The Vision Men

Early in his tenure as chairman of the Defense Policy Board, Richard Perle spent the better part of a New York-to-Washington flight pestering a Japanese businessman to invest in his new firm Trireme. A colleague of Perle's on the defense board was seated behind them on the same flight.

The exchange involved known knowns, to borrow a phrase from Perle's friend Donald Rumsfeld, and unknown unknowns. One of the known knowns to the Japanese businessman was that as Defense Policy Board chairman, Perle had an inside line on America's future defense needs -- handy information for the head of a security-oriented investment firm like Trireme.

Another known known, this one the board member’s, was that Perle was at that moment not passing the sniff test. The Defense Policy Board, which is supposed to serve as a broad-based advisory council for the defense secretary, has strayed far from its nonpartisan mission, stocked as it is with partisan hawks like Newt Gingrich and Perle whose far-right views mirror Rumsfeld's own. But Perle's position still carried with it ethical considerations, among them the responsibility not to profit from his appointment by doing things like pimping his insider status at the Pentagon to potential investors for personal enrichment.

The unknown unknown, from Perle's point of view, was that his fellow board member was sitting behind him. Upon landing and discovering this discomfiting fact, Perle hurried to explain that it wasn't what it sounded like, really it wasn't ... Within two years, though, Perle was busted by the press doing the same thing, only carrying it out to fruition. He stepped down from the chairmanship in March 2003 when the story broke that he had exploited his position on the board to win $100 million in Trireme investments, this time from a Saudi businessman and his friends. The meeting had been arranged by a middleman in the Iran/Contra affair.

The airplane story, told to author William Hartung by the backseat board member, is one of dozens of accounts of shenanigans, cronyism and warmongering in How Much Are You Making on the War, Daddy?: A Quick and Dirty Guide to War Profiteering in the Bush Administration (2004, Nation Books/Avalon). What emerges from Hartung's analysis is a portrait of an entrenched cadre that has been biding its time since the Cold War, waiting for a sympathizer to make it into the White House so the group can advance its agenda of lasting American global dominance through overwhelming military might. Some are motivated by greed, others by ideology, but this is the goal.

They're making progress, by the way. Not including the cost of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush's proposed 2005 budget allocates $401.7 billion to defense -- $100 billion more than when he took office -- and a 13 percent increase in funding for missile defense.

The main characters in Hartung's book are Vice President Dick Cheney, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Perle and Frank Gaffney of the right-wing think tank Center for Security Policy, neoconservatives all. Hartung visits their younger selves in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations and traces their careers in the defense industry and at think tanks like CSP and the American Enterprise Institute during the Clinton years. He also chronicles numerous examples of unsavory activity since they reentered the halls of power and the Iraq war began.

Hartung, a senior research fellow at the New School's World Policy Institute, has plucked much of his material from newspapers and magazines, and many of the stories will be familiar to readers. There's the infamous no-bid contract for Halliburton -- which still pays its old boss Dick Cheney $150,000 a year in deferred compensation -- that could rake in as much as $7 billion over the next two years to fight oil fires in Iraq and rebuild the oil infrastructure. When outraged critics insisted part of the contract be put up again for a proper bidding process, the Army sped up the timetable so that Halliburton was paid for much of the work anyway.