Richard Perle's Excellent Advice

It's always amazing what arguments neoconservatives will make in one decade and then forget a decade or two later. Actually, saying whatever is political convenient seems to be a general principle of what passes for the leadership of the Republican Party these days. Jonathan Schwarz of A Tiny Revolution has a post on something Richard Perle said a number of years ago concerning the Russian war in Afghanistan:

GORBACHEV [circa 2006]: "We had to finish this war. But in a way so the Russian people would understand why tens of thousands had died. We couldn't just run away from there in shame. No. We needed to find a process."

What's hilarious—to the degree things involving massive bloodshed can be hilarious—is the subsequent footage from 1987 of Richard Perle dismissing all this "process" nonsense:

RICHARD PERLE: "It's not very complicated. They arrived in a matter of days on Christmas Eve in 1979. They could be home by Christmas Eve if they decided to leave Afghanistan and let the Afghans decide their own future."

You might ask: why isn't the same thing true for the U.S. in Iraq?

Richard Perle has interested me since he started pushing for war in Iraq back in 2002 (yes, his interest in Iraq began much earlier but he wasn't often seen in the media prior to 2002); in a way, Perle's not a true neoconservative but rather a link of sorts between the Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld triad, who are not much interested in neoconservatism except for its political value, and arch-conservative dreamers like William Kristol and Paul Wolfowitz who truly are neoconservatives. The key to Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld is that power rather than theory is what really interests them; for them, theory is just fancy noise for dazzling the followers. A further key to Bush is to remember that his father felt free to play all kinds of games during campaigns and would stop the moment he reached office. Junior never stopped playing the games.