Perle Has Sour Grapes About Iraq

Often described as a leader of neo-con thought, Richard Perle is out doing damage control for the neo-con movement, blaming Bush, Rumsfeld, and, incredibily, the "depraved" Iraqi people for the failure in Iraq. He now says invading Iraq was wrong. He was the man who led the charge to Iraq.
Los Angeles Times

Richard N. Perle, the former Pentagon advisor regarded as the intellectual godfather of the Iraq war, now believes he should not have backed the U.S.-led invasion, and he holds President Bush responsible for failing to make timely decisions to stem the rising violence, according to excerpts from a magazine interview.


Perle — a leading neoconservative who chaired the Pentagon's defense advisory board for the first three years of the Bush administration — is quoted in January's Vanity Fair as saying the U.S. might have been able to strip Saddam Hussein of his ability to build unconventional weapons "by means other than a direct military intervention."


[...]Perle's prominent advocacy of invasion after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — and his close relationship with the war's top architects, including Paul D. Wolfowitz, then the deputy Defense secretary, and Douglas J. Feith, the former Pentagon policy chief — makes his reversal particularly noteworthy.


Perle told Vanity Fair he did not anticipate the "depravity" currently underway in Iraq, saying, "The levels of brutality we've seen are truly horrifying." He said "huge mistakes" had been made in the management of the war, and he blamed disloyalty among top Bush administration officials for a failure to get the policy correct. "The decisions did not get made that should have been," he said. He continued: "At the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible…. "I don't think he realized the extent of the opposition within his own administration, and the disloyalty."


Although the excerpts do not show who Perle blames for disloyalty or mismanagement, he appears to lay the blame at the feet of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the military leaders who put together the war plan. "Huge mistakes were made, and I want to be very clear on this: They were not made by neoconservatives, who had almost no voice in what happened, and certainly almost no voice in what happened after the downfall of the regime in Baghdad," he said.