No Regrets

Richard Perle, one of the neo-con architects of the Iraq war, is to appear at the Hays Book Festival. It is understood that Perle will defend his actions in calling for the war but distance himself from the way that the war was conducted.

"I will take responsibility for what I argued which was that we should remove Saddam, and I am willing to defend that position today," says Perle, who is to be interviewed by Philippe Sands at the Guardian Hay Festival tonight. "Do I take responsibility for the things that went wrong afterwards? I had no influence over those things, unfortunately."

The problem for someone like Perle is that everything that went wrong afterwards was predicted. The tensions between Shia and Sunni elements in Iraq were always likely to break out into violence once Saddam was removed and the simple truth is that the Bush regime were warned about this and chose not to believe it.

At a time when the neo-cons appear to be on the run, with Wolfowitz recently hounded out of the World Bank and "Scooter" Libby facing jail time, the more one picks at the surface the more one realises that Perle - who was rumoured to have jumped the sinking ship in a Vanity Fair article last year - actually hasn't changed his way of thinking at all.

When questioned about Iran he admits that now might not be the best time to engage in air strikes, but:

"But if the only way to prevent Iran from being a nuclear weapons power is to destroy one or more facilities that will give them that capability I see no moral basis for rejecting that option," Perle says.

He would also like to see the US actively working to destabilise Iran by supporting opponents of the regime. The same lessons could then be applied to Syria, he says.

In other words, he hasn't given up on the Bush doctrine of pre-emption at all, despite the disaster of Iraq. Like a true neo-con he is still wedded to the notion of American military might as the solution to all the world's ills. Rather bizarrely, Perle claims to dislike the term neo-con and reminds anyone who will listen that he is still a registered Democrat. Which is a little like Hitler and Tony Blair claiming to be Socialists, they can apply whatever terminology they like, but it is by their actions that they will be defined, and Socialist they were not.

Perle nowadays justifies what he encouraged by sliding deeper into fantasy, by insisting - despite the lack of WMD - that Saddam was a threat and that he had to be removed.

Instead, Perle continues to cling to a view of events in Iraq that has now been comprehensively discredited. Even now, when it is abundantly clear that Saddam Hussein did not have the weapons of mass destruction that were the pretext for the war, Perle insists that it was the right decision to remove Saddam by force. "Even after recognising that some of the information was wrong, the judgment that Saddam proposed a threat and a serious threat was right," he says.

Against the reams of evidence to the contrary - including congressional inquiries into the administration's misuse of intelligence in the run-up to the war - Perle continues to insist that Saddam Hussein was a friend of al-Qaida.

Interviewed by Susan Goldberg in today's Guardian, Perle comes across as an arrogant buffoon, as man who simply refuses to ever admit that he got it wrong. Nor does he finger anyone too high up the ladder when he assigns blame for the debacle that was the Iraq war. He does not single out Bush nor any of his fellow neo-con travellers. So who does he blame?

Perle turns his ire on General Tommy Franks, the former commander of forces in Iraq. Among Franks's greatest blunders, Perle says, was his failure to stop the looting that erupted the day the regime fell. "The looting was just a serious and inexplicable mistake, made I believe principally by Franks and the military on the ground," he says. "I have, I concede, a low regard for Franks. I think he is a fool, and I thought that the first time I met him."

Many of us who would agree with Perle that the looting was the beginning of the breakdown of social order in Iraq, would set our sights on the Defence Secretary and his bizarre "Stuff happens" speech, but Perle is having none of it.

But Perle is understanding of that. "I think Rumsfeld thought, people have suffered under this regime so they are going to burn down the symbols of officialdom," he said.

However, like all proponents of the Iraq war, Perle really would like history to judge the rights and wrongs of the conflict. It's an answer that we'll really all only know long after we are dead.

Was it worth going to war against a regime that did not after all constitute an imminent threat? "It's the wrong issue to talk about imminence," he says. Would he agree the situation in Iraq is disastrous? Disaster is an overused term, he says. "It is what it is." When you get right down to it, he really isn't all that keen to talk about the reality of Iraq.

The scary thing about people like Richard Perle and William Kristol isn't that they simply refuse to admit that the mindset they embraced led us into this tragedy, although that would be bad enough. But what is even more serious is that people like this continue to be listened to by the Bush White House. I don't know where Perle stood on the issue of the surge but I certainly know that Kristol advocated that approach, an approach that the White House embraced and which seems to be failing, just as everything these nutters propose seems to fail.

So, in Perle, we have a man who will admit that things have gone wrong, mistakes have been made; although he will not concede that these mistakes were anything to do with the people who planned the war and rather chooses to lay the blame at the door of Tommy Franks.

But what's more scary is that, when it comes to possible future conflicts like Iran, Perle and his ilk would proceed with the same lack of care that defined their mindset before the Iraq war and make the same mistakes all over again.

These people should be national figures of fun, class dunces that are laughed at for their obvious stupidity. Instead they continue to have influence within the Bush White House, mostly due to the fact that the Vice President shares their mindset and their apparent belief that they can change reality by the force of their own will. Now, that's scary...

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