Ricks was defending the Post's coverage during the run-up to the Iraq War, and drew some laughter from the New York Times-toting crowd last night at the 92nd Street Y.

The occasion was a panel discussion moderated by veteran journalist Robert McNeil, and featuring former Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle Perle, documentary Filmmaker Martin Smith, and Ricks. Prior to the heated discussion on the war, two clips were shown from "America at a Crossroads," a week-long PBS series that premieres in April, that features Smith and Perle.

Perle, who still defends the invasion of Iraq, took plenty of criticism from the floor: there were several shouts of "liar," a fair amount of hissing, and the ejection of one audience member who was shouting about how the Bush administration benefited from 9/11.

But later, during a press Q&A, Perle took the opportunity to swipe back at Ricks.

(As Perle, Smith and McNeil sat down for the post-panel Q&A, Ricks passed through already in his overcoat. Ricks said that as a reporter, he shouldn't be up there answering questions).

"I didn't have a chance inside to defend my friend Judy Miller," said Perle. "I don't know if the New York Times is still here."

"Judy reported, with the great skill she possesses, what she was being told by people who had access to the information, who believed what they were telling her. The derision that she has suffered, because some of that information is inaccurate, is an appalling way to judge--particularly--a fellow journalist.

"I think that anyone who goes back over what Judy was writing will find that it was professionally sourced, and accurately reported. I was following what she were writing, and I knew what people in the administration, and elsewhere, were saying, based on the information that was available to them. I think that she has been dealt with unfairly. It particular pains me that Tom--that a remark would come from a fellow journalist."

-Michael Calderone

I find it's wise to keep a copy of Perle's book An End to Evil (penned with fellow AEIer David Frum three years ago), close at hand. Has helped me through many a crisis.

Just how wrong were the gloomsayers?

Of course since then missiles have been fired on the Israeli town of Sderot from Gaza, and, in the latest outbreak of violence, from Lebanon onto Haifa. A lot more than 15 miles. And of course Israel was attacked by Iraq in 1991 from a distance of 250 miles, and Iran is within 1000 miles, and threatening to get nuclear weapons. You can imagine the anxiety in El Paso and Detroit if the Mexicans and Canadians were committed to our destruction, or if we had become convinced that they were. As Perle pointed out, these same concerns were raised by Sen. Henry Jackson, 30 years ago. The anxieties never end, and neither does the violence.

Does any other state have a right to feel anxiety about its borders?

Voskamp is an enterprising journalist. As a grad student at University of Texas/Austin 3-1/2 years ago, he interviewed Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, the former deputy director of the CIA, now a professor of national policy at UT, and asked him whether oil interests were pushing for war in Iraq.

Voskamp conducted the interview as a researcher for journalist Robert Bryce for his book, "Cronies: Oil, the Bushes, and the rise of Texas, America's Superstate." The comments weren't printed in that book. I called Inman to see if he minded my making them public. He said No, and elaborated on them:

"Oil has everything to do with our relationship with Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates. Where Iraq is concerned, our policy has everything to do with Israel's long-term security."

But is this a conspiracy theory? How did people who care about Israel affect our policy visavis war in Iraq?

"Because they were persuasive and they were dedicated in making their case. They ended up in very strategic positions in the Vice President's office, the NSA, and the Defense Department. They fervently believed, and in the absence of opposing views [after 9/11] they carried the day.... [Today] they are no longer a unified bloc with power. .. The terrible failure to plan for Iraq after the removal of Saddam Hussein has discredited their view about how to bring peace to the Mideast."

Are you talking about dual loyalty?

"No. It's about fervor. Zealots often carry the day. They are U.S.A. loyalists. But their vision of the Mideast, and how to secure peace in the Mideast, is shaped by concern for Israel's longterm security... Myself, I don't think you will ever get security in the Mideast until you have what on the surface appears to be fair to both sides. You have to have leaders committed to peace, on both sides. One side can't impose a solution."

