Sunday, May 23, 2004
You've got to hand it to the Prince of Darkness -- he's loyal: (from here)
Richard Perle is a confused and disappointed man these days. Nicknamed the Prince of Darkness, the one-time darling of Republican foreign policy circles - and a man who was as much the architect of the war in Iraq as any other - has seen his standing decline rapidly.
It reached its nadir last week when Ahmed Chalabi, an Iraqi whom Perle and his hawk allies in the Pentagon had positioned to lead a new Iraq into a prosperous, democratic and peaceful future, was dumped by the Bush administration. Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress had received $100m from the US since the late 1990s. Last week his house and headquarters were raided in an anti-corruption probe.
The knives are out in Washington. As Perle, a neoconservative who is perhaps the staunchest Chalabi supporter in the capital put it: "The CIA despises Chalabi; the State Department despises him. They did everything they could to put him out of business. Now there is a deliberate effort to marginalise him."
The Boston Globe provides the rest of the above Perle quotation:
[Chalabi] has devoted his life to freeing his country ... He is a man of enormous intelligence, and I believe the effort to marginalize him will fail. They will end up looking ridiculous."
But will they end up looking more ridiculous than a man who was so thoroughly conned that he happily serves as chief character witness for the con man?
