Richard Perle was on CNN’s Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer about 10 minutes ago, and demonstrates to me how the neoconservatives continue to be wrong. His stances sound strikingly similar to John Bolton, who’s for some reason been making the rounds on talk TV in recent weeks.
The scary part about these guys is their complete disregard for historical accuracy. It used to be that the neoconservatives, whether you agreed with them or not, were at least considered scholarly and well-grounded in a study of history (though, perhaps, not in their interpretations therein). Both Richard Perle and John Bolton have demonstrated, however, a complete disregard of history.
In John Bolton’s case, the most brilliant example of this was his appearance on the Daily Show. I guess Bolton expected Stewart to roll over like hosts on the real news interview shows, but alas, it didn’t happen like that.
In Perle’s case today (unfortunately, I don’t have a transcript yet), he blurs the history on the US’s dialog with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. On the subject of us talking to Iran and Syria, Perle represents the neoconservative position that there’s no point in talking to these countries because they are our enemies. When Wolf points out that we had dialog with the Soviet Union even while considering them our mortal enemies, Perle responds that the circumstances were different because we were negotiating from a position of power.
The fact is that détente between the United States and the Soviet Union was neither a strict negotiation nor was it from a standpoint of significant advantage for the United States. Both countries had enough nuclear arsenal to assure each others’ destruction in the event of war. A Soviet collapse was not imminent. Interestingly, the time parallel even more than perhaps Blitzer thought in his question. The United States was embroiled in the Vietnam War, a conflict which the Soviets had very close ties (including direct military support) with our enemy.
The talking heads like Richard Perle and John Bolton, as de facto representatives of the neocons and the Bush administration, are attempting to reframe any discussion about possible dialog with enemies like Iran and Syria into a discussion about negotiating. Their rote response is always “what are we willing to offer Iran/Syria to play along?” No one is suggesting we enter into negotiations with these countries at this point. The suggestion is that we open dialog. Until we have real dialog with our enemies, we’ll have no idea what possible negotiations may entail.
There is an old saying that everyone should know that goes “keep your friends close and your enemies closer”. The neocons, and the Bush administration, would like to be able to simply ignore their enemies, as if they didn’t exist on the border of Iraq. They are blinded by their continued tunnel vision, which leads them to see the hard line and military conflict as the only solution to our international disputes. They remain completely unapologetic about the failure of the Iraq War (a most wonderful example of why their position is wrong). It’s one thing to try to save face, but to do so in such a flabbergasting way is ridiculous.
Update: I just ran across this interesting story at Scientific American that might explain some of the intractability of these folks. It gets bonus points for describing “cognitive dissonance”, a term some of my friends know I’m fond of using 
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Update: CNN now has the transcript of Richard Perle’s interview online. Get it here.
