WAR ON IRAK

Guardian: Thank God For The Death Of The UN by Richard Perle
Its abject failure gave us only anarchy. The world needs order.

Saddam Hussein's reign of terror is about to end. He will go quickly, but not alone: in a parting irony, he will take the UN down with him. Well, not the whole UN. The "good works" part will survive, the low-risk peacekeeping bureaucracies will remain, the chatterbox on the Hudson will continue to bleat. What will die is the fantasy of the UN as the foundation of a new world order. As we sift the debris, it will be important to preserve, the better to understand, the intellectual wreckage of the liberal conceit of safety through international law administered by international institutions.

As free Iraqis document the quarter-century nightmare of Saddam's rule, let us not forget who held that the moral authority of the international community was enshrined in a plea for more time for inspectors, and who marched against "regime change". In the spirit of postwar reconciliation that diplomats are always eager to engender, we must not reconcile the timid, blighted notion that world order requires us to recoil before rogue states that terrorise their own citizens and menace ours.

A few days ago, Shirley Williams argued on television against a coalition of the willing using force to liberate Iraq. Decent, thoughtful and high-minded, she must surely have been moved into opposition by an argument so convincing that it overpowered the obvious moral case for removing Saddam's regime. For Lady Williams (and many others), the thumb on the scale of judgment about this war is the idea that only the UN security council can legitimise the use of force. It matters not if troops are used only to enforce the UN's own demands. A willing coalition of liberal democracies isn't good enough. If any institution or coalition other than the UN security council uses force, even as a last resort, "anarchy", rather than international law, would prevail, destroying any hope for world order.

This is a dangerously wrong idea that leads inexorably to handing great moral and even existential politico-military decisions, to the likes of Syria, Cameroon, Angola, Russia, China and France. When challenged with the argument that if a policy is right with the approbation of the security council, how can it be wrong just because communist China or Russia or France or a gaggle of minor dictatorships withhold their assent, she fell back on the primacy of "order" versus "anarchy".

Rense: Expatriate Richard Perle by Kurt Nimmo
Richard Perle is a traitor. There's no other way to put it."
Seymour Hersh is a rarity in America these days -- an investigative journalist.
"Hersh is not a nice man in the Washington sense," writes Eric Alterman of Salon, "he does not know how to make small talk, flatter his bosses, spin his defeats and conceal his fierce competitiveness. He is simply the best investigative reporter alive and expects his work to speak for itself."
Because Hersh does what he does so well, the chicken hawk Richard Perle called him a terrorist on CNN the other day.
That's right. Perle equated Hersh with Osama bin Laden and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. "Sy Hersh is the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist," Perle told Wolf Blitzer.
Perle slandered Hersh because the award winning journalist wrote in the March 17th issue of the New Yorker: "There is no question that Perle believes that removing Saddam from power is the right thing to do. At the same time, he has set up a company that may gain from a war."
Maybe one day Richard Perle will be prosecuted for his crimes. For now he is allowed to bend the ear of George W. Bush and prod the half-wit dictator into destroying America.
When Perle was working for Senator Scoop Jackson, he was investigated by the Justice Department and found to have violated US policies relating to unlawful transmission of sensitive classified US information to Israel.
"An FBI summary of a 1970 wiretap recorded Perle discussing classified information with someone at the Israeli embassy," writes Paul Findley (They Dare To Speak Out, Chicago, Ill, Lawrence Hill Books 1989)."He came under fire in 1983 when newspapers reported he received substantial payments to represent the interests of an Israeli weapons company. Perle denied conflict of interest, insisting that, although he received payment for these services after he had assumed his position in the Defense Department, he was between government jobs when he worked for the Israeli firm."
In other words, Richard Perle is an Israeli spy.

Ny Sun: Perle Sues Hersh Over New Yorker Article
WASHINGTON -- Richard Perle, the influential foreign policy hawk, is suing journalist Seymour Hersh over an article he wrote implying that Mr. Perle is using his position as a Pentagon adviser to benefit financially from a war to liberate Iraq.
Mr. Hersh's article, which appears in the March 17 issue of the The New Yorker magazine, said Mr. Perle met for lunch with two Saudi businessman in France in January in an attempt to seek Saudi investment for a company Mr. Perle is associated with, Trireme Partners L.P.

Trireme was created to "invest in companies dealing in technology, goods, and services that are of value to homeland security and defense," according to Mr. Hershís article.

Mr. Hersh writes that Mr. Perle said that the meeting was convened only to talk about a diplomatic alternative to war in Iraq. One of the meeting's participants, Harb Saleh Al-Suhair, a Saudi born in Iraq, wanted to discuss averting war with Mr. Perle. But according to the article, both Saudi businessmen - Mr. Al-Suhair and Adnan Kashoggi - thought the purpose of the meeting was to discuss Iraq as well as Saudi investment in Trireme.

But the article quotes all three participants saying that Saudi investment in Trireme was not discussed at the lunch, because, as Mr. Al-Zuhair says, Mr. Perle said "he was above the money" and that he "stuck to his idea that 'we have to get rid of Saddam.'" And to this day, according to the article, no Saudi money has been invested in Trireme.

When asked what part of the article is incorrect, Mr. Perle told the Sun: "It's all lies, from beginning to end."

The editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, is sticking by Mr. Hersh's piece.

"It went through serious reporting, with four members of the board talking to Sy [Hersh], and rigorous fact-checking, legal-checking and all the rest," Mr. Remnick told the Sun.