Neocons do the ‘rat backstroke’

Re “Perle says he should not have backed Iraq war,” Nov. 4

Former Pentagon advisor and neoconservative Richard Perle’s clear statement that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake belonged on the front page. Perle has long been recognized as a major backer of President Bush’s tragic Middle East acts. As the killing in Iraq goes on, the Taliban resurges in neglected Afghanistan, Iran’s president trumpets U.S. failures and the U.S. loses further military, political and economic prowess. This is the time to throw the rascals out of Congress who have slavishly supported all the destructive acts of the Bush administration.

EDWARD MULVANEY

Pasadena

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Perle’s mea culpa sounds like the pleading of a man terrified about the judgment of history. It is about as believable as the fictitious intelligence that he and his neoconservative accomplices invented to get us into this debacle in Iraq. Sorry, Mr. Perle, but the statement that neocons “had almost no voice in what happened” is a bald-faced lie. Surely you remember the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, overseen by former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, a neoconservative. OSP was the unit that invented the seminal lie in this cavalcade of lies, the alleged link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. The intelligence used by Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to invade Iraq was not flawed or faulty, the media words of choice. It was fake, falsified, fabricated and phony. Thousands of innocents have died as a result. You, sir, have blood on your hands.

MICHAEL A. GRAHAM

Malibu

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If the statements of Perle, Kenneth Adelman, David Frum and other Iraq policy architects quoted in a Vanity Fair article are to be believed, they are frantically doing the “rat backstroke” as Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld are left on the sinking ship. Only if he had “Delphic” oracular powers would Perle have predicted the catastrophic outcome -- due, he says, to a dysfunctional administration. He should have checked in with the many millions of non-Delphic Americans who clearly predicted the present situation in Iraq.

NORMAN PALLEY

Culver City