Richard Perle Speaks Truth to Power — in the U.K. and, Obliquely, Within the U.S. Government

(Washington, D.C.): In an op.ed. article published in today’s London Daily Telegraph, Richard Perle says the unsayable about the kow-towing mission to Tehran recently undertaken by British Foreign Minister Jack Straw. In so doing, he properly excoriates Mr. Straw for his blurring of the record of active and ongoing support by the Islamic government of Iran for global terrorism. And Mr. Perle, a founding member of the Center for Security Policy’s National Security Advisory Council, makes plain the folly of believing that such a regime could possibly be a reliable, let alone a worthy, partner for American and British efforts to wage a successful war against international terrorists and their state sponsors.

Unsaid — but nonetheless transparently clear — is the applicability of the Perle critique to the U.S. State Department’s less public romancing of Iran, Syria, Sudan and other purportedly “good” terrorist states. If President Bush is to have any chance of actually implementing the clear and coherent war policy he enunciated before the Joint Session of Congress two weeks ago and, pointedly, at the State Department yesterday, he needs to heed the advice of the Chairman of his Defense Policy Board, Richard Perle. Naturally, the same applies to Mr. Straw’s boss, Prime Minister Tony Blair, whose splendid address to the Labor Party congress rivaled in its elegance and paralleled in its grasp of the challenge at hand that delivered by Mr. Bush on 20 September.

BY ITSELF, Jack Straw’s failed mission to Iran is of no lasting significance. Derisively dismissed by his interlocutors, he is back home, his self-described “dialogue among civilizations” now just an embarrassing memory.

What makes his hapless journey worth comment, however, is the need to think again about the theory of statecraft that led the British foreign secretary to try to enlist Iran, a state most deeply involved in terrorism, in the war against terrorism.

Declaring his visit “an opportunity to open a new era of British-Iranian co-operation,” Mr. Straw sought to enlist the Iranians by appealing to their own opposition to the Taliban in Afghanistan. Iran’s response: The enemy of my enemyis still my enemy.

Mr. Straw reported after his meeting that the Iranian leaders “congratulated me for having acted as Home Secretary to ban a very bad terrorist organization acting within Iran.” According to his account, Mr. Straw then admonished the Iranians that they “will have to think very carefully” about Iran’s sponsorship of Hammas and Hezbollah, two terrorist groups which routinely arrange for suicide bombers to kill innocent civilians in Israel and which have created and manipulated the culture of suicidal murder that spawned the attacks of September 11. Could the United Kingdom’s top diplomat possibly have believed that this pale entreaty would have the slightest influence on Iran’s unremitting support for terrorist organizations that they organize, finance and shelter?

In an article written for the controlled Iranian press on the occasion of his visit, Mr. Straw tried to establish a rapport with his hosts by informing them that he has over 25,000 people of the Muslim faith in his constituency, (“and 23 mosques”). The vast majority of Muslims throughout the world he wrote, were “outraged” by the attacks on New York and Washington.

Having said all that he goes on to saygrovel, reallythat: “Equally, I understand that one of the factors which helps breed terrorism is the anger which many people in this region feel at events over the years in Palestine.”

(Never mind that there is no “Palestine.” The conditions surrounding the establishment of a Palestinian state are at the heart of the negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, as the Foreign Office authors of Mr. Straw’s article must surely have known.)

In contextthe Foreign Secretary’s comment on the murder of some 7,000 innocent men, women and children, some hundreds of them from the United Kingdom–the Foreign Secretary’s announced “understanding” of the source of terrorist anger is the worst sort of pandering, the purpose of which was clearly to elicit sympathy for his mission.

What is so dangerous and wrong-headed about this sort of extenuating comment, especially in the aftermath of the most vicious act of terror in modern times, is that, tailored to its Iranian audience, it hints of empathy. It aims at rapport, but at the cost of clarity. And rapport with whom? With a government whose support for terrorism is beyond doubt.

Prime Minister Blair took great pains in his magnificent speech to the Labour Party Conference (was the Foreign Minister in the audience?) to make the point when he said, “Understand the causes of terror. Yes, we should try, but let there be no moral ambiguity about this: nothing could ever justify the events of 11 September”

In his futile effort to gain sympathy with the Iranian leadership the Foreign Secretary broke new ground in his description of Britain and Iran as possessing “the common belief in civil society and the rule of law that underpins both out societies.” Could this have been the result of a dreadful malfunction of a Foreign Office word processor? A phrase meant to describe Britain and the United States or Britain and France somehow transposed in a monstrous typographical error? Or does Mr. Straw see the rule of law that has eluded those of us who observe arbitrary arrests, the jailing of dissenters at home and their assassination abroad, the banning of newspapers and the ubiquity of the secret police? Civil society? In a country where a woman’s choice of clothing can lead to her arrest or stoning? Where music, art and literature are mandated by decree?

After returning empty handed (there are few misadventures as pathetic as obsequiesness rebuffed), Mr. Straw refused to abandon his script. When asked whether Iran is a state that has sponsored terrorism, he had this to say: “Iran is a country that supports Hezbollah which is active in south Lebanon and from time to time active in terms of violence in the occupied territories.”

“The occupied territories?” Is there no geographer at the F.O. these days? Mr. Straw is right up there with Merlinconjuring Palestine and obliterating Israel with one hand while reaching out to the sponsors of terror with the other. Mr. Straw may choose to regard Tel Aviv, where [numerous] teen age kids were killed in a suicide bombing at a discothque, as “occupied territory,” but doing so places him in a select group of fanatical irredentists who refuse to accept the legitimate existence of the state of Israel.

Terrorist attacks throughout Israel have claimed the lives of hundreds of innocent men, women and children. Relative to population the death toll in the last year is the equivalent of 350,000 thousand Americans or 70,000 thousand Britons. And the term the Foreign Secretary has found with which to describe Iran supported Hezbollah and Hammas terrorism is “active in terms of violence.”

The terrorists who planned the murder of thousands of innocents in New York and Washington will have listened to Mr. Straw, probably with greater care than went into his remarks. They will have detected one of the fruits of their terror: confusion and obfuscation about who the terroristsand their victimsreally are.