The armchair general

He's been beating the drums of war for a decade. Can Beltway hawk Richard Perle finally persuade the U.S. to wage war with Iraq?

By Eric Boehlert

Sept. 5, 2002 | News that congressional leaders huddled with President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Wednesday to discuss a possible war with Iraq may convince even skeptics that the administration's talk of removing Saddam Hussein is serious. Although recent polls show that Americans are roughly split in their support for military action, Wednesday's news certainly cheered at least one Beltway insider: Richard Perle, the man who's done perhaps more than anyone to lay the intellectual and political groundwork for a preemptive strike against Iraq.

Perle is arguably the Beltway's most influential foreign-policy hawk, an outside-insider who's used his bully pulpit as chairman of the quasi-official Defense Policy Board to argue on behalf of neo-conservatives that a full-scale, preemptive strike against Iraq must be the next move in America's post-Sept. 11 war on terrorism.

For months, Perle has been appearing on television programs and newspaper Op-Ed pages urging the U.S. to topple Saddam. A formidable Washington heavyweight who for decades has been expertly maneuvering his way in and out of the highest levels of government (and newsrooms), Perle now finds himself the public point man for the looming war with Iraq.

The role is not a new one. The former Reagan administration arms-control expert and pro-Israel hawk has been urging a U.S.-led regime change in Iraq for the last decade. Perfecting his rhetoric about Saddam Hussein's insatiable appetite for weapons of mass destruction and how one day soon they will be unleashed on America, Perle, through sheer dint of sound-bite repetition, helped lay the groundwork for serious talk of war with Iraq. (Perle did not return calls seeking comment for this article.)

"His goal appears to be to push the extremes of what people are proposing; that way, he moves the center of the debate over to the right," says P.W. Singer, an Olin fellow in the foreign-policy studies program at the Brookings Institution. "He presses buttons and makes bold predictions that are not substantiated. And that's fine if you're outside the government. The worry is, people actually listen to him."

But there are signs that even some Republican statesmen and generals are concerned about what Perle and his allies have unleashed. Writing on the New York Times' Op-Ed page, former Secretary of State James Baker recently struck a cautious tone on Iraq, and took issue with the freelance campaign being waged by the president's "advisers and their surrogates" to generate support for a war with Iraq.

Perle is by far the most prominent of those surrogates. During the 1970s he gained notoriety inside the Beltway as an influential staffer to Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, D-Wash., who at the time was among the most fiercely anticommunist and staunchly pro-Israel members of the Senate. In 1981 Perle was appointed deputy secretary of defense, where he earned the nickname "Prince of Darkness" for opposing arms-control agreements with the Soviets.

Today, Perle maintains a platform through constant Op-Ed submissions and television appearances, as well as his chairmanship of the Defense Policy Board. Formerly an obscure civilian board designed to provide the secretary of defense with non-binding advice on a whole range of military issues, the Defense Policy Board, now stacked with unabashed Iraq hawks, has become a quasi-lobbying organization whose primary objective appears to be waging war with Iraq.

"It's amazing that he [Perle] is not part of the administration but he has this immense amount of power," notes Yvonne Haddad, professor of Christian-Muslim relations at Georgetown University.

For Perle, the unpaid Defense Policy Board position allows him to say he's not speaking for the administration when he advocates war with Iraq during media appearances, and to articulate extreme positions that government officials perhaps cannot. (It's also unlikely he'd have been approved by the Senate if given a post that required confirmation.) Yet his constant contact with senior administration hawks -- Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith, and the State Department's Undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton -- means that Perle is a major player with the Bush White House.

"If at any point Perle was too far out in front and his status as a semi-official spokesman for the administration became a problem, they'd pull him off TV," says John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a nonprofit defense policy group. "That hasn't happened."

True, but some Republican critics have Perle in their sights. Fed up with his constant advocacy of war with Iraq, Nebraska Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel, who volunteered for Vietnam and earned two Purple Hearts, suggested perhaps "Mr. Perle would like to be in the first wave of those who go into Baghdad." Perle, like many Beltway hawks, has never seen military service. Nonetheless, he recently urged Bush to dismiss "the unsolicited advice of retired generals" when contemplating war with Iraq.

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