http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2007/2/25/210805.shtml?s=usPerle: Bush Failed by his Own People
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."
Perle will be featured in PBS's upcoming two-hour program "The Case for War: In Defense of Freedom." --coming in April (15-20th)
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Perle: I think that the Democrats have injected a note of such bitter partisanship that it is going to backfire.
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Nancy Pelosi is overplaying her hand. Jack Murtha has just gone around the bend. I don't understand him at all, and I think in the end the public, broadly speaking, will say, "Enough of this."
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Franken was hung up on the fact that we didn't find stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, and that whole thing gets a little tedious after a while.
The president didn't create
. He made the mistake of keeping Tenet in place, but that is another matter.
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NewsMax: Reportedly, 70 percent of the American public wants the boys to come home...
Perle: It depends on how you ask the question. Of course, we all want the boys to come home. If the question you put was "Do you think that we should withdraw even if it means that Iraq subsides into chaos and we will have been defeated and humiliated in Iraq?" you will get an entirely different answer.
I think polls on a matter like that are pretty useless.
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Perle: Saddam is gone, and I think that is a good thing. He was a menace. It is very popular now to suggest that because we didn't find WMD, he wasn't the threat. What we didn't find in truth was stockpiles of WMDs. He certainly had the capacity to produce chemical and biological weapons again when he wanted to do so, and so I believe he was a threat, and I think we had the right to respond to that threat.