Perle says he should not have backed Iraq war - Los Angeles Times
Perle says he should not have backed Iraq war - Los Angeles Times: "By Peter Spiegel, Times Staff Writer
November 4, 2006
WASHINGTON —
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.'
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'I think if I had been Delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said 'Should we go into Iraq?' I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists,' ' Perle said, according to interview excerpts released Friday by the magazine.
Perle's about-face is the latest in a series of war recriminations by neoconservatives, many of whom blame Iraq's spiraling violence on the administration's management of the postwar stabilization effort.
Others interviewed for the article included former Bush speechwriter David Frum and former Reagan administration official Kenneth L. Adelman.
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.'"
