infighting we are seeing now is a lack of direction from the White House. Some commentators, letting their wishes drive their thoughts, have posited that apparent divisions over Iraq are merely cover for a deep and clever diplomatic game by President Bush. It is far more likely that they signify an administration that is not on the same page on a vital issue now and whose chief will prove unable to put his subordinates on the same page in the future. And the likely consequence of that, in turn, is either that war with Iraq will be handled badly or -- what I think is most probable -- it will not be undertaken at all, Richard Perle notwithstanding.

-- RMD

(To reply, click here.)

(8/26)

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