Blame Game
Perle, not caught up in trendy apology craze, dishes out blame to Newsmax, which keeps demanding to know when he stopped beating his wife. He whacks Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, George Tenet and the National Securtiy Council, acknowledges the mistakes … Bremer’s, not Rumsfeld’s … but just won’t apologize for Iraq!
This is advance publicity for a two-hour PBS documentary, “The Case for War: In Defense of Freedom” which, News Max posits, fails to offer sufficient Perles of apology.
NewsMax: Throughout your program, you adamantly say you were for the regime change in Iraq. The regime change was a good thing…
Perle: Saddam is gone, and I think that is a good thing. He was a menace. It is very popular now to suggest that because we didn’t find WMD, he wasn’t the threat. What we didn’t find in truth was stockpiles of WMDs. He certainly had the capacity to produce chemical and biological weapons again when he wanted to do so, and so I believe he was a threat, and I think we had the right to respond to that threat.
You can’t operate on the basis of what you know later. You’ve got to operate on the basis of what you know then.
NewsMax: So, the fact is that while the ramp-up to the war was clumsy and less than a smooth scholarly enterprise, we got there and it was justified?
Perle: Yes, I believe it was justified, and I wish we had handled it a little bit differently, but … if we were having a debate now about how effectively we handled the post-Saddam situation, it would be a very different debate than the one that we are having.
NewsMax: Reportedly, 70 percent of the American public wants the boys to come home…
Perle: It depends on how you ask the question. Of course, we all want the boys to come home. If the question you put was “Do you think that we should withdraw even if it means that Iraq subsides into chaos and we will have been defeated and humiliated in Iraq?” you will get an entirely different answer.
I think polls on a matter like that are pretty useless.
Perle likes al-Sadr’s foot-vote for the surge. Perle doesn’t want to “send in the Marines” re Iran. I agree with that … send in the cruise missiles! Shoulder-fired rockets for Iranian insurgents! Mass air-drop of Ahmadinejad bobblehead dolls!
Re the Dem Cong:
NewsMax: How do you suspect this is all going to end?
Perle: I think that the Democrats have injected a note of such bitter partisanship that it is going to backfire.
NewsMax: In the 2008 elections?
Perle: Even before that. I think that most Americans are unhappy with the situation in Iraq, but they do not want to see a humiliating withdrawal, and they don’t want to see a bitter partisan dispute when they realize that the country needs to pull together.
Nancy Pelosi is overplaying her hand. Jack Murtha has just gone around the bend. I don’t understand him at all, and I think in the end the public, broadly speaking, will say, “Enough of this.”
Here’s a funny part. About the former comedian Al Franken:
NewsMax: Now that Al Franken has declared for the U.S. Senate, do you find him a more serious guy?
Perle: He tells me that he is out of a job [host on Air America Radio]. He actually has a decent sense of humor, so he tries to be funny, but he was reasonably serious with me. I didn’t think, however, that he had a lot to say of importance.
Franken was hung up on the fact that we didn’t find stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, and that whole thing gets a little tedious after a while.
Topics: Iraq
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:07 am Comments (1) on Tuesday, February 27, 2007
One Response to “Blame Game”
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February 28th, 2007 at 7:50 pm
To borrow a word–heh.