Memo To: Henry Kissinger
Re: Richard Perle
I was surprised to see you on television last night making arguments I associate with the world's No. 1 hawk, Richard Perle, who has been the chief architect of our policy toward the Arab/Islamic world. There is no single American more responsible for inciting outrage among Muslims globally than Richard, whose maniacal prescriptions led inexorably to last week]s cataclysm. It was no surprise to me to see Richard on CNN's Evans & Novak, Hunt & Shields program on Sunday, calling for all-out war against the Arab world with a coalition entirely composed of western Europeans. If he were just an ordinary maniac, we could live with him, Henry, but he is chairman of the Defense Policy Board, which advises the Pentagon, and which gives him total access to all military secrets.
Over the last four decades, since I first met both you and Richard in the first year of the Nixon administration in 1969, I always associated you with the moderates, like the late Sen. Jacob Javits of New York, who would look for diplomatic solutions to conflict.
Richard, who was then a 25-year-old boy wonder who worked for Sen. Henry (Scoop) Jackson, Washington Democrat, was a protégé of Albert Wohlstetter, who played hawk to your dove in our dealings with the Soviet Union. Back then, I was allied with Wohlstetter a Cold War hawk, although I at least had an appreciation of your views.
Now I see you practically in lockstep with Perle, who we have always known as the Prince of Darkness, a master of disinformation who helped us win the Cold War, and who now wants to bring the Muslim world to its knees.
You know how these things work, Henry. There are basically two approaches to solving the problem of terrorism. One is that you understand the mind of the terrorist in order to establish defenses against it. The other is that you kill all the terrorists and all the potential terrorists. Richard would certainly not flinch at that possibility, although I'm sure he would think we would only have to kill a significant fraction of the 1.25 billion Muslims before the rest "got the message."
You know as well as I do that it has been criminal for our government to pretend to the American people that the embargo would have been lifted on Iraq if Saddam complied with the 1991 UN resolutions.
Insofar as you have known this and done nothing about it, I suppose I would have to list you on the negative side of last week's equation.
Remember when Madeleine Albright our UN Ambassador, was asked by Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes if it were worth the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children to keep the embargo on, and without hesitation, Madeleine said it surely was.
Richard Perle, I'm sure, cheered her statement. So did Paul Wolfowitz, Perle's acolyte, who is now Deputy Defense Secretary. Our Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, probably flinched at the comment, as he still has some sense left, but Don still follows Perle's lead, as he has since the Ford Administration.
When Wohlstetter was the big intellectual cheese at the Rand Corporation, he brought Rumsfeld in on the Rand board, where he was fully indoctrinated on how to end wars and how to start them. In 1996, when the GOP came up with the Dole/Kemp ticket, I did my best to come up with ideas on how Bob Dole could present a more diplomatic image to the American people. Alas, Dole had Perle at his side. When President Clinton bombed Iraq on Labor Day, to kick off his re-election campaign, he violated the War Powers Act. But Dole quickly praised the bombing and other Republicans, whose staffs include members of the Perle network on Capitol Hill, immediately complained that Clinton should have dropped bigger bombs.
In case you did not know it, Secretary of State Colin Powell refers to Perle and his network as 'the bombers.' They include the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which Perle has in his back pocket, The Weekly Standard, which he has in his front pocket, and Bill Safire, his mouthpiece at the NY Times. We were all buddies during the Cold War, but when the Cold War ended I became a peacenik. I do not have any influence, just a little guy trying to figure out how to prevent hot wars, cold wars and terrorist wars. But you have influence, Henry. You could pick up the phone and advise our young President to weigh Colin Powell's advice a little more heavily than Rumsfeld's, which is in fact Perle's.
I'd hate to see our country overrun with Muslim McVeigh's, blowing up this, that and the other thing. Wouldn't you?
Perle's connections to hawks and the CIA are deep. Perle and his band have endeavored to fire up America's "will to win" and neutralize the advocates of armed coexistence (who were hardly doves themselves). Perle and his cohorts have rigged data, exaggerated the "peril", and battered individuals and institutions that dared to contradict them. The State Department and the CIA were favorite targets. In 1974 Albert Wohlstetter of the Rand Corporation, father-in-law of Richard Perle and a guiding spirit of the modern conservative movement in America, fired the first shot: "He accused the CIA of systematically underestimating Soviet missile deployment, and conservatives began a concerted attack" -- led by then-defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, his protégé Richard Cheney, Ford's chief of staff at the time, and by the president's foreign intelligence advisory board (PFIAB).
In late September of 2001, taking advantage of the attacks of September 11th, Perle laid out his agenda clearly:
"Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and other senior administration officials are quite right to say that it is a totally new kind of war that the Free World now faces. But even though it is new, the Vichyite contingent would be quite wrong to extrapolate from that that the United States and its allies are impotent. Even if we don't yet know the whole story about last week's atrocities, we know enough to act, and to act decisively.
... Deprive the terrorists of the offices from which they now work, remove the vast infrastructure now supporting them and force them to sleep in a different place every night because they are hunted - and the scope of their activity will be sharply reduced.
...Regimes supporting terrorism have many different motives. Some, such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and Syria, do so because they agree with the fanatical outlook of their protégés. Saddam Hussein, crazed by a desire for vengeance, pays the families of suicide bombers. The Saudis tolerate terrorism out of fear and weakness, hoping thereby to deflect them on to other potential victims.
...As the United States builds a coalition to combat terrorism, it must remember that including states that are themselves sponsors of terrorism, or ready to tolerate it, carries a heavy price. The last time around, in building the coalition to liberate Kuwait in 1990-91, we paid a cost that we should never again bear.
...For example, Syria was invited to join the Gulf war coalition. Its military contribution to the campaign was minimal, yet in exchange for getting inside the Western tent it obtained the latitude to continue the use of and the sponsorship of terrorism -- especially in Lebanon. It has continued to destabilize the region. There are those who argue that even Yasser Arafat, a terrorist himself, who has recruited suicide bombers, commemorated their murderous acts, and ordered the assassination of American diplomats, should join the campaign to combat terrorism.
...Some countries may be unwilling or unable to participate in a coalition that demands a respect for the values and norms of western civilization. The nature of their hold on power may be inconsistent with genuine opposition to terrorism. Such countries are part of the problem, not the solution, and we neither need their help nor would benefit from their professions of support.
It is clear that Bush has opted to follow Perle's plans thus far -- and that the nations of Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other nations that Perle deems as "part of the problem" may be next on the list.