Perle Wisdom

All right, I don't mean to be too hard on Dan Schorr, but tonight's piece on Richard Perle was confusing at best. Schorr is responding to an opinion piece by Perle published Sunday in the Washington Post. Schorr describes Perle's career as "a neoconservative working from the inside to stiffen the spine of the President." (I swear I'm not making that up!) Schorr essentially restates Perle's points from his piece attacking Bush's policy on Iraq for not being more aggressive. What Schorr doesn't do is educate his readers in any meaningful way about Perle's rather distasteful policy views and activities. I'll try to do that without even turning to partisan sources. Let's just start with Perle's 2000 paper, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," written with Israeli PM Netanyahu and the Likud party in mind. Notice who Perle is working for in writing this piece--Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (see their scary Mission Statement). Also notice that this paper lays out the Israeli Zionist mission of having the US remove Saddam THREE years before the invasion. For more of the Perle flavor see the letter to Clinton that he and his cohorts at Project for a New American Century sent. Schorr could also have let us know about Perle's resignation from the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board. Lastly it would have been a service to readers to just put this rather nasty figure in the context of all the folks underpinning this current Bush administration--the neocons (thanks to the Christian Science Monitor).