Richard Perle Quotations

Dictators must have enemies. They must have internal enemies to justify their secret police and external enemies to justify their military forces.

If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy but just wage a total war, our children will sing great songs about us years from now.

The jealousy and resentment that animate the terrorists also affect many of our former cold war allies.

National sovereignty is an obligation as well as an entitlement. A government that will not perform the role of a government forfeits the rights of a government.

No operational commander should have to assign a soldier a task that could be done as well by a computer, a remote sensor, or an unmanned airplane.

Law-abiding citizens value privacy. Terrorists require invisibility. The two are not the same, and they should not be confused.

Right now, American law bars the admission of aliens suspected of terrorist activity - but not of terrorist sympathies.

Dictatorships start wars because they need external enemies to exert internal control over their own people.

We may be so eager to protect the right to dissent that we lose sight of the difference between dissent and subversion.

Few governments in the world, for example, praise human rights more ardently than does the government of France, and few have a worse record of supporting tyrants and killers.

The lax multiculturalism that urges Americans to accept the unacceptable from their fellow citizens is one of this nation's greatest vulnerabilities in the war on terror.

But if the UN cannot or will not revise its rules in ways that establish beyond question the legality of the measures the United States must take to protect the American people, then we should unashamedly and explicitly reject the jurisdiction of these rules.

In time, all of Korea will be united in liberty.

Acknowledge that a more closely integrated Europe is no longer an unqualified American interest.

Sometimes the things we have to do are objectionable in the eyes of others.

To stop terrorists before the strike, we must do three things: deny them entry into the country, curtail their freedom of action inside the country, and deprive them of material and moral support from within the country.

George Tenet has been the director of central intelligence since 1997, time enough to have changed the Agency's culture. He has failed. He should go.

In any event, the problem in Iran is much bigger than weapons. The problem is the terrorist regime that seeks the weapons. The regime must go.

The same European governments that hesitated to confront terrorists were more than prepared to oppose us.

We must do our utmost to preserve our British ally's strategic independence from Europe.

We should force European governments to choose between Paris and Washington.

Nor should we exclude the possibility that Islamic terrorism may begin to make common cause with Western political extremists of the far Left and far Right.

Non-citizen terrorist suspects are not members of the American national community, and they have no proper claim on the rights Americans accord one another.

There is no doubt that, with the exception of a very small number of people close to a vicious regime, the people of Iraq have been liberated and they understand that they've been liberated.

But even a nation of laws must understand the limits of legalism. Between 1861 and 1865, the government of the United States took tens of thousands of American citizens prisoner and detained them for years without letting any one of them see a lawyer.

France has aligned itself with Saddam -- there's no other way to look at this.

I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing.

Look, he's trying to change an institution that is very set in its ways and that's not easy. You've got some disgruntled former officers. It's no big deal.

The problem is the message, ... The message is confused and inconsistent. It posits a problem, but does not provide a convincing solution. Only if the problem and the solution are in balance can they hope to convince a skeptical public.

We can train Iraqi soldiers to combat insurgencies while respecting human rights, as we have trained armies in the Philippines and Latin America.

What's the big fuss about preemption? You'd shoot first if someone was planning to shoot you right?

The situation in Bosnia is such that a safe withdrawal of American forces can be made effective. The scale of the problem is now such that it is entirely manageable by the Europeans.

President Chirac has said Saddam Hussein was his friend -- a friend, one of the most brutal dictators in this world?

a formal warning that the agency's enforcement staff has determined that evidence of wrongdoing is sufficient to bring a civil lawsuit.

After 9/11, there was an awakening. The administration has to believe that it's possible to wait too long to deal with a problem, the contours of which could have been seen easily before. Is it safe to do that again?

It's Saddam Hussein's style of justice, and it's appalling.

The attack would be over before anybody knew what had happened.

The FBI must return to the job it does best: catching criminals. It should be fired from the counterterrorism job it has bungled, and its counterterrorism units and employees should be reassigned to a new domestic intelligence agency.

In the Middle East, democratization does not mean calling immediate elections and then living with whatever happens next.

The Europeans don't like the president's style. But they have carried this disapproval of the president's style to an extreme.

The committee almost never met, and when it deliberated it was usually at a fairly low bureaucratic level, I think it's a bit of a joke.

The CIA is blinded, too, by the squeamishness that many liberal-minded people feel about noticing the dark side of third world cultures.

For us, terrorism remains the great evil of our time, and the war against this evil, our generation’s great cause … There is no middle way for Americans: it is victory or holocaust.

I think there is a potential civic culture in Arab countries that can lead to democratic institutions and I think Iraq is probably the best place to put that proposition to the test Well, you're going to find a disproportionate number of Jews in any sort of intellectual undertaking.

The programme of the British Labour Party under Neil Kinnock is so wildly irresponsible, so separate and apart from the historic NATO 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.

When you gaze into souls, it's something you should update periodically, because souls can change.

These are lies, there is not a word of truth in them.

Iraq is a very wealthy country. Enormous oil reserves. They can finance, largely finance, the reconstruction of their own country. And I have no doubt that they will.

No one is talking about occupying Iraq for five to ten years.

Even now, the irony that so non-intellectual a man should choose to engage the Soviet Union on the battlefield of ideas has eluded most commentators and historians.

Support for Saddam, including within his military organization, will collapse after the first whiff of gunpowder.

I think we have an administration today that is dysfunctional. And if it can't get itself together to organize a serious program for finding nuclear material on its way to the United States, then it ought to be replaced by an administration that can.