Ambushed on the Potomac.

• Author: Sempa, Francis P.
• Position: George W. Bush's administration

Ambushed on the Potomac

http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=20486

By Richard Perle, resident fellow, American Enterprise Institute

In the current issue of The National Interest, Richard Perle, who served as an Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan Administration and chairman of the Defense Policy Board from 2001 to 2003, attempts to set the record straight about why the George W. Bush administration invaded Iraq and what went wrong after our swift overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime.

Perle dismisses the widely believed notion that a cabal of neo-conservative advisers hijacked policymaking on Iraq and the Middle East and convinced the President to wage a war that was not in America's interest. Instead, the origins of the Iraq War are found in the unsatisfactory peace that ended the first Gulf War, Saddam Hussein's refusal to abide by numerous UN resolutions imposed at the end of that war, the near-universal belief among Western governments and their intelligence agencies that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (that he failed to account for) and had programs to produce nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, Hussein's known support for terrorist groups in the Middle East, and the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States.

The potential threat of Hussein's regime that gradually emerged during the 1990s was magnified by the successful 9/11 strikes. As the President said in the wake of the 9/11 attacks: The United States would not sit by and wait while the world's worst regimes obtained the world's most destructive weapons. That--not some neo-conservative/Israeli conspiracy to transform the Middle East--is why Iraq was attacked by the United States.

Perle speculates on how Bush would have been viewed if he chose to ignore the Iraqi threat in the wake of 9/11 and Hussein, either directly or through terrorist accomplices, attacked the United States with WMD. "How would we now...