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Never has the hypocrisy of neo-con Richard Perle been more obvious than in a recent New York Times op-ed piece, entitled Too Heavy a Hand. In an apparent effort to absolve his own involvement in the failed Bush war policy, Mr. Perle says that following the defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Bush administration turned it's attention to "the risk that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was thought to pose to the nation, still reeling from the attacks of 9/11. He admits to sharing the administration's misguided belief that Iraq not only possessed the capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction, but that it also had a hidden stockpile of them. This, despite the fact that evidence to the contrary was readily available to Perle and others in the Bush administration. Neither Mr. Perle nor Mr. Bush were interested in contrary opinions, whether based on fact or not.

Mr. Perle cleverly points to the fact that former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had shown a propensity for using weapons of mass destruction, as he did in Iran and his own country. What Mr. Perle fails to mention is we were highly supportive of Mr. Hussein's nefarious efforts as long as they were trained against Iran, with whom we were engaged in a long standing cold war. Mr. Perle goes on to ask, "Saddam Hussein forced the question: Should we leave him in place and hope for the best, or destroy his regime in a lightning strike and thereby end the risk that he might collaborate with terrorists to enable an attack even more devastating than 9/11?" What the Bush administration engaged in and continue to engage in is supposition. Mr. Hussein gave no indication that he would ever attack the United States, though from the extremely narrow perspective of a neo-con, Mr. Perle says the correct decision was made. We shocked and awed countless hundreds of thousands innocent Iraqi people, but Perle insists we made the right decision in attacking the sovereign nation of Iraq, for the sake of displacing their brutal dictator.

The war in Iraq was won in 21 days, that's how long it took for Baghdad to fall. "Then the trouble began," says Perle. He continued by stating, "Twenty-five million Iraqis had been liberated and the menace of Saddam's monstrous regime eliminated." Mr. Perle laments the fact to use his words, "Rather than turn Iraq over to the Iraqis to begin the daunting process of nation building." He then lays the blame for the fiasco at the doorsteps of former Secretary of State Colin Powell , Condoleezza Rice and former CIA director George Tenet. He claims they persuade President Bush to reverse the plan to do just that. Perle says, "Instead, we blundered into an ill-conceived occupation that would facilitate a deadly insurgency from which we, and the Iraqi's are now emerging." We can at least hope that that's the case. Mr. Perle says he had badly underestimated the administration's capacity to mess things up. He is part of the reason that we're in this mess, but reality will find no quarter in the revisionist history Perle has attempted to write. Richard Perle, now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, was one of the primary architects of the failed invasions strategy of the Bush administration. Can you say hypocrite?

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