Arrows of the Night by Richard Bonin

Author:Richard Bonin [Bonin, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-53503-8
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-12-05T16:00:00+00:00

Reaction to Perle’s article was instantaneous and pervasive. It was discussed all over major print and television media sources, including the New York Times, the Associated Press, and CNN, in large part because the Republican foreign policy leadership was ready to back Perle up. As the Washington Times reported, Perle had pushed hard “to persuade Republican leaders on Capitol Hill to embrace [the INC] as an alternative government for Iraq.” Republican senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska made a strongly supportive statement on the Senate floor the day after Perle’s article, saying, “I believe Secretary Perle’s analysis and general recommendations should be taken seriously.” Senator John McCain echoed Perle’s proposals at a press conference, advocating expanded propaganda broadcasts into Iraq, expansion of the no-fly and no-drive zones, and logistical support to dissident Iraqi groups. “The time for talk may be over,” he said. “And we should be prepared to act alone if necessary.”

Perle pressed on. Appearing that week on a Nightline segment titled “Could an Attack on Iraq Do More Harm Than Good?” Perle emphasized that “[t]here is a democratic opposition. It broadly represents all the people of Iraq. With a bit of support from us and some of [our] very skillful air power to protect the territory from which they operate in northern Iraq, I think we can bring Saddam down. But that means a political as well as a military strategy.”

A few days later, Perle traveled with McCain and Senator Joseph Lieberman, then a Democrat from Connecticut, to a security conference in Munich. He used the plane ride and the conference to buttonhole the senators about the INC, Perle said. Then, along with several other leading neoconservatives, Perle went to the White House and pressed the case in a meeting with Sandy Berger, Clinton’s national security adviser. Years later, Berger spoke about the encounter during an event at the Council on Foreign Relations, recalling, “The neocons came to visit me in ’98—Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Perle and Bill Kristol and others—and they said, ‘We want you to create a free Iraq; we want you to basically provide a no-fly zone in southern Iraq, protected by American air power, fly back Chalabi and all the Iraqi exiles; give them guns and let them go and they’ll get rid of Saddam Hussein. And I listened to that and I said: ‘I’ve seen this movie before. It’s called the Bay of Pigs.’ ”

When asked in a February 1998 town hall meeting in Dayton, Ohio, why the United States didn’t support Iraqi opposition groups militarily and unfreeze assets to help them, Berger said, “[W]e have had experiences in this country in the Bay of Pigs, in Hungary in 1956, and in Iraq in 1991, where perhaps our rhetoric has gone ahead of what we are prepared to do. And we have been very careful not to let that happen again.”

In other words, the White House wasn’t budging from its policy of containment. And so Perle and his coterie bore down. On February 19,

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