The ship is leaving the sinking rats

The biggest of the rats -- the one who was most often found scuttling through darkened and dimly lit back corridors -- is playing the game called CYA.

Richard Perle, one of the major players in the mob that created the debacle of death, despair and degradation we know as Operation Iraqi Freedom, is moonwalking away from the mess he helped make, backing up, sliding away in reverse without admitting it like a cat who's losing a fight, or, more properly, a war criminal innocently stating: "Who me? I vass neffer a member of the party."

Just to be clear -- he is no relation to this Saintperle, and I have often thought, not even a close relation to what we like to think of a homo sapiens.

In his statement today, as quoted in an article in the Toronto Star, the man the neocons called "The Prince of Darkness" smiled sweetly and innocently and said:

"I would be the first to acknowledge we allowed the liberation (of Iraq) to subside into an occupation. And I think that was a grave error, and in some ways a continuing error," said Perle, former chair of the influential Defence Policy Board, which advises the Pentagon.

With violent resistance to the U.S.-led occupation showing no signs of ending, Perle said the biggest mistake in post-war policy "was the failure to turn Iraq back to the Iraqis more or less immediately.

"We didn't have to find ourselves in the role of occupier. We could have made the transition that is going to be made at the end of June more or less immediately," he told BBC radio, referring to the U.S. and British plan to transfer political authority in Iraq to an interim government on June 30.

One interpretation of that statement would either be something like: "If you hadn't dumped me because of my grotesquely overt conflicts of interest, you wouldn't be in this mess today."

Another way of interpreting the statement would be Perle saluting the White House and Department of Defense, and shouting: "You threw me out and now it's all yours -- SO LONG SUCKERS!"