Perle says magazine betrayed promise to hold story

Raw Story
Nov. 06, 2006

Richard Perle -- a controversial conservative considered among the architects of the Iraq invasion -- has rushed to criticize a new Vanity Fair piece in which he is quoted as saying he regrets advocating for invading Iraq. Perle claims that he was promised the article would not be published before the Nov. 7 Congressional elections.

"I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?,' I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists,'" Vanity Fair quotes Perle as saying.

But Perle fires back in the National Review. To read a full symposium of conservative responses, click here. An excerpt of Perle's response follows below.

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I should have known better than to trust the editors at Vanity Fair who lied to me and to others who spoke with Mr. Rose. Moreover, in condensing and characterizing my views for their own partisan political purposes, they have distorted my opinion about the situation in Iraq and what I believe to be in the best interest of our country.

I believe it would be a catastrophic mistake to leave Iraq, as some are demanding, before the Iraqis are able to defend their elected government. As I told Mr. Rose, the terrorist threat to our country, which is real, would be made much worse if we were to make an ignominious withdrawal from Iraq.

I told Mr. Rose that as a nation we had waited too long before dealing with Osama bin Laden. We could have destroyed his operation in Afghanistan before 9/11.

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