In the Footsteps of Tocqueville (Part IV)

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A Conversation with Richard Perle

Stylish furniture.

A picture of Arthur Rimbaud on the wall.

A big, rustic kitchen that appears to be one of his favorite rooms—perhaps a discreet homage to Albert Wohlstetter, his intellectual master, whose fiercest passions, they say, included the culinary arts as well as math and strategic planning.

A lot of books, a lot of objects and knickknacks, some of them brought back from the south of France, where this hawk famous for his Francophobia, this man who declared at the height of the tension between Presidents Bush and Chirac that France had "aligned itself with Saddam" and is "no longer the ally it once was," actually has a second home.

As he makes coffee, we begin talking about the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, whose work he seems to know.

I ask Perle if it is true that his first calling was literature, and that his dream as a young man was to teach a course not on international strategy but on Joyce and the genesis of Finnegans Wake. He shrugs his shoulders a little sadly, but doesn't answer.

We talk about Tocqueville, and he points out, annoyed, that we shouldn't exaggerate; my compatriot certainly didn't foresee everything that has happened to the United States in the past century, and he overlooked America's quasi-religious belief in a mission—which, according to Perle, the Founding Fathers clearly evinced.

And here we are, facing each other in this garden covered with dead leaves and bathed in sunlight, outside his quaint house in Maryland, where he's been spending most of his time ever since allegations of a conflict of interest forced him to resign from his chairmanship of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board (he later left the board altogether). Here, sitting on a simple wooden bench, his face sagging and tired, his eyes terribly wrinkled, wearing one of those gray shirts with white collars that I've noticed in most of his photos but which he is wearing now without a tie—here is the great architect of American policy in Iraq, out of a job.

Where does he stand now?

What does he say two years later about this war that he and his friend Paul Wolfowitz helped chart, which is eliciting condemnation or debate throughout the world?

To my great surprise, Perle begins by giving vent to reservations about the way the whole thing has been conducted.

He denies, by the way, having been the architect I call him; he insists that he has never, alas, been in a position to decide anything; and he begins by telling me, imitating "our friend Althusser," about all the things that "cannot last any longer"—not, this time, in the Communist Party but in America's war policy in Iraq.

He regrets, for instance, that there weren't more Iraqi troops alongside the Americans from the beginning.

He still has confidence in Ahmed Chalabi, who was also a disciple of Wohlstetter's, and he maintains that Chalabi refuses to transform himself into a manipulative, unscrupulous, venal politician like everyone else in Washington now.

What's more, he grumbles, fiddling with his shirt collar as if the mere idea of it were suffocating him—what's more, he thinks today that the administration committed a major mistake, and that this mistake was neglecting to be sure of the support of the local armed forces from the beginning, as was done in Afghanistan. "We needed scouts," he says angrily. "Iraqi scouts, and that's why, even though we started out as liberators, we're turning into an occupying force."

About the basic principle, though, of the validity of the war itself; about the appropriateness of the choice that right after 9/11 consisted of targeting Saddam Hussein and bringing him down; about the political aim, then and now, of establishing democracy, in this country martyred and abandoned by the West, in this land of suffering and of methodically ignored mass graves, Perle hasn't changed one iota. And I even have the feeling that his recovered freedom of speech only makes him more eloquent in hammering home his conviction that no source of disorder or insecurity in this world is worse than the existence of dictatorships and our indulgence of them.

This conversation has the effect of reviving my old questions not about the war itself—of which I disapproved from the first day, and of which my analysis hasn't varied at all—but about these strange characters whom we in France stubbornly persist in demonizing ("princes of darkness") or ridiculing with simplistic epithets ("neo-cons," which can also mean, in French, "neo-dummies"), but who aren't quite as uni-dimensional as they may seem.

Sometimes, listening to this Bush follower who, among other peculiarities, has remained a registered Democrat and boasts about it, I say to myself, Of course he's right. How can one be against the overthrow of such a tyrant? How can one spend a lifetime, as I have done, deploring the inaction of rich countries, their pusillanimity, their recurrent Munichism when faced with enemies bent on destroying them and willing to try anything to acquire the means of doing so, and not be delighted when in the most powerful democracy in the world there finally appears a generation of intellectuals who get close to the top and concretely work for the universalization of human rights and freedom?

But then other times I catch a word, an intonation, an offhand phrase, implying that the actual presence or absence in Baghdad of weapons of mass destruction isn't so important after all. Or I hear a dismissal of people who, like me, recoil from the idea of a preventive war as being similar to a man who waits till he's sick to sign up for health insurance. Or I hear something that I interpret as a condemnation of the Geneva road map advocating a division of land between Israelis and Palestinians, which I ardently support. It's a slight hint of populism, a sudden frivolity, a reaction like that of an outraged old conservative when he asks me if Althusser paid the penalty for strangling his wife and I tell him no, a small cabal of people at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, where he taught, managed to protect him and keep him from going to jail. Or I hear an unfair phrase about John Kerry or his wife. So I swing over to the other side; I rear back internally; I tell myself that this man and I surely don't belong to the same family.

That's where I stand …

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Bernard-Henri Lévy is a writer and philosopher who lives in Paris. He is the author of many books, including Barbarism With a Human Face, Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, and War, Evil, and the End of History. This is the fourth of several articles.