Richard Perle, the "Dr. Evil" of neoconservatism, is now an official war profiteer
"No new group of war millionaires shall come into being in this nation as a result of the struggles abroad. The American people will not relish the idea of any American citizen growing rich and fat in an emergency of blood and slaughter and human suffering." -- President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, May 26, 1940
What's a neocon to do after invading Iraq turns out to be an f**ing stupid idea, your presidupe is almost out of office, your Darth Vader veep can't run because, well, he scares people, and most of the world has figured out that entire belief system is idiotic and dangerous?
(Wall Street Journal) Influential former Pentagon official Richard Perle has been exploring going into the oil business in Iraq and Kazakhstan, according to people with knowledge of the matter and documents outlining possible deals.
Mr. Perle, one of a group of security experts who began pushing the case for toppling Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein about a decade ago, has been discussing a possible deal with officials of northern Iraq's Kurdistan regional government, including its Washington envoy, according to these people and the documents.
It would involve a tract called K18, near the Kurdish city of Erbil, according to documents describing the plan.
ThinkProgress has more on our once and future war profiteer:
In March 2003, weeks after the invasion of Iraq, war architect Richard Perle resigned from his position on the Defense Policy Board in an attempt to “defuse a controversy over charges he stood to profit from the war in Iraq.” But that hasn’t stopped Perle from continuing to seek profit from the war. Citing documents and people close to the negotiations, the Wall Street Journal reports today that Perle “has been exploring going into the oil business in Iraq and Kazakhstan. One of the oil tracts, near the Kurdish city of Erbil, “is estimated to hold 150 million or more barrels of oil, would potentially be operated by Houston-based Endeavour International”
Perle also “has explored obtaining an oil concession in Kazakhstan in tandem with a northern Iraq deal,” the Journal adds. Perle denied the reports, stating, “I am not involved in any consortium…nor am I ‘framing plans for a consortium.’” But a spokesman for Qubat Talabani, the Kurdish government’s delegate in the U.S. who deals with “investment information,” “confirmed that the envoy had been approached by Mr. Perle.”
Well good for you, Evil One. And here's a peek at Endeavor's board. (According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Board Chairman Bill Transier and his wife are recent donors to Oil Gal Kay Bailey Hutchinson, Vice Chairman John Seitz has given quite a bit of money to Andarko Petroleum's PAC, and also in the past to Phil Gramm and big contributions to the RNC, not surprising given their industry and location... )
Meanwhile, other neocons have found employment with their old friend John McCain, an early backer of Ahmad Chalabi, and with Joe Lieberman, an advocate, dating back to the 1990s, of invading Iraq. One of them is Randy Scheunemann, who TPM Muckraker describes this way:
Over the weekend, The New York Timesnoted that some of John McCain's foreign policy advisers from the "realist" camp are uneasy with the amount of influence enjoyed by neoconservatives like Randy Scheunemann, who's been serving as McCain's chief foreign policy aide and spokesman.
And what has he gotten so wrong? (Shortened. Read the full post at the TPMM site)
As a top aide to then-Senate GOP leader Trent Lott, Scheunemann helped draft -- and acted as a driving force behind -- the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act (ILA), which essentially made "regime change" the official Iraq policy of the US. ...
Scheunemann was a board member of Bill Kristol's Project for a New American Century, which played a major role in agitating for the war. Scheunemann signed Kristol's influential letter to President Bush, sent nine days after 9/11, which asserted that failing to respond to the Al Qaeda attack by going after Saddam would "constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism." Scheunemann also served as a "consultant" to Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon while it was planning the war. And in late 2002, Scheunemann, with administration approval, founded the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (CLI), an advocacy group with the explicit goal of whipping up pro-war sentiment across the country.
Scheunemann also played a key role in lining up support for the invasion from the "Vilnius Ten," a group of former Soviet bloc countries seeking to gain entry to NATO, some of whom Scheunemann has worked as a paid lobbyist on behalf of. With his partner Bruce Jackson, a Lockheed Martin executive, Scheunemann reportedly gave assurances to the Ten that backing the invasion would help their chances for NATO membership. ...
In the invasion's aftermath, Scheunemann's judgment proved no more effective. He argued vociferously against giving the UN a significant role in stabilizing Iraq. ...
Still other neocons, like Charles Krauthammer, continue to find refuge on the op-ed pages of the New York Times and on Fox News, where their desperate ravings about Barack Obama can be read and heard by millions.
Curious about what's going on with the other neocons who conned Dubya into invading Iraq? ThinkP has you covered here.
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"[T]he practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.' Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 84, August, 1788
