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CounterPunch
August
13/19, 2002
Union
Jackass
Richard Perle's
UK Charm Offensive
by Anthony Gancarski
In an August 9 piece in the Telegraph entitled
"Why the West Must Strike First Against Saddam Hussein",
Richard Perle attempts to teach the British a thing or two about
embracing their imperialist prerogative and the corollary doctrine
of preemptive war. What is notable about this piece isn't so
much its inherent disregard for principle -- just war, violence
in self defense, and so on -- as its apparent lack of concern
with overtly making the case for attacking.
To be sure, Perle goes through the motions
of establishing the oppositional dynamic.. Saddam Hussein is
"contemptuous of the UN and fearful of America", and
therefore seeks to play his "last card: dividing America
and Britain in the hope that the former will be unwilling to
act alone to remove him from office." Hussein is a bad man,
apparently, so it is fortunate that there is an "Iraqi opposition"
seeking to "liberate Iraq from one of the world's most brutal
dictatorships." We can presume that the opposition more
or less shares the values and beliefs of "doughty cold warriors"
[to borrow the London Times formulation] like Richard Perle.
And what might those values be? Perle
clues us in while providing quotes for Tony Blair's eulogy, describing
him as having "shown extraordinary courage in defending
Western values in the Balkans, in combating international terrorism,
and in the current confrontation with Saddam." Perle stops
short of measuring Blair's biceps with a velvet tape measure,
preferring instead to assert that neither Blair nor Bush would
be put off by "the feckless moralizing of 'peace' lobbies,
or the unsolicited advice of retired generals."
It's a good thing that we can avoid such
"feckless moralizing." By avoiding it, we are able
to appreciate Perle's contention that the "decision to use
force is most difficult when democratic societies are challenged
to act preemptively." He then goes on to assert that dangerous
characters like Hitler [who FDR described as a "moderate"
before the US got involved in Europe] and Osama bin Laden "could
have been stopped by a relatively modest well-timed pre-emption."
Left out of Perle's piece to this point
is an attempt to address moral considerations. Presumably, that
would be feckless. Also left out, by way of establishing the
US right to preemptive strike, are issues seemingly central to
any military adventure. Just a few here, for starters. How many
people will die? How much money will this cost? Who will benefit?
To what substances will US troops be exposed?
But those considerations fall short of
the notice of Mr. Perle, just as one would expect.
Having linked Osama and Hitler in infamy,
and Bush and Blair in heroism, Perle proceeds to list his charges
against Hussein. Here, we see the sober side of Richard Perle,
as he approaches the problem of "regime change" with
the rhetorical panache of a high school history book. The "concerned"
Richard Perle shines through in formulations such as "we
know that [Hussein] harbors terrorists, about which more evidence
will emerge in due course." While waiting for this evidence
to emerge -- presumably in the same package that contains hard
evidence that 9/11 was not an inside job -- we are invited to
speculate about Hussein sharing his most "lethal weapons"
with terrorists. After all, "his perfidy would be unprovable."
One wonders why the burden of proof concerns
Perle at all, considering his willingness to dismiss the need
for proof throughout the balance of the piece. After repeating
the usual litany of charges against Hussein -- gassed his own
people, working to attain nuclear weapons, and such -- Perle
addresses the question of the "evil of which Hussein is
undoubtedly capable" by saying that "we cannot know
for sure" whether said evil is "cogently probable."
I guess Perle is an optimist, really.
When he holds forth about a "democratic Iraq" as "a
powerful refutation of the patronizing view that Arabs are incapable
of democracy," perhaps he's actually serious. When Perle
holds forth about the imminent danger of Hussein's arsenal just
a few paragraphs before asserting that "the Iraqi force
today is a third of what it was in 1991, and it is the same third,
11 years closer to obsolescence", perhaps I am mistaken
in focusing on the apparent contradiction between a description
of a military hellbent on destroying the US and Israel and the
subsequent description of a ragtag, outmoded, dispirited army.
I expected better from Perle in this
piece, but perhaps I shouldn't have. The US government has proven
itself capable time and time again of fabricating provocations
for expensive and bloody wars, and it takes little imagination
to picture how the October invasion of Iraq will proceed.
Anthony Gancarski is the author of UNFORTUNATE INCIDENTS, a 2001
collection of fiction and poetry. He attends Gonzaga Law School
in Spokane, Washington.
He can be reached at: Anthony.Gancarski@attbi.com.
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