The AEI is bacccck! The thinktank that has suffered such thinkability issues, that gave us Dick Cheney and John Bolton and Richard Perle and on and on and helped bring somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 deaths to Iraq, that George Bush said had given him more brains than any other organization—the AEI is putting its best foot forward. Maybe its only foot: its women scholars, the softer foot, the one that stamps the ground about political correctness.

I'm not saying they shouldn't be in the Times. Let 100 flowers bloom. But maybe their i.d. slug should say, the AEI,whose scholars promoted the war in Iraq.

Werth was underscoring a key fact about our humble president: he lacked political education. Those qualities that Bill Clinton had in spades—immersion in the game from a young age, the insane desire to step up to the plate himself, endless study of the history of our politics—well, George Bush postponed that experience out of goofy entitlement. Clinton screwed up in his own ways, but as a keen student of politics he did choose very able aides.

Bush has good political instincts and got a good political primer as Texas governor, but his responsibilities as president seemed to overwhelm him, and he knew it. Later in his speech, Werth said that being a president is a very "isolated" job, and a president is subject to the influences of those with whom he (or she?) surrounds himself. In this case, people with far more political education, like Cheney, Rumsfeld and Perle. All of whom just happened to be extremists.

D.A. office spokesman Jerry Schmetterer said he expects a retraction. "If they give the retraction we're not going to file a suit."

And by the way, why are officials of the D.A.'s office dealing with a libel suit that looks to me like personal, not public, business?

"I'm very meticulous," said Ms. Benador, a diminutive woman in her 40's who is a publicist to neoconservative stars. "Clothing. Attitude. Hair style. I'm always fussy about it. Some of them, if they're putting on weight, very gently I will go to them and say, 'You have two choices: You go to my doctor who makes you lose weight, or you buy a new suit.' Very gently."

Ms. Benador, a Peruvian-born New Yorker who runs a one-woman publicity firm for experts on national security, foreign policy and the Middle East, noted that her star client, Richard Perle, the former chairman of the Defense Policy Board, had shown marked improvement.

"I think we have seen that he's losing weight," she said in her heavily accented English. "I've looked at him."

Arriving at the Mark Hotel on East 77th Street on March 28, Ms. Benador was wearing an elegant brown dress, a floral scarf and heavy black eyeliner. She walks with the aid of two titanium crutches, the result of childhood polio. She stowed the crutches against the wall of the café, ordered coffee and smiled. "I must say that I had polio when I was 7 months old-that's one of the reasons why I have this strong character," she said, breaking into laughter.

Since she started Benador Associates a year and a half ago, Ms. Benador has assembled a Who's Who of Iraqi-regime-change pundits, including former C.I.A. director James Woolsey, Daily News columnist A.M. Rosenthal, American Enterprise Institute resident scholar Michael Ledeen, National Review contributing editor Frank Gaffney Jr., former Washington Times editor in chief Arnaud de Borchgrave, former Secretary of State Alexander Haig Jr. and Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya, a Brandeis professor who advocates regime change in the pages of The New Republic .

With 300,000 coalition troops in the Iraqi region, the hawks are soaring, and the influence of neoconservative thinkers like Mr. Perle on the Bush administration has boosted Ms. Benador's stock.

"I know that my roster is very high-level," she said. "I like to say it's like choosing a horse-a purebred, you know? Take your time, look at the muscles, look at this, look at that."

Ms. Benador spends her days mediating with TV producers and newspaper op-ed editors to get her clients' messages out. "One of my greatest goals is to just promote views regarding Iraq," she said. "For instance, helping to understand that we are having a military success."

"I think it's safe to say we've used everyone on her list," said Tunku Varadarajan, the op-ed editor of The Wall Street Journal . Mr. Varadarajan said that Ms. Benador calls him nearly every day.

"Whenever there is a political group that feels strongly about something, the most effective way to get it out is to work the media," said Mr. Varadarajan. "The conservatives are fairly new to the game. Liberal political groups are well versed in media recognition."

