half a million troops, the ultra-hawks, grouped around Perle, were touting a scheme to go in with a "light force" of 68,000 troops. (Perle told David Corn that we could do it with 40,000.) The Pentagon, already highly dubious about the plans for an immediate invasion, vetoed this harebrained scheme. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld split the difference between the ideologues and the old guard: we went in with 200,000-plus  and even that, as it turned out, isn’t going to be enough.

When voices of dissent were raised by senior military officers, who questioned the rationale for invading Iraq, Perle was contemptuously dismissive. As the [UK] Guardianreported at the time:

"Richard Perle, a Pentagon adviser and an advocate of an assault on Iraq, rejected the anxiety voiced as irrelevant. Thea pointed editorial the day before his resignation, the St. Petersburg Times named Perle as "the guru of the civilian ideologues who are the architects of the Bush administration’s Iraqi war plans" and the author, along with Vice President Dick Cheney, of "a vividly optimistic scenario" in which the Iraqis would take care of the Ba’athist regime with little help from the U.S. military:

"The lives of American soldiers are put at risk if our battlefield plans are based on the political assumptions of civilian ideologues instead of the expertise of our military leaders. Some of those ideologues within and outside the White House painted a scenario of an easy military victory in Iraq because it fit their broader political goals."

These goals included rushing us into war before the