Some very interesting tidbits from Richard Perle's talk yesterday at my alma mater. On Ahmed Chalabi:

"Almost everything you've heard about [Chalabi] is false," Perle said. "The CIA, which doesn't like him, has been out of control on this issue."

Perle described Chalabi as a brilliant patriot who sacrificed a life of comfort in the United Kingdom for an active role in the rebuilding of Iraq.

"We should have handed him the keys the day Baghdad fell," Perle said.

On Iraq: 

"I think we made serious mistakes after the initial military action," Perle said. "It was a benign occupation but it was an occupation nonetheless, and people don't like to be occupied."

And finally, a passage that the left will no doubt view as confirmation of their deepest, darkest conspiracy theories about Iraq:

After Sept. 11, 2001, he said, the Defense Policy Board unanimously agreed that Iraq was one of the states most likely to supply terrorists with weapons of mass destruction. Perle said the U.S. government felt it could not tolerate that risk, no matter how improbable it seems in retrospect.

Most will recognize the Defense Policy Board as the roughly 30-member advisory group of former politicians, military officers, and defense experts chaired by Perle from 2001-2003 which many on the left firmly believe was ground zero for the hijacking of U.S. foreign policy by the neocon/Likudnik cabal.

In fact, DPB members who were part of the unanimous vote Perle refers to included former Democratic Speaker of the House Tom Foley, former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, Nobel Prize winning Professor Gary Becker, Helmut Sonnenfeldt of the Brookings Institution,  Henry Kissinger, Dan Quayle, Pete Wilson, and Tillie Fowler.