Ms. Benador has been taken to task by partisan critics for acting as a kind of public-relations firm for the war. A column by Brian Whitaker in The Guardian characterized Benador Associates as a tool of the "creative destruction and total war" crowd-referring to phrases used by Benador client Michael Ledeen, who has advocated "the kind of warfare that not only destroys the enemy's military forces, but also brings the enemy society to an extremely personal point of decision."

"Several of her experts regard the fall of the Iranian regime as a certain consequence of war in Iraq," wrote Mr. Whitaker.

Some of Ms. Benador's clients do indeed have a like-minded message to promote. Mr. Woolsey and Mr. Perle signed the now-legendary letter to President Bill Clinton in 1998 which declared that United Nations inspections had failed in Iraq and urged regime change. And while the Bush administration has been famously close-mouthed about its vision for the Middle East, Mr. Perle is often viewed as the unvarnished id of its foreign-policy mission.

Playing in such a big sandbox seems to be reward enough for Ms. Benador: Some of her flashier clients, like Mr. Perle and Mr. Woolsey, don't pay her a dime.

"For me, this is more than just a business," she said. "There are some things I just do because they need to be done. In some cases, people pay me very well. I'm not a business woman with a flat fee; sometimes I go by the budget of the client. If it's somebody really amazing, I have some kind of advantage-an intellectual or emotional reward.

"Mr. Perle doesn't reward me financially," she added, "but it's a very positive and constructive relationship."

"She came to me and said she was putting together a speakers' bureau and could she represent me, and I said yes," said Mr. Perle. "What she has done since then is to call me frequently to suggest TV appearances. Sometimes I've done them and sometimes I haven't."

On the day she spoke to The Observer , Ms. Benador was cheery despite the fact that Mr. Perle had resigned the day before as chairman of the Defense Policy Board, a quasi-governmental organization that advises Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The New Yorker 's Seymour Hersh had reported that Mr. Perle was embroiled in a conflict of interest, because he was serving as managing partner in a technology venture that stood to benefit from a war in Iraq-a war Mr. Perle has heartily advocated for a decade.

Would Mr. Perle's resignation affect his standing as a hired lecturer?

"Practically speaking, yes," said Ms. Benador, "because he's no more the chairman. But I don't think it will have an impact as far as the rest. He's a personality by himself. He doesn't need a title."

In the months before the conflict started, Mr. Perle was shilling heavily for the war. Ms. Benador said that she arranged TV appearances for him on ABC, MSNBC, CNN and Fox News. On March 17, two days before the war, Ms. Benador featured Mr. Perle at a seminar she'd organized at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., billed as an event to "support the fight for the liberation of the people of Iraq and the fight for democracy."

Ms. Benador denied being the unofficial publicist of the pro-war crowd.

"First of all, for the record, nobody asked me to do anything," she said. "This was totally a private initiative. There was nothing paid by the government. Absolutely nothing, nothing, nothing. So it coincided that this group of people accepted to be represented by me. And the others asked me to do so. It coincided also that our views were the same."

Ms. Benador sees her clients as really just a bunch of sensible peace-lovers.

"All of them in my group, they wanted peace," she said. "Nobody was asking to go to war per se. That was not the goal. The goal was to disarm Saddam Hussein, to go for total regime change.

"You see, what I believe is, I am the intermediary," she continued. "And because I understand them so well, sometimes I'm even the one who suggests they write a couple of articles on this or that subject. I am more able to present the case. In some instances, some bookers have said, 'I can't take that piece.' And I say, 'Oh, how can you do that? Because look at the facts, look at the format of the piece.' And I would say something like, 'If I was you, I'd take the piece.'"

When she was 7, Ms. Benador's family moved from Peru to France. Her family, she said, were "mostly doctors," although her father was in the Peruvian navy. In the late 70's and early 80's, she studied psychology and political science at the Sorbonne and the Université Catholique de Lille. She did stints as an editor at the Peruvian Times and as a translator at the United Nations in Vienna. Through the years, she said, she has lived in Paris, Geneva and Vienna, where her closest friends were the princes of Liechtenstein.

She married a Swiss named Emmanuel Benador in 1989, and they moved to the United States. He is the director of graphics at the Jan Krugier Gallery on East 57th Street.

