WHY RICHARD PERLE WON'T GO AWAY

BUSH WATCH - http://www.bushnews.com/
MARCH 29, 1998-2003
WHY RICHARD PERLE WON'T GO AWAY

With Dems in Congress and the media looking into conflict of interest allegations having to do with Richard Perle's private business dealings and his key role in creating U.S. foreign policy that has led to the present war in Iraq, Bush and Rumsfeld had to take the heat off in an attempt to cut off further probes into the complex of ideological, government, business, and Israeli connections that could prove embarrassing to the Bush administration.

Thus, Perle pulled a Kissinger and resigned as chairman of the influential Defense Policy Board. Then Rumsfeld indicated that Perle's gesture was all show and no tell by stating that Perle would remain on the Board as a member, thereby allowing him to continue doing what he's been doing. Perle will remain a key member of the Bush Global Dominance team and will continue to walk the corridors of power and get the word out through a complex of friends in high government places and friends in key media and think tank positions.

What follows is just one descriptive slice of Perle's incestuous family of conservative hawks who are pulling the strings that make up Bush's foreign policy and world view. While Jeb Bush was brought into this family through his involvement with the PNAC, George Bush is the only major hawk who was not. That's because Bush is a cheerleader, not a thinker, and he appears to be most comfortable when angrily using confrontational rhetoric and tearing up over religious pronouncements.

--Jerry Politex, 03.28.03

"...William Kristol [,son of Irving Kristol, is] the crown prince of the neoconservative clique and editor of the Rupert Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard. In 1997, he founded the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a front group which cemented the powerful alliance between right-wing Republicans like Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, Christian and Catholic Right leaders like Gary Bauer and William Bennett, and the neocons behind a platform of global U.S. military dominance.

"Irving Kristol's most prominent disciple is Richard Perle, who was until Thursday the Defense Policy Board chairman, is also a "resident scholar" at the American Enterprise Institute, which is housed in the same building as PNAC. Perle himself married into neocon royalty when he wed the daughter of his professor at the University of Chicago, the late Alfred Wohlstetter - the man who helped both his son-in-law and his fellow student Paul Wolfowitz get their start in Washington more than 30 years ago.

"Perle's own protege is Douglas Feith, who is now Wolfowitz's deputy for policy and is widely known for his right-wing Likud position. And why not? His father, Philadelphia businessman and philanthropist Dalck Feith, was once a follower of the great revisionist Zionist leader, Vladimir Jabotinsky, in his native Poland back in the 1930s. The two Feiths were honored together in 1997 by the right-wing Zionist Organization of America (ZOA).

"The AEI has long been a major nexus for such inter-familial relationships. A long-time collaborator with Perle, Michael Ledeen is married to Barbara Ledeen, a founder and director of the anti-feminist Independent Women's Forum (IWF), who is currently a major player in the Republican leadership on Capitol Hill. Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and another neo-con power couple - David and Meyrav Wurmser - co-authored a 1996 memorandum for Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu outlining how to break the Oslo peace process and invade Iraq as the first step to transforming the Middle East.

"Though she doesn't focus much on foreign-policy issues, Lynne Cheney also hangs her hat at AEI. Her husband Dick Cheney recently chose Victoria Nuland to become his next deputy national security adviser. Nuland, as it turns out, is married to Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol's main comrade-in-arms and the co-founder of PNAC...." more

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION IS nothing other than the quintessential political expression of [a] social dung heap. Its vice president, Mr. Richard Cheney, divides his time between presiding over a secret government and working as a bag man for Halliburton, which continues to pay him more than a half million dollars a year. The secretary of the Army, Mr. Tom White, is a former high executive of Enron. Mr. Richard Perle, who has shaped administration policy on Iraq, holds secret business meetings with the arms merchant Khashoggi. As for the president himself, the elevation of this utter nobody?-whose most notable characteristic is his personal sadism?-will be seen by historians as the expression of the moral and intellectual degradation of the American ruling class. A class that could choose Mr. Bush as its leader is one that has, figuratively and literally, lost its head.

There is still, despite everything, a real world. Beneath the glitz and glitter, the crisis of American capitalism is assuming gigantic proportions....The massive diversion of resources to fund tax cuts for the wealthiest section of the population threatens national insolvency....A staggering percentage of the nation's wealth is in the hands of the wealthiest two percent of the population. A study by Kevin Phillips established that the annual income of the richest 14,000 families is greater than the annual income of the poorest 20,000,000 families. --WSWS, 03.26.03

Let's be clear about the Senate Dems' successful vote to trim Bush's new tax cut plan from $739 billion down to $350 billion in the face of Bush's request for $75 billion to pay for the first six months of the war. By the time it gets out of the Repug House-Senate committee whose job is to iron out differences between the two houses of Congress, the new Bush tax cuts will be back up to $739 billion or close to it. And then the Senate will vote for it and defeat the Dems. That's because two of the Repugs who voted with the Dems on a 51-48 vote, Voinovich and Snow, have gone on record as saying they will support whatever comes out of committee. In Washington, that's called "politics." Anywhere else, that would be called "hypocrisy."

--Politex, 03.26.03