November 17, 2002
A HAWK FOR THE AGES:
Portrait: Richard Perle: An alpha hawk spreads his wings (THOMAS OMESTAD, 11/25/02, US News)His culinary specialty is lemon and grapefruit soufflés-fragile, puffed concoctions he has mastered in his suburban Maryland kitchen. Richard Perle's policy specialty, however, is a far less delicate undertaking: bucking up the Bush administration to overthrow Saddam Hussein. [...]A review of Perle's commentary since Sept. 11, 2001, reveals a striking pattern: He often seems to telegraph tough positions before they become accepted wisdom at the White House. "He has provided the party line before the party adopted it," says Frank Gaffney, a friend who runs a conservative foreign-policy institute in Washington. Perle was touting links between states seeking weapons of mass destruction and terrorist groups before that became a staple of Bush's "axis of evil." He foreshadowed a new national-security doctrine by arguing that the need to pre-empt threats had trumped traditional deterrence. He derided the United Nations as a latter-day League of Nations months before Bush issued a similar warning, and he described in advance some of the U.S. demands for U.N. arms inspections in Iraq. Perle shrugs off his influence. "It's coincidence," he said in an interview with U.S. News. "We see the world in similar terms." Besides, he confides, his place in the media spotlight "annoys" cohorts in government.
What's next on his agenda out of the spotlight?
There may be no other single person who will have played such a pivotal role in the defeats of communism and Islamicism as Mr. Perle (the Pipes family, for example, had to split the roles, Richard for the Cold War, son Daniel for this one), but that souffle deal is kind of hard to process mentally. Posted by Orrin Judd at November 17, 2002 10:30 AM
The Soviet Union would have collapsed
without either Perle or Reagan.
I wouldn't accord as much sway to
thumbsuckers as you do. I read R. Pipes,
but damn if anybody I ever met (except one
friend who was working on a master's in
Soviet history at the time) showed any knowledge
of his views at either first or even second hand.
D. Pipes has been galloping through village
and town, halloing that the Moslems are
coming, but his adherents seem to be rather
few.
Besides, he's all wet about Islamic fundamentalism.
That isn't where the problem arose, and
if it could be extinguished, that wouldn't solve
the problem. The problem is an aggressive,
violent religion based on premodern concepts.
Not a lot of people probably consider D. Pipes
soft on Islam, but I do.
Islamicism will collapse, or has collapsed, without us too. As with communism it's a question of what you do in the meantime.
Posted by: oj at November 17, 2002 10:21 PMI don't think Islamicism will collapse. It has not been competitive for three centuries, but it's still here.
Its adherents do not have the same goals as we do, so when they do not reach our goals, they do not perceive they have failed. The communists claimed to have the same goals, just a better way to reach them.
The evident tremendous satisfaction of living within an Islamic community, while it escapes me completely, is real enough, and we have unlimited testimony to that effect.
They didn't have satellite tv until recently.
Posted by: oj at November 19, 2002 7:21 AM