Richard Perle is back! The man is resilient. He was around in the ’70s and ’80s and, between journeys to his sock in France, the Prince of Darkness was sure around in the enfant siecle as well. These days he is holding forth on Baker-Hamilton in the pages of the Times and the WSJ. I.e., space they could be giving to, say, Kenneth Pollack or Ken Adelman, is going to him.
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.
“The gloomsayers… have been proven wrong when they predicted the United States would sink into a forlorn quagmire in Iraq… The aftermath of war is always messy and often bloody… Post-Saddam Iraq has emerged from more than three decades of totalitarian rule and mass murder… Should anyone have been surprised that it took the United States a few weeks to get the lights working?…”
Just how wrong were the gloomsayers?
“Like General Barry McCaffrey, they predicted a military disater in which the United States could potentially suffer, ‘bluntly, a couple to 3,000 casualties.'”