Over the past few weeks, many Bush administration officials have begun rewriting history in an effort to burnish President Bush’s legacy. Following suit, neoconservative war hawk Richard Perle has taken the opportunity to polish his own record during the Bush years — mainly on Iraq.

In the latest issue of The National Interest, Perle devotes 4,600 words — not to congratulate President Bush for invading Iraq — but to wipe his, and the whole neoconservative movement’s, hands clean of the whole affair. In the essay, he categorically denies that both he — and neoconservative ideology in general — had any influence on the Bush administration in its decision to go to war:

I have been widely but wrongly depicted as deeply involved in the making of administration policy, especially with respect to Iraq. Facts notwithstanding, there are some fifty thousand entries on Google in which I am described as an “architect,” and often as “the architect,” of the Iraq War. I certainly supported and argued publicly for the decision to remove Saddam, as I do in what follows. But had I been the architect of that war, our policy would have been very different. [...]

But about the many mistakes made in Iraq, one thing is certain: they had nothing to do with ideology. They did not draw inspiration from or reflect neoconservative ideas and they were not the product of philosophical or ideological influences outside the government.

Perle is right. He strongly advocated publicly for the invasion of Iraq, especially after 9/11, even making claims that Saddam Hussein had links to Osama bin Laden (an assertion he later claimed he never said). But in fact, Perle had direct access to top administration officials during the run up to the war. Former CIA director George Tenet recalled that shortly after 9/11, Perle told him that “Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday, they bear responsibility.”

Moreover, the neoconservative influence on the Bush administration, particularly regarding Iraq, has been well documented. For Perle to claim otherwise is beyond absurd.

Seeing that Perle cannot deny he supported the invasion, he then offers two separate justifications for both outcomes of the WMD argument. First, he says the belief that Saddam had WMD was “widely accepted” at the time of the invasion. But, noting that no WMD were found, Perle then says the “salient issue” was not that Saddam had WMD but that he “could produce them” someday. Nevertheless, Perle concludes, “no one should take seriously the facile conclusion that invading Iraq was mistaken because we now know Saddam did not possess stockpiles of WMD.”

Except this statement is a direct contradiction of what Perle wrote earlier this year in an article for The American Interest. Then, he claimed if we knew Saddam had no WMD in March 2003, the U.S. shouldn’t have invaded:

If Saddam had provided solid, confirmable evidence of the destruction of the stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction he was believed to possess, we would not have invaded.

Indeed, no matter how many incoherent, contradictory and misleading essays Perle concocts trying to absolve himself from the Iraq debacle, like his fellow Iraq war architects, it’s clear he has no leg to stand on.

In September 2003, Iraq war architect Richard Perle famously stated that the Iraqis “have been liberated” and that “a year from now, I’ll be very surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush.” When Perle was asked about that comment in a recent interview with Foreign Policy magazine, he wouldn’t back down, claiming that “absolutely” the Iraqis have been liberated. He even suggested there’s still a chance his dream of a square named after Bush in Baghdad can be realized:

FP: Does the rosy picture at all represent the country we see today? [...]

PERLE: Is it rosy today? Do I think most Iraqis have been liberated? Absolutely. …Obviously if it deteriorates into chaos or a new Saddam emerges and people are no better off than they were before, then there won’t be [a square named after President Bush]. …I think [Iraqis] will look back and say, we paid a terrible price, but it’s worth it.

Exploring the question “Iraq: What if we win?” in the latest issue of The American Interest, neoconservative Iraq war architect Richard Perle offers a series of false, incoherent, contradictory and misleading statements in an effort to not only, again, distance himself from the disastrous Iraq war policy he helped create but also to tout the war’s successes.

In his article, which is headlined “We Won Years Ago,” Perle claims that the Iraq war — which he argues was “imposed on us” — is “far from over.” But later, he claims that “we have already won in Iraq” because “Saddam will not be sharing WMD with anyone.” Missing from this line of thinking, of course, is that Saddam never had any WMD to share:

[D]espite the widely, if grudgingly, acknowledged progress of the surge, the war is far from over. [...]

Without military action we could not have decisively managed the threat from Iraq. It is now managed: Saddam will not be sharing WMD with anyone. Judged against that measure, we have already won in Iraq.

Perle takes a number of confusing positions on the issue of Saddam’s WMD. First he correctly noted that the pre-war intelligence on Iraq’s weapons “proved to be wrong” but only in “some” respects. Unfortunately, Perle does not expound upon which intelligence was correct on Iraq’s weapons.

Next, Perle asserts that if Saddam had only said Iraq didn’t have WMD, the U.S. wouldn’t have invaded:

If Saddam had provided solid, confirmable evidence of the destruction of the stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction he was believed to possess, we would not have invaded.

But Saddam did tell the U.S. he didn’t have any weapons. In late 2002, Hussein’s government allowed UN weapons inspectors inside Iraq who subsequently did not find any “smoking guns” after visiting some 125 Iraqi sites. Moreover, in December, 2002, Iraq sent 12,000 pages of documents to the UN explaining how its WMD stockpiles had been eliminated.

Despite his earlier claim that “we have already won” the war, Perle also argues the U.S. should stay anyway because withdrawal would be “foolish” and “irresponsible.” But even though the U.S. needs to stay in Iraq, Perle claimed that “we have…created” a Pax Americana in the Middle East. Perle of course does not offer evidence of any such “Pax.”

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) recently warned that the Bush administration is building a case against Iran. “This whole concept of moving against Iran is bizarre,” he said. When Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) warned last week that President Bush does not have the authority to launch an attack against Iran without congressional approval, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino responded that she was “puzzled” because Reid seemed “to be fanning [the] flames where there’s no fire.”

That’s not the view of Richard Perle, a leading neoconservative proponent of the Iraq war. Speaking at a conference this weekend in Israel, Perle suggested Bush would attack Iran before he leaves office:

“Would this president do it? I think that until the day he leaves office, this is a president that, if he is told, ‘Mr. President, you are at the point of no return,’ I have very little doubt that this president would order the necessary military action.”

[...]

“I’m not convinced that we have a lot of time. Given the peril that would result, its astonishing to me that we do not now have a serious political strategy with Iran,” he said, adding he thought regime change is “the only significant effective way” to deal with the Iranian threat.

“If we continue on our current course, we have only a military option. So what I’m urging, and this should have happened a very long time ago, is that we make a serious effort to work with the internal (Iranian) opposition,” Perle said.

Perle is reported to have once said, “The first time I met Bush 43 … two things became clear. One, he didn’t know very much. The other, that he had the confidence to ask questions that revealed he didn’t know very much.”