The Pentagon's Dynamic Duo: Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz

By Richard H. Curtiss

Richard Perle…

Richard Perle is perhaps the best-known member of the group roughly known as the Washington neocons—neoconservatives who advocate a hard-line foreign policy aimed at complete U.S. control of key regions of the world. Chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, Perle also is, in the words of foreign affairs analyst Holger Jensen, “an ardent Zionist, a personal friend of [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon, head of Hollinger Digital, part of the group that publishes the Daily Telegraph in London, a board member of the Jerusalem Post, resident ‘fellow’ of the American Enterprise Institute and ex-employee of the Israeli weapons manufacturer Soltam.”

In the 1960s, Perle was a protégé of nuclear arms strategist Albert Wohlstetter of the RAND corporation. Although he has spent much of his life in the arms industry, Perle never served in the U.S. armed forces, perhaps because he was a student, and then married, at the time of the Vietnam War.

Over the years, Perle has become so ubiquitous that for some time he has been known as the “Prince of Darkness,” due mainly to his conspiratorial tendencies, which helped make him a major player in the Israel lobby. He is perhaps most widely known for the vast number of friends and acquaintances he has made over his many years working in and with the U.S. government. They constitute a veritable “who’s who” of the group now dubbed neocons.

For example, Perle first came to Washington to work with the late Democratic Sen. Henry M. Jackson of Washington state. Also working with Jackson at the time was current Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. While working with Jackson, who was widely known as “the senator from Boeing,” Perle drafted the Jackson/Vanek Amendment, which made the Soviet Union’s “Most Favored Nation” status contingent on allowing mostly Jewish immigrants to leave the communist state. Among those allowed to emigrate under the amendment was Natan Sharansky, now deputy prime minister of Israel.

Perle had been working on a Ph.D. at Princeton University, but hit it off so well with Jackson that he never completed the degree, staying with Jackson for 11 years. As Perle put it later, there was always so much to do of interest that he never left Washington after that.

After leaving Jackson’s staff, Perle found work with the Israeli arms manufacturer Soltam, reportedly arranging various deals with the Pentagon. He came under fire in 1983, when newspapers reported that he had received substantial payments to represent the interests of an Israeli weapons company. Perle denied any conflict of interest, saying that, although he received payment for those services after assuming his position at the Defense Department, he had rendered the services while an employee of Soltam.

Perle quickly exploited his position at the Defense Policy Board to the fullest.

When Ronald Reagan was elected president, he named Perle assistant secretary of defense—one of 10 such positions. One of Perle’s first appointments was Steven Bryen, who became deputy assistant secretary of defense, in charge of deciding which contractors could be used on defense projects.

This was surprising, because Bryen had been investigated extensively on charges that he was leaking highly classified information to Israel. Following a U.S. government investigation, which included the use of wiretaps, a grand jury voted to indict Bryen on suspicion of espionage. The indictment was never served, however. Instead, the statute of limitations was allowed to run out and Bryen’s troubles disappeared.

In 1987, at the end of Perle’s first term at the Defense Department, he announced his intention to write a novel based on insider politics. Random House paid him $300,000 to complete the novel, which was appropriately titled Hard Line.

Perle then became a lobbyist for Israeli weapons manufacturers. He also lobbied on behalf of Turkey, using his Israel lobby credentials, and helped the Bosnian government acquire arms. Perle would later work with Douglas Feith advising the Bosnian government during the 1995 Dayton peace talks.

With the inauguration of the current Bush administration, Richard Perle expected to receive a major Defense Department appointment. He was disappointed, as all he received was a position on the advisory Defense Policy Board.

However, Perle quickly exploited this position to the fullest. The board is now perhaps the most widely publicized bureau in the U.S. government, whether members other than Perle like it or not.

Perle is currently a “resident fellow” at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank where his good friend David Wurmser runs the Middle East department. Wurmser’s wife, Israeli-born Meyrav Wurmser, is a co-founder of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), which specializes in translating and distributing articles that present Arabs in a highly negative light. Another MEMRI co-founder is Col. Yigal Carmon, formerly of Israeli military intelligence. Perle also is on the Board of Trustees of the Indiana-based Hudson Institute, where the Middle East section is run by—guess who—Meyrav Wurmser.

Additionally, Perle is an adviser to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, where he counts among his colleagues Robert Satloff (director of policy), Patrick Clawson (director of research) and Michael Rubin (who publishes more op-eds than the rest of the neocons combined). Every four years, Perle and his Washington Institute associates convene a “bipartisan blue-ribbon commission” known as the “Presidential Study Group,” which presents the newly- or re-elected president with a blueprint for U.S. Middle East policy.

