Nationalsovereignty is an obligation as well as an entitlement. Agovernment that will not perform the role of a government forfeits the rights of a government.
An End To Evil: How To Win the War on Terror, David Frum, Richard N. Perle, Ballantine (reprint,2004), Chapter 5 'The War Abroad,' p. 102 :ISBN 0345477170
"I think in this caseinternational law stood in the way of doing the right thing." (2003)
"And a year from now, I'll be very surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad that is named afterPresident Bush. There is no doubt that, with the exception of a very small number of people close toa vicious regime, the people ofIraq have been liberated and they understand that they've been liberated. And it is getting easier every day for Iraqis to express that sense of liberation."
Notes: from luncheon keynote speech, "Turkey at the Crossroads", September 22, 2003
Sometimes the things we have to do are objectionable in the eyes of others.
I’ve never thought much ofJoe Nye’s writings on soft power.
Dictators must have enemies. They must have internal enemies to justify theirsecret police and external enemies to justify theirmilitary forces.
2005 February 17 - In a debate with DNC ChairmanHoward Dean at Pacific University
I really don't have a solution. Except to say that a precondition for any solution must be a recognition on the part of all parties on the legitimacy of all parties. That is you cannot build a political agreement on the premise that a Jewish state inPalestine is illegitimate.
The programme of the BritishLabour Party underNeil Kinnock is so wildly irresponsible, so separate and apart from the historicNATO strategy, that I think a Labour government that stood by its present policies—and I rather doubt that they would—would, if it didn't destroy the Alliance, at least diminish its effective ability to do the task for which it was created.
The Times (25 September, 1986).
AboutGeorge W. Bush: "He came ill-equipped for the job and has failed to master it."
Source: "Perle Turns on Bush in Harsh Terms", by Nicholas Wapshott,New York Sun, May 15, 2007[1]
Notes: newspaper article reporting on Perle's statements at a meeting of theHudson Institute on May 14, 2007.
Jeremy Black,The Cold War: A Military History (2015)
That war in the early 1990s changed a lot for me. I never thought I would see, inEurope, a full-dress reprise of internment camps, themass murder of civilians, the reinstitution oftorture andrape as acts of policy. And I didn't expect so many of my comrades to be indifferent – or even take the side of thefascists. It was a time when many people on the left were saying 'Don't intervene, we'll only make things worse' or, 'Don't intervene, it might destabilise the region. And I thought – destabilisation of fascist regimes is a good thing. Why should theleft care about the stability of undemocratic regimes? Wasn't it a good thing to destabilise the regime ofGeneral Franco? It was a time when the left was mostly taking theconservative, status quo position – leave theBalkans alone, leaveMilosevic alone, do nothing. And that kind of conservatism can easily mutate into actual support for the aggressors.Weimar-style conservatism can easily mutate intoNational Socialism. So you had people likeNoam Chomsky's co-authorEd Herman go from saying 'Do nothing in the Balkans', to actually supporting Milosevic, the most reactionary force in the region. That's when I began to first find myself on the same side as the neocons. I was signing petitions in favour of action inBosnia, and I would look down the list of names and I kept finding, there's Richard Perle. There's Paul Wolfowitz. That seemed interesting to me. These people were saying that we had to act. Before, I had avoided them like the plague, especially because of what they said aboutGeneral Sharon and aboutNicaragua. But nobody could say they were interested inoil in the Balkans, or in strategic needs, and the people who tried to say that – like Chomsky – looked ridiculous. So now I was interested.
