Richard Perle Claims We’ve ‘Already Won’ The Iraq War But It’s Also ‘Far From Over’

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 weapns “proved to be wrong” but only in “some” respects. Unfortunately, Perle does not expound upon which intelligence was correct on Iraq’s weapons. Think Progress