High Price For Bad Advice ( about Richard Perle)

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High Price For Bad Advice http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/9753


William D. Hartung is the author of How Much Are You Making on the War, Daddy?—A Quick and Dirty Guide to War Profiteering in the Bush Administration. (Nation Books/Avalon Group, 2004). This commentary is adapted from chapter 5 of the book, "The Defense Policy Board: Richard Perle and His Merry Band of Profiteers."


As he roams the airwaves plugging his new book, giving aggressive prescriptions for American policy at every stop, we would all be well advised to take a closer look at Richard Perle's recent counsel. If you want bad advice at a high price, Perle is your man.



Perle literally never seems to stop promoting himself for a fee. Boeing decided to invest $20 million in Trireme, and lo and behold, Perle later became a public advocate of a controversial deal that called for the Air Force to lease 100 Boeing 747s for use as aerial refueling tankers at a cost to taxpayers of more than $20 billion. Richard Perle endorsed the Boeing tanker deal on the pages of The Wall Street Journal—but only after Boeing invested in his company.

You may not be surprised to learn that Richard Perle thinks that there is nothing wrong with any of this. In an op-ed that he wrote for The Wall Street Journal at the time that he stepped down as chairman of the Defense Policy Board, he suggested that "the people best able to help" the government in an advisory capacity "are professionally involved with the businesses for which the official is responsible: . . . energy executives advising the Department of Energy, or defense executives advising the Department of Defense." He then suggests that as long as said executives follow appropriate rules of disclosure, and don't rule on policies directly affecting their own companies, they should be free to give their "best candid advice" to the government.

There are several problems here. First, it is not clear that Perle has ever made full disclosure of his ever-widening web of business entanglements. And second, his "candid advice" to Donald Rumsfeld has been uniformly bad. It was he and his colleague Kenneth Adelman who suggested that the invasion and occupation of Iraq would be a "cakewalk." It was he and his neocon cohorts who claimed that Saddam Hussein was sitting astride a vast arsenal of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. It was he and his colleague R. James Woolsey who asserted an operational link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda that did not and does not exist. It was he and his pals at the American Enterprise Institute who suggested that their hand-picked choice to lead Iraq, exiled leader Ahmed Chalabi, would be welcomed with open arms by ordinary Iraqis. None of these things proved true.

In fact, it's hard to think of any major claim about Iraq that Richard Perle got right. So why is he still on the Defense Policy Board? Given a record of financial impropriety, which surely violates the spirit if not the letter of our conflict-of-interest laws, and a record of uniformly bad advice that has put our military personnel at risk, what possible reason could Donald Rumsfeld have for keeping Richard Perle as an adviser? Isn't Rumsfeld's bad judgment on Perle just the latest indicator of how ethically challenged and politically tone-deaf his leadership of the Pentagon has become?

[lovedems]

1. According to O'Neill in his recent book, this is how Dick likes it.

Bush has caged himself in, surrounded only by "idealogues" and his definition of an idealogue is somebody who knows all the answers. They don't need to engage in debate, nor do they like debate because they are "right" on the issues. Perle fits right in with the cabinet members because he tells * why they are right on any given policy.

The handelers of * are all in concert with one another and they DO NOT allow anyone who disagrees with them on any policy, to speak to the idiot. I think he has the tendency to confused so they always tell him "stick to principle" or "don't negotiate with yourself".

The book, by the way, is more of a criticism of the administration rather than the idiot.