Defense analyst Richard Perle GS '68 criticized the postwar U.S. occupation of Iraq and expressed full confidence in Ahmad Chalabi, Iraq's controversial deputy prime minister, in an extemporaneous speech in Whig Hall Wednesday afternoon.
Perle, who chaired the bipartisan Defense Policy Board during the period leading up to the Iraq war, said he continues to trust Chalabi, who has been accused of supplying the United States with false intelligence prior to the war and of providing secret U.S. cryptographic codes to Iran.
"Almost everything you've heard about [Chalabi] is false," Perle said. "The CIA, which doesn't like him, has been out of control on this issue."
Perle described Chalabi as a brilliant patriot who sacrificed a life of comfort in the United Kingdom for an active role in the rebuilding of Iraq.
"We should have handed him the keys the day Baghdad fell," Perle said.
Perle praised the efficiency of the U.S. operations that ousted Saddam Hussein but faulted the establishment of the Coalition Provisional Authority, which precluded the transfer of sovereignty back to Iraqis until June 2004.
"I think we made serious mistakes after the initial military action," Perle said. "It was a benign occupation but it was an occupation nonetheless, and people don't like to be occupied."
Perle, now a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, began his speech by analyzing how the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 changed U.S. policy toward terrorism.
"Up until then we had regarded terrorism as an issue to be dealt with by law enforcement," Perle said.
The failure of the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and especially Bill Clinton to respond to terrorist attacks allowed the terrorists to think they were winning, he added. President Bush's policy of not distinguishing between terrorists and states that harbor them was a more effective response than those of his predecessors.
"Terrorists can hide, terrorists can move, states are fixed in place," Perle said. "What better targets than states, which can be persuaded by threats or force not to harbor or support terrorists."
After Sept. 11, 2001, he said, the Defense Policy Board unanimously agreed that Iraq was one of the states most likely to supply terrorists with weapons of mass destruction. Perle said the U.S. government felt it could not tolerate that risk, no matter how improbable it seems in retrospect.
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