From: "Mark" 


"Phil Payne"  wrote in
message news:454d386a{at}w3.nls.net...
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6117442.stm
>
> "Richard Perle, a former defence adviser to the Bush administration, told
> US
> magazine Vanity Fair the president was responsible for the failure."

Richard Perle sees it a bit differently than do Vanity Fair and the BBC:
  http://www.americanthinker.com/comments.php?comments_id=6530

  "Vanity Fair has rushed to publish a few sound bites from a lengthy
discussion with David Rose. Concerned that anything I might say could be
used to influence the public debate on Iraq just prior to Tuesday's
election, I had been promised that my remarks would not be published before
the election.

  I should have known better than to trust the editors at Vanity Fair who
lied to me and to others who spoke with Mr. Rose. Moreover, in condensing
and characterizing my views for their own partisan political purposes, they
have distorted my opinion about the situation in Iraq and what I believe to
be in the best interest of our country.

  I believe it would be a catastrophic mistake to leave Iraq, as some are
demanding, before the Iraqis are able to defend their elected government.
As I told Mr. Rose, the terrorist threat to our country, which is real,
would be made much worse if we were to make an ignominious withdrawal from
Iraq.

  I told Mr. Rose that as a nation we had waited too long before dealing
with Osama bin Laden. We could have destroyed his operation in Afghanistan
before 9/11.

  I believed we should not repeat that mistake with Saddam Hussein, that we
could not responsibly ignore the threat that he might make weapons of mass
destruction available to terrorists who would use them to kill Americans. I
favored removing his regime. And despite the current difficulties, I
believed, and told Mr. Rose, that "if we had left Saddam in place, and
he had shared nerve gas with Al Qaeda, or some other terrorist
organization, how would we compare what we're experiencing now with
that?"

  I believe the President is now doing what he can to help the Iraqis get to
the point where we can honorably leave. We are on the right path."

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