Another close associate of Perle’s is the Washington Institute’s Martin Kramer, who has published a vitriolic book called Ivory Towers on Sand, which also targets and criticizes university departments across the U.S. Kramer, the former director of the Moshe Dayan Centre at Tel Aviv University, is an editor for the Middle East Forum, which publishes Middle East Quarterly and the Middle East Intelligence Bulletin. Recently the Middle East Forum and its director, Daniel Pipes, made headlines when they launched—with help from the Washington Institute—a Web site called “Campus Watch,” intended to discredit university Middle East studies departments which don’t toe the pro-Israel line.

Interestingly, Perle is a client of theatrical agent Eleana Benador, who organizes TV appearances and speaking engagements for experts on the Middle East and terrorism. Her clients also include leading New York Times correspondent Judith Miller, author Laurie Mylroie (who has written two books on the threat posed by Saddam Hussain), Michael Rubin and Meyrav Wurmser.

Perle was involved in the September 2000 “Project for the New American Century,” which advocated an expanded U.S. posture worldwide, including increased American forces in the Gulf region. Other participants in the project included Perle’s assistant Lewis Libby (now chief of staff to Vice President Richard Cheney), Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, and Cheney.

Perle’s connections with the vice president run deep, as both are members of the board of advisers to the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, along with Under Secretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton and Douglas Feith, the third-highest executive in the Pentagon. Under the auspices of the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, Perle and Feith worked together in 1996 as advisers to then-Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Their advice reportedly included an immediate war to oust Saddam Hussain from Iraq, and the removal of as many Palestinians as possible from the occupied territories. (Perle is a long-time opponent of the land-for-peace formula.)

As the best-known hawk in the Bush administration, Perle appears regularly on talk shows, and works steadily to popularize the war against Iraq. Even as he perseveres, however, the projected attack on Iraq has become so deeply unpopular around the world, and even in the United States, that Perle may not have his way after all. At this point, no one quite knows what will happen next.

Paul Wolfowitz…

Whatever comes next in the battle against Saddam Hussain, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz has achieved a lifelong aim. He has diverted the search for a just solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem onto the back burner while turning up the heat on the problem of Saddam Hussain.

As Secretary of State Colin Powell tries—once again—to cope with the crisis U.S. foreign policy has created among the Western allies, Wolfowitz must be chortling at the mischief he has wrought. The damage is comparable to that caused by his neocon colleague, Defense Advisory Board chairman Richard Perle, who has been his co-conspirator within the George W. Bush administration.

Wolfowitz was born in New York City in 1943 to Jewish parents, Lillian Dundes and Jacob Wolfowitz, a Cornell math professor, who emigrated from Warsaw in 1920. Like his father, Paul majored in mathematics as well as chemistry, earning his BA in mathematics in 1965. Young Wolfowitz turned to political science in graduate school, earning a doctorate in political science from the University of Chicago in 1972.

Some Wolfowitz-watchers warn that he is “the most dangerous man in the current administration.”

Wolfowitz studied with writer and educator Allan Bloom. In Ravelstein, his novel about Bloom, author and fellow Chicagoan Saul Bellow apparently modeled a character on Wolfowitz, one of whose most influential faculty professors was Albert Wohlstetter, later of the RAND Institute.

In 1968 Wolfowitz married Clare Selgin, and they have three children, Sara, David, and Rachel.

Wolfowitz has a long history working for the government. After completing his university graduate work, he was a management intern in the Bureau of the Budget (1966-67), where he began his steady ascent up the bureaucratic ranks.

He spent four years (1973-77) with the Pentagon’s Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, was assistant secretary for regional problems from 1977 to 1980, then served a brief two-year stint as State Department director of policy and planning. In the first Bush administration Wolfowitz held the position of assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs. In 1986 he became U.S. ambassador to Indonesia, the world’s fourth largest—and largest Muslim—country.

Following President George H.W. Bush’s reelection loss, Wolfowitz landed at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at the Johns Hopkins University, where he was both dean and professor. As dean, he raised $75 million for Johns Hopkins and doubled the school’s endowment.

He was not entirely absent from government during the Clinton administration, however, having been appointed to the Commission on Roles and Capabilities of the U.S. Intelligence Community.

