An End to Evil? (7)

The End of Evil is not that crackpot. But a large part of the book uses facts, half-truths and blatant fabrications in much this way. An example is the brief discussion on the CIA's evaluation of the Soviet economy. Those not familiar with the background would likely conclude from the description in Chapter 7 that the CIA had consistently dangerously misrepresented the power of the Soviet Union in ways that potentially jeopardized American security. The reality is that Richard Perle and like-minded strategic thinkers argued for a much more threatening worst-case scenario of Soviet capabilities and intentions than did the CIA - and even the CIA's estimates turned out to be exaggerated.

And that same approach also underlies the argument of this book. In the context of the Iraq War, Frum and Perle generalize this approach, which could have been catastrophic in dealing with the USSR in the 1980s, and which has proved quite catastrophic enough in Iraq: "Where intelligence is uncertain, prudent leaders will inevitably minimize risk by erring on the side of the worst plausible assumption. And rightly so." (p. 27)

It was sometimes a disorienting feeling reading this book to see pleas like this to rely on the integrity and caution of intelligence analysts, when Richard Perle himself was a key adviser and a member of Rumsfeld's rump intelligence group, the Office of Special Plans (OSP) headed by Perle protegé Douglas Feith, that took raw intelligence and cherry-picked it to bolster the case for war against Iraq. And in doing so they produced wildly erroneous results. Yet here is Perle, repeating chestnuts like the Mohammed Atta/Iraqi intelligence meeting in Prague.

And in describing his own OSP group, he doesn't bother to name it. Nor is it mentioned that one of the authors of the book was one of the "small team of independent analysts" whose work is described, though in several other points of the books anecdotes are identified as coming from Perle.

Tags: an end to evil, david frum, richard perle