In 1997, Ms. Benador did some publicity work for Bezalel Narkiss, an Israeli art-history professor at Hebrew University who lectured on Zionist art. She first made contact with the neocon crowd in 2000, when she started working for Daniel Pipes, the director of the Middle East Forum, a Philadelphia-based right-wing think tank dedicated to strengthening ties between the U.S. and Israel. He was looking to build a political presence in New York when he received a call from Ms. Benador, who was looking to get involved. She became his media liaison and got to know the leading players of the neocon crowd.

"From the beginning, she was enthusiastic about what we stood for," said Mr. Pipes.

Maybe too enthusiastic: Mr. Pipes said Ms. Benador left after a year and a halfbecause of an ego conflict.

"She has a very strong will, and that is good, but it makes it difficult to be her boss," he said. "So we amicably parted with the understanding that she would do better on her own."

Mr. Pipes said that Ms. Benador's new firm was unique in its focus on neocons. "It seems pretty unusual to me," he said. "She's invented her own niche." He added that Ms. Benador had grown in influence in the neoconservative crowd, to a degree.

"She's an agent-and, as such, she's more of a player," he said. "But she's not someone who has opinions on the record. So, she's facilitating and having an ever-larger role in getting people into the right places-but she herself doesn't opine."

Ms. Benador said that she has a serendipitous way in social settings.

"I'm supposed to go to a dinner, and all of a sudden I end up invited at the main table, and I don't even know why," she said. "Some people ask me, 'How did you get invited?' Because I was supposed not to know anybody, but it was just like that. I have a very good conduct with people. I'm patient."

It was Mr. Woolsey and Mr. Rosenthal, she said, who helped her start her client list-first by becoming clients, then by introducing her to others. Mr. Woolsey was reluctant to tout his relationship with Ms. Benador. He said he had signed on to do a few speaking engagements and that he last saw her nine months ago. "I like Eleana, but I really just know her as someone who was committed to getting into this business and to set up some speeches," he said.

Another client, Amir Taheri, an Iranian intellectual living in London, was surprised to find that his name appeared on a list of clients on Ms. Benador's Web site. And he was even more surprised-and flattered, he said-to hear that Ms. Benador considered him as something of a mentor. "She hardly knows me!" he said. "I met her just a year ago. I've talked to her altogether about 50 minutes."

Nevertheless Ms. Benador did place two op-ed columns by Mr. Taheri in The New York Times -so far, her only Times coup. "I don't give up on The New York Times , although they are a very acute case," she said.

Like Mr. Woolsey and Mr. Taheri, Mr. Perle gave the impression of knowing Ms. Benador only slightly.

"I don't recall where I met her," he said. "It may have been at a luncheon address."

But Ms. Benador remembered it vividly: Last year, when Mr. Perle flew to New York for a private social engagement, she said, "I went to the airport and picked him up and spent the whole day with him."

Mr. Perle also dismissed the idea that there was an orchestrated effort by like-minded right-wingers to campaign for their views.

"I don't think there's been any orchestration," he said. "Not that I've been aware of. If there was some orchestration there, I would know it. And I don't think there has been."

Ms. Benador was clearly enamored of her clients. But she said that while "part of my heart is in Washington already," she felt New York still needed her. "I have been hosting events here because the city needs something like that-intellectual activity," she said.

Ms. Benador said her job was not only to work the phones for her clients, but sometimes to help polish their message.

"There are some things, you have to just state them in a different way, in a slightly different way," she said. She described meeting with a new organization that plans to explore which rogue regime will be next in line for U.S. intervention following Iraq.

"They said their agenda is to see who is next after Iraq," she said. "And I said, 'I don't think that's the right position, because " Who is next?" is like you're asking for more war.' And I said, 'So you can ask, " What is next? What is going to happen next?"' So I made them change that slightly.

"See, it's a little word," she said, "but it makes a difference. If not, people get scared. And that's not the point. I'm just there looking after small details. Trying to avoid trouble for people and trying to make communication a little bit easier."