Richard Perle is a prominent neoconservative — a lifelong Democrat who became a major adviser to the George W. Bush White House. John Kiriakou relays a famous story that on September 12, 2001, Perle went to Dick Cheney and said the United States had to invade Iraq — planting the seed even though there was never any evidence Saddam Hussein had anything to do with 9/11, and Osama bin Laden in fact hated Saddam.[1][2] Kiriakou has repeated this account across several interviews: that Perle was the first person to vocalize the idea, going to the White House the day after (or, in some tellings, on) September 12, 2001, to argue the U.S. had to attack Saddam Hussein rather than focus on Osama bin Laden or al-Qaeda — step one, in Kiriakou’s telling, toward an eventual second step of overthrowing the Iranian government.[3][4][5][6]
Kiriakou also places Perle within a specific ideological lineage: alongside Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol, Perle worked in the 1970s and ’80s for Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, a militarist, staunchly Zionist Democrat from Washington State who ran for president in 1976. When Jackson died, Kagan and Kristol moved into Republican think tanks, but Kiriakou notes that Perle alone never changed his party registration and remains a Democrat to this day.[7][6]