January 26, 2004 © New York University. All Rights Reserved.

Richard Perle: high price for bad advice

By William D. Hartung
Global Beat Syndicate

NEW YORK—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 track record. If you want bad advice at a high price, Perle is your man.
Perle’s last big moment in the spotlight was in the spring of 2003, when he stepped down as chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board amidst charges that he had abused his position as a top adviser to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for personal gain. Perle’s self-imposed “punishment” came in the wake of not one, not two, but three questionable business deals.
The first deal, exposed by veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh last May 17 in the New Yorker, involved a luncheon in the south of France, brokered by infamous arms dealer and Iran/Contra middleman Adnan Khashoggi. Perle, under the guise of listening to a “peace plan” for Iraq, tried to persuade Saudi industrialist Harb Saleh al-Zuhair to raise $100 million to invest in Trireme, a security-oriented investment firm Perle had started after being apointed chairman of the DPB.
Other deals Perle solicited while chairing the policy board included a consulting arrangement in which he sought $750,000 in exchange for helping the telecommunications firm Global Crossing to get Pentagon approval to sell one of its units to a Chinese-owned company; and a deal to help Loral Corporation get reinstated in the satellite export business after it made illegal technology transfers to Beijing.
Perle’s role in the Global Crossing deal was particularly problematic. After denying that he had used his DPB role to secure the consulting deal, a memo surfaced, with his signature, saying, “As the chairman of the Defense Policy Board, I have a unique perspective on and intimate knowledge of the C.F.I.U.S. [Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States] process and security issues that will be raised by the C.F.I.U.S. review that will not be available to other C.F.I.U.S. professionals.” That was the body that had to rule on whether Global Crossing could sell part of its company to a Chinese-owned firm.
Mr. Perle never seems to stop promoting himself for a fee. Soon after Boeing decided to invest $20 million in Trireme, he became a public advocate of a controversial deal that called for the Air Force to lease 100 Boeing 747s as aerial refueling tankers at a cost to taxpayers of more than $20 billion. He endorsed the Boeing tanker deal on the pages of The Wall Street Journal, but only after Boeing invested in his company.
What may come as a surprise is that Mr. Perle sees nothing wrong with any of this. In an op-ed article for The Wall Street Journal when he stepped down as DPB chairman, 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 do not 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 Mr. Perle has ever fully disclosed his ever-widening web of business entanglements. Second, his “candid advice” to Secretary Rumsfeld has been uniformly bad. It was Perle and his colleague Kenneth Adelman who suggested that the invasion and occupation of Iraq would be a “cakewalk.” It was he and his neo-conservative associates who claimed that Saddam Hussein had 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 friends at the highly conservative American Enterprise Institute who suggested that their hand-picked choice to lead Iraq, exiled leader Ahmed Chalabi, would be welcomed with open arms by Iraqis. None of these things proved true. Indeed, it is difficult 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 Defense Secretary Rumsfeld have for keeping Richard Perle as an adviser? Apparently, Rumsfeld’s bad judgment on Perle is simply the latest indicator of how ethically challenged and politically tone-deaf his leadership of the Pentagon has become.

ABOUT THE WRITER
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).

© 2000 New York University. All Rights Reserved. The Global Beat Syndicate, a service of New York University's Center for War, Peace, and the News Media, provides editors with commentary and perspective articles on critical global issues from contributors around the world. For more information, check out http://www.nyu.edu/globalbeat/syndicate/.
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