As deputy secretary of defense in the current administration of George W. Bush, however, Wolfowitz has come into his own. Some say he considers himself the administration’s resident intellectual. Whether that is true or not, Secretary of State Powell is his chief rival for influence in the White House.

At least once in the Bush administration Powell has come down hard against Wolfowitz. But Wolfowitz indefatigably bounces right back from such upsets, all the while pursuing his own private agenda. That agenda is to deflect attention from the problem of Israel by finding Washington new enemies anywhere else in the world.

This long-term goal of his has been Wolfowitz’ idée fixe for many years. Apparently with the president’s blessing, he has elaborated this goal into calling for the defeat of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussain and the creation of a military occupation government. Wolfowitz maintains that, since Saddam is so hated by his people, once serious military action begins he will fall rapidly. It will not be terribly long, Wolfowitz argues, before a military government can be melded into a democratic country, perhaps the first in the Arab world.

The civilian Defense Department official tends to minimize problems that don’t fit into his world views—such as the fact that Iraq’s Kurds may have different plans of their own. The country’s Shi’i Muslims also may have a different game plan. Waving aside these practical considerations, Wolfowitz insists that these matters can easily be dealt with later.

There are others, however, who believe that Wolfowitz has a separate agenda of his own, and who believe, in fact, that Wolfowitz welcomes each new international problem. He may want the United States to remain bogged down in various crises and thus give the Israelis more time to consolidate their own conquest over the Palestinians.

Indeed, some Wolfowitz-watchers warn that he is, in the words of one conservative, “the most dangerous man in the current administration.” This is partly because he both advocates hard-line positions and has the ability to defend them.

One observer has described Wolfowitz and his cohorts as “democratic imperialists.” In addition, Wolfowitz and other hard-line commentators are talking about U.S. military action to bring about changes in both Syria and in Iran after subduing Iraq.

Said Hugo Young of The Guardian of Dec. 3, 2002, “In Washington, as well as in Europe, Paul Wolfowitz is regarded as the most awesome of the hawks in his appetite for war to overthrow Saddam Hussain. A Republican senator saw him as a ‘weirdo’ whose views were so dogmatic as to put him outside the realms of normal debate.”

Young continued, “This is Wolfowitz in his soothing mode, ceaselessly deferential to the president. Wolfowitz has made a vivid case for preemptive strikes.”

In a press conference after Sept. 11, 2001, Wolfowitz declared that American policy “is ending states that sponsor terrorism.” This earned a public remonstrance from Colin Powell, who said that Wolfowitz “can speak for himself,” but the U.S. goal is only to end “terrorism.” Wolfowitz’s enthusiasm for nailing Saddam was thus quashed for the time being, as Powell and others made it clear that such a widespread war would destroy the anti-terrorism coalition and infuriate Arab allies. While this was neither the first nor the last time Wolfowitz and Powell have clashed, the secretary of state has not totally quashed the deputy secretary of defense.

Wolfowitz’ knack for the unexpected and his eagerness to deploy American forces earned him a reputation for both prescience and nuttiness, in the words of Slate magazine’s David Plotz. Wolfowitz reportedly has said, for example, that “a kiloton of prevention is worth a megaton of cure.”

In October 2002, The New York Times published a leak about Wolfowitz and his coterie. According to the article, Wolfowitz wants an immediate war with Iraq, believing that the targeting of Afghanistan, an already impoverished wasteland, falls far short of the global war the cabalists are seeking. Iraq, however, is just another stepping stone in turning the “war on terrorism” into a full-blown “Clash of Civilizations,” where the Islamic religion could become the “enemy image” in a new Cold War.

The Times also revealed deep divisions within the Bush administration, describing how the Wolfowitz clique plots behind the backs of cabinet officials such as Secretary of State Powell in the name of the U.S. government. “The group wants to obliterate Iraq, and put the Palestinian Authority and President Arafat on the terrorism list,” wrote Michele Steinberg in the Oct. 26, 2001 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

According to fellow cabalist I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, “Paul is one of the smartest guys I’ve ever known. He’s had an intellectually coherent set of views he’s pursued over a long time. On Iraq, the Soviet Union—those ideas have stood the test of time. In fact, Wolfowitz has never wavered on how to handle Iraq.”

The “Wolfowitz Cabal” is now determined to push the U.S. in the same direction as Israel’s most dangerous right-wing policy and take on as an enemy every Islamic nation Israel perceives as a threat. In this Wolfowitz and his colleague, Richard Perle, seem to have succeeded beyond their wildest and most fevered dreams.

Richard H. Curtiss is executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.