Richard Perle And The Limits Of Schadenfreude

by tristero

In re: Neo Culpa again.

I’d like to draw attention to some remarks of Perle’s that have gotten less attention from bloggers than the more outrageous things he and the others said. Except for phrases in brackets, the following are all quotes from Perle:

The levels of brutality that we’ve seen are truly horrifying, and I have to say, I underestimated the depravity…”

[An anarchic, failed state is becoming more likely], and then you’ll get all the mayhem that the world is capable of creating.”

I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, ‘Should we go into Iraq?,’ I think now I probably would have said, ‘No, let’s consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists…’Could we have managed that threat by means other than a direct military intervention? Well, maybe we could have.”

Perle’s evasion of responsibility and propensity to blame others has been noted by others.

But Perle is also saying that he has learned a bitter lesson from the catastrophe of the Bush/Iraq War. Knowing what he knows now, he wouldn’t be so rash to recommend invasion, conquest, and occupation.

I’m going to try to say this as clearly and as forcefully as possible.

War should never be fought to provide anyone with an opportunity to grow in wisdom. Yet that is, as far as anyone can tell, the only thing other than sheer horror and outrageous exploitation that has come from this war. Richard Perle and friends have learned something.

And they all learned…what?

They learned that war is “horrifying.” They learned that war is unpredictable and chaotic, and its outcome impossible to discern. They learned that the men who start wars, no matter how brilliant they appear to be before the war, are incompetent. They learned that men who prosecute wars, no matter how stong-willed they might appear to be, cannot control them.

Yes, that is what Perle and his friends learned. That is all.

Question: After a war, how much wisdom do you need to gain to recognize the carnage? Answer After a war it takes only as much wisdom to see it was horrible as it takes intelligence to blame others – Rumsfeld, the beauracracy – for the failure of your crackpot plans. And that is exactly how much wisdom Perle has gained.

Why did Perle underestimate “the depravity” the world would see from a Bush/Iraq war, and spectacularly underestimate it at that? I have no idea, but it was not because he’s never seen a war up close. I haven’t either and I never underestimated the depravity to come from this war. Why did Perle fail to weigh carefully the very real probability that the Bush/Iraq war might result in a failed state where you’d get “all the mayhem that the world is capable of creating?” Again, I don’t know, but once again, I didn’t.

And I was far from alone.

Most of the world knew what was going to happen if Bush invaded Iraq. And to make absolutely sure Perle knew that we knew, and to bring the possibility that the Bush/Iraq war would end in chaos to his attention, just in case it happened to have escaped his brilliant mind, tens of millions around the world marched, not once, but twice, in protest. Millions of us wrote our governments begging them to do something, anything, to avert the inevitable disaster. Helen Caldicott even urged that the ailing John Paul II travel to Baghdad to become a human shield. And the Pope himself, face to face with George W. Bush, counseled a peaceful solution.

And then the war came. And the casualties began to mount. Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands dead or horribly mutilated. Tortures and beheadings. Atrocities even worse, too horrible to describe. And no end in sight no matter whether the US stays or goes – and the US isn’t going anytime soon.

And it took all this to provide Perle with his learning experience. To finally have Perle say, maybe we could have looked at other means than war in dealing with the very containable threat of Saddam Hussein.

But you’d have to have been “delphic” to know that, Perle says. Yes, delphic… As if Richard Perle was a half-crazed woman ranting oracles in the mists. And Perle, he tells us this straight out, that’s the last thing he wants anyone to think Richard Perle could possibly be.

But this post really isn’t about Richard Perle.

When I first saw that article, like many of you, I was entertained by the spectacle of these scoundrels having to eat crow. But then I remembered that poor kid whose parents were killed and whose legs and an arm were severed by a bomb I paid for.

And I remembered that a television anchor asked the reporter on the scene whether the shocked, traumatized beyond all belief, child really understood that all of this happened to him for a good cause, the liberation of his country.

And after I remembered that I felt ashamed of my schadenfreude towards Perle. For he is among those directly responsible for the murder of that child’s parents, and for that kid’s own permanent mutilation. And he implicated me, and you, in that murder and gore as well, despite the fact that we protested loud and long. And he helped create the ghastly environment of immoral self-righteousness reflected in that anchor’s remarks. And he urged it happen. He wanted it to happen. He rejoiced when it happened. He wants it to happen again in Iran, in Syria, and elsewhere.

And I felt ashamed that this country’s public discourse is even now still so unspeakably corrupt that people as morally sick as Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen, and Ken Adelman still have access to a wide public. And I felt furious that while Vanity Fair fusses to find the most elegant way to fling Perle’s shit at America, the rest of us can only wait anxiously for the inevitable catastrophes, the direct result of the advice and avid support of these people, to unfold, with little opportunity to guide the discourse back to anything close to sanity.

A longtime ago, the summer of ’03, I think it was, I wrote a private letter to Josh Marshall. I had just seen a video of him and Perle on a panel at, I think, American Enterprise Institute, discuss the Iraq War. Perle was unbearably coarse, surly, and contemptuous, even personally nasty towards Josh. And of course, everything Perle asserted was dead wrong.

In the letter, I told Josh that he shouldn’t raise Perle’s status in the world by deigning to appear with him.

I never heard back from Josh, but I’m pretty sure that one of the things he thought was that I was completely uninformed and had it entirely backwards. Probably he thought I didn’t know that Perle, a highly-placed adviser to a president and his war cabinet, was deigning to appear with him.

No, Josh, I knew exactly what I was saying.

It is high time that Perle, Ledeen, Adelman and the whole sick crew stop getting their phone calls returned from the media. And for the media to stop calling them. For truly, Perle is not Joshua Marshall’s peer. Perle is Joe McCarthy’s. He is Curtis Lemay’s. Perle is a nutcase, a madman. He makes Ward Churchill appear a paragon of insight and integrity. As for not being delphic, he makes Anne Heche seem normal.

Let this Vanity Fair article be the last time any mainstream publication would think enough of someone as utterly worthless as Richard Perle to publish his comments surrounded by the trappings of seriousness. And if it’s not the last time, then by God, let’s work to make sure its the second to last. Or the third to last.

[Updated to correct the name of the Pope. Thank you, commenters!]