Late last night I wrote about Jim Lobe's exchange with Richard Perle over Perle's evasion of neoconservative responsibility for the Iraq war. Well, here is Lobe's excellent blogpost on Perle's snakiness, from a month back. It includes citations of two letters that Bill Kristol apparently drafted, and that Perle signed:
was published on September 20, 2001, and lays out the step-by-step
blueprint for how the war on terror should be fought, including, of
course, the necessity of ousting Saddam Hussein whether or not he was
involved in the 9/11 attacks (although Perle, in his interactions with
the media, never missed an opportunity to suggest that Saddam was
indeed involved) followed by “appropriate measures of retaliation”
against Iran and Syria if they did not end their support for Hezbollah.
The second letter,
published April 3, 2002, calls for breaking all ties with Yasser Arafat
and for accelerating plans to remove Saddam as the first step toward
realizing “a renewed commitment on our part, as you suggested in your
State of the Union address, to the birth of freedom and democratic
government in the Islamic world.” If those two letters (which, of
course, echoed the arguments made by the hawks within the
administration) didn’t constitute statements advocating the invasion of
Iraq primarily for the purpose of of promoting democracy or advancing
some grand neoconservative vision,” it’s hard to know what would.
In my post of last night, I defended the idea that the neocons represented a conspiracy, inasmuch as they have never been straightforward about their aims. A friend points me to an important piece on the Iraq war by Princeton professor George Kateb. Called "A Life of Fear" (available at findarticles.com), it was the first essay to diagnose the Iraq war as driven by (a) an interest in the oil of the region, (b) Israel and its American supporters and (c) Republican quest for party political advantage. And here is Kateb on conspiracy:
