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Instead of pressuring reluctant Republican senators for rapid ratification of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with Russia, the Obama administration should just drop it, says Richard Perle, a key architect of President Ronald Reagan’s strategy to end the Cold War. “It’s a seriously flawed treaty,” Perle, now a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, says during an exclusive interview with Newsmax.TV. “It’s certainly not the kind of treaty Ronald Reagan fought for and accomplished.” The pact is very weak on verification, he says. “For example, our right to inspections is limited to sites the Russians declare . . ....

FOR EIGHT years George W. Bush pulled the levers of government—sometimes frantically—never realizing that they were disconnected from the machinery and the exertion was largely futile. As a result, the foreign and security policies declared by the president in speeches, in public and private meetings, in backgrounders and memoranda often had little or no effect on the activities of the sprawling bureaucracies charged with carrying out the president’s policies. They didn’t need his directives: they had their own.Again and again the president declared “unacceptable” activities that his administration went on to accept: North Korean nuclear weapons; North Korean missile tests;...

Influential former Pentagon official Richard Perle has been exploring going into the oil business in Iraq and Kazakhstan, according to people with knowledge of the matter and documents outlining possible deals. Mr. Perle, one of a group of security experts who began pushing the case for toppling Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein about a decade ago, has been discussing a possible deal with officials of northern Iraq's Kurdistan regional government, including its Washington envoy, according to these people and the documents. It would involve a tract called K18, near the Kurdish city of Erbil, according to documents describing the plan. A...

Richard Perle is again propping up regime-toppling Mideast dissidents who lack credibility. ON A COLD MORNING last winter, I arrived at the home of Richard Perle outside Washington for a scheduled interview. I was about 10 minutes early, so I chose to shiver a bit on the front porch. Perle, the point man for the neoconservatives' drive for regime change throughout the Middle East, had agreed to spend time me with for a book I was writing about his life and times. Just then, the front door opened and out stepped Perle and a robust young man who was obviously...

George Tenet sets the stage in his memoir by recalling a conversation he claims to have had with me on Sept. 12, 2001: "As I walked beneath the awning that leads to the West Wing[, I] saw Richard Perle exiting the building just as I was about to enter. . . . Perle turned to me and said, 'Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday. They bear responsibility.' I looked back at Perle and thought: Who has [he] been meeting with in the White House so early in the morning on today of all days?" But I...

Feb. 18, 2004. 01:00 AM DANNY JOHNSTON/AP U.S. President George W. Bush is applauded by the army and National Guard troops during a speech at Fort Polk, La., yesterday in which he defended the U.S. war in Iraq. Fort Polk is home to more than 6,300 troops who are in Iraq. `Heads should roll' over IraqAdviser wants U.S. intelligence chiefs to quit Cites faulty conclusions on Saddam's weapons ERIC ROSENBERGSPECIAL TO THE STAR WASHINGTON—Richard Perle, a chief proponent of last year's U.S. invasion of Iraq, yesterday called for the chiefs of the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Defence Intelligence...

One of the biggest names of the conference never even uttered a word. Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer is the military intelligence operative who recently went public with a controversial claim that a year before September 11, his top-secret task force "Able Danger" was able to identify the man who later turned out to be the lead hijacker as being connected to al Qaeda. Shaffer is a veteran of top-secret operations against terrorists, including some in Afghanistan, and several of his DIA colleagues have come out publicly to confirm that they remember Mohamed Atta being identified in 2000 as part of...

Reprinted from NewsMax.com Perle: Bush Failed by his Own People Dave Eberhart, NewsMax.com Monday, Feb. 26, 2007 Richard Perle tells NewsMax that key members of the Bush administration have failed the president – and Perle names names. In a wide-ranging interview, the former assistant Secretary of Defense under President Reagan and chairman of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee from 2001 to 2003 under President Bush calls former Secretary of State Colin Powell a "disaster" and says current Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice "was in way over her head from the beginning."

Vanity Fair has come out with its usual election eve hit job. This time it selectively quotes leading neocons on their views respecting the war, editing their lengthy remarks to suggest dissatisfaction with the Administration and the war. Michael Rubin has already responded, ss has David Frum. I read Richard Perle’s comments as an attack on the perfidy of some in the Administration, a topic I have written about more than once. Richard Perle was traveling, and I was only just able to reach him to clarify his views, as I was certain the article was a total misrepresentation of...

It's blocked, but here is the URL - http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/12/neocons200612

Conservative national security allies of President Bush are in revolt against Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, saying that she is incompetent and has reversed the administration’s national security and foreign policy agenda. The conservatives, who include Newt Gingrich, Richard Perle and leading current and former members of the Pentagon and National Security Council, have urged the president to transfer Miss Rice out of the State Department and to an advisory role. They said Miss Rice, stemming from her lack of understanding of the Middle East, has misled the president on Iran and the Arab-Israeli conflict. "The president has yet to...

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran knows what he wants: nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them; suppression of freedom at home and the spread of terrorism abroad; and the "shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the liberal democratic systems." President Bush, too, knows what he wants: an irreversible end to Iran's nuclear weapons program, the "expansion of freedom in all the world" and victory in the war on terrorism. The State Department and its European counterparts know what they want: negotiations. For more than five years, the administration has dithered. Bush gave soaring speeches, the Iranians...

Thursday July 17, 2003 The Guardian As the CIA director, George Tenet, arrived at the Senate yesterday to give secret testimony on the Niger uranium affair, it was becoming increasingly clear in Washington that the scandal was only a small, well-documented symptom of a complete breakdown in US intelligence that helped steer America into war. It represents the Bush administration's second catastrophic intelligence failure. But the CIA and FBI's inability to prevent the September 11 attacks was largely due to internal institutional weaknesses. This time the implications are far more damaging for the White House, which stands accused of politicising...

WASHINGTON: Soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, a two-man intelligence team set up shop at the Pentagon, searching for evidence of links between terrorist groups and host countries. The men, Michael Maloof and David Wurmser, culled classified material, much of it uncorroborated data from the CIA. "We discovered tons of raw intelligence," said Maloof. "We were stunned that we couldn't find any mention of it in the CIA's finished reports." They recorded and annotated their evidence on butcher paper hung like a mural around their small office. By the end of 2001, they had constructed a startling new picture of...

In the morning of March 11, 2004, Susan Lindauer woke to find five F.B.I. agents at her front door. After reading her her rights, the agents took Lindauer from her home in Takoma Park, Md., to the F.B.I. field office in Baltimore, where she was charged with having acted as an unregistered agent of Saddam Hussein's Iraqi government and otherwise having elevated the interests of a foreign country above her allegiance to the United States. ''The only visible sign of stress is that I'm chain-smoking,'' she said when I met with her recently. Forty-one and free on bail, she wore...

``We set out to establish a democracy, but we're slowly realizing we will have some form of Islamic republic,'' said another US official familiar with policymaking from the beginning.

Four Broad Lessons from Iraq Print Mail By Richard Perle Posted: Thursday, April 7, 2005 TESTIMONY House Committee on Armed Services (Washington) Publication Date: April 6, 2005 Mr. Chairman, As always, I appreciate this opportunity to share with the Committee some ideas and observations about the situation in Iraq and, more specifically, some of the lessons we should take away from our experience there. Within the Department of Defense, and among its many advisors and consultants there have already been several important "lessons learned" assessments. These cover everything from the effectiveness of specific weapons systems, procedures, organizations and training to...

Until recently, Nancy Soderberg was just another blissfully forgotten face of the Clinton administration.... But she gained some notoriety this month during an appearance on "The Daily Show," in which host Jon Stewart was half-marveling, half-despairing at the turn of events in the Middle East after the Iraq elections, which seemed to vindicate President Bush.... Soderberg: "Well, there's still Iran and North Korea don't forget..." Begin with the simplest errors of fact.... [W]hen Ms. Soderberg snickers about how candidate Bush struggled through a foreign-policy pop quiz in 2000, one is compelled to snicker back. Next ... errors of analysis. "It...

Juan Cole has, don seatbelts please, written the phrase "positive development" (ya gotta scroll to the bottom to spot this rarest of birds). Matthew Yglesias is wondering why, er, conservatives aren't more excited about Egypt. There's always something to complain about with regard to those dastardly Bushies, isn't there? They're not, you know, happy enough about what Bush has wrought in Egypt (though doubtless John 'palsy walsy with Hosni' Kerry must be duly gratified, eh?) That said Matt, to his real credit, is calling developments underway in Egypt a real positive and at least a partial, if mid-stream, vindication of...

PORTLAND, Ore. - Howard Dean, the newly minted leader of the Democratic Party, and former Pentagon adviser Richard Perle made clear their opposing views on the war in Iraq during a debate marred by a protester who tossed a shoe at Perle.