Does anyone know who Richard Perle is? He scares the pants off of me. I keep hearing his name mentioned as the "mysterious Svengali behind Bush's Iraq policy" but I really don't know anything about him. He's not in the government, but he just advises the administration on defense issues ... he's a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute ... he really wanted to go to war with Iraq (interview) ... yeah.
So I read this Guardian article and this NYTimes Dowd column. They're both very biased (especially the Dowd column, which calls him the "Prince of Darkness"), so I went to the AEI website and read a few articles for myself, and ... they're crazy! They dream of schemes to create "An enduring 'Pax Americana'" and run the world! And publish crazy partisan rants by that David Frum guy from the National Review (who believes that "there has never been a president who worked harder" than Bush "to conciliate and befriend the opposition").
They have these things at the AEI called Black Coffee Briefings on the War in Iraq where experts come up and talk about different war and post-war scenarios. Luckily, one of the experts they've had to come and give a presentation was none other than the President himself! Watch/listen to his speech online and see him really kiss some AEI ass in his intro. Then watch the rest of the speech and how he awkwardly pauses all the time, expecting applause to break out after each sentence fragment (even the audience of supporters can't keep this up). Argh, he's addressing a think-tank of "scholars," talking about what are supposed to be his well-thought-out beliefs on foreign policy, and he awkwardly trips through just a couple pages of these thoughts, dragging it out for half an hour.
But the scariest part for me came during his introduction, when Bush made it clear that the AEI's agenda of everlasting American hegemony was also his:
At the American Enterprise Institute, some of the finest minds in our nation are at work on some of the greatest challenges to our nation. You do such good work that my administration has borrowed 20 such minds. I want to thank them for their service, but I also want to remind people that for 60 years, AEI scholars have made vital contributions to our country and to our government, and we are grateful for those contributions.aaack! It would be one thing if they were just another crazy right-wing think-tank, but they're not -- they're the President's favorite thinkers now! Get to know them better.We meet here during a crucial period in the history of our nation, and of the civilized world. Part of that history was written by others; the rest will be written by us. (Applause.)
UPI says perle resigned his post today in order to reap max lucre from the GBLX deal he was hired to "help restructure" or some other such nonsense.
link: http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20030327-071406-2705r
what a dick.
oh, so the thrust of the UPI story is that he resigned his specific post, viz. chairman, on that board, but he'll still sit on the board, only now he won't have to follow the "ethics rules" he was subject to as chairman.
what a dick.
Posted by: ben at March 28, 2003 10:58 AM