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Unbowed: Richard Perle may have lost influence due to the Iraq War, but his view of the world has changed little.

FOREIGN POLICY: You’ve often been described as a neoconservative. What do people not understand about neoconservatism?

Richard Perle: It is a term that is applied almost at random. I’ve seen it applied to Dick Cheney to Don Rumsfeld and to Condi Rice. Those are examples where it clearly is wrong. To some people, it’s synonymous with supporters of the Bush administration or with important people within the administration. In some cases, particularly in the Middle East, it’s a code word for “Jew.” It’s frequently described as a movement, which it isn’t, or as an organization, which it isn’t. It’s associated somehow with Leo Strauss, which I think is wrong. It’s mindlessly pejorative; it implies that there is a group of people who all think the same way on one or more topics. It’s a term that is almost without meaning and is therefore not very useful.

FP: Iran has been behaving more aggressively recently and has vowed to continue with its uranium enrichment program, in defiance of the United Nations Security Council. How can Iran be stopped? Is military action inevitable?

RP: I don’t think it’s inevitable, but I don’t see the kind of concerted political action that would be a plausible alternative to military action. It astonishes me that we have no political strategy that entails working with the opposition and that reflects how unpopular the theocracy is. It’s a complete failure of imagination. We had such a strategy with Franco’s Spain, with Salazar’s Portugal, with Marcos’s Philippines, with Milosevic’s Yugoslavia, and with Poland during Solidarity. In Iran you have mullahs who are acting in a political capacity—who basically rule by force, with the backing of the Basij—and they ought to receive a political challenge. There are clerics in Iran, such as Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, who don’t like the theocracy. And there are lots of indications that a majority of the Iranian people, and certainly the overwhelming majority of young Iranians, identify with Western concepts of government. That is what they voted for when they brought Khatami to power. They were subsequently bitterly disappointed that Khatami’s accession to the presidency didn’t change anything. There is plenty of scope for a political strategy in Iran, and I think the Iranian mullahs fear it. They must wake up everyday saying to themselves, “I can’t understand why these Americans haven’t done anything to use our unpopularity against us.” They must be as puzzled as I am.

FP: How are we to understand Saudi Arabia’s increasingly assertive role in the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis? Is Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert right in being skeptical of Saudi mediation efforts?

RP: Absolutely. The Saudis are completely cynical on this. They couldn’t care less about whether Israel and the Palestinians reach an agreement. This more active Saudi policy is a reflection of Saudi fears, and it’s aimed at dealing with Saudi concerns, not Palestinian concerns or Israeli concerns or global concerns. The Saudis are motivated by self-interest, and even that has to be defined narrowly as the self interest of the House of Saud and the hangers-on who benefit from that dictatorship. They’re terrified of Iran and they’ve always been terrified of Iran. I went to Saudi Arabia in 1973, and all they talked about was the Iranian menace—so you can imagine how they feel about Ahmadinejad. Their current concern is that that Hezbollah, which is owned and operated by Iran, might emerge strong enough to take over Lebanon.

FP: What do you think of the Bush administration's recent agreement with North Korea? Do you agree with former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton that it's a bad deal, and that it "will inevitably fail,” as he told the American Enterprise Institute recently?

RP: Yes, I would agree with him. There’s a history of not being able to get reliable, predictable behavior out of the North Koreans. Just signing another piece of paper does not change that important fact. I doubt they would respect such an agreement for a minute longer than they thought it was in their interest to do so. Now, can we, with help from the Chinese and others, put enough pressure on the North Koreans so that they make modest curtailments of their program? Sure. But if we do, it will not be because we signed a piece of paper with them. Instead, it will be because we continued to be engaged in a deeply contentious manner with them and at any given moment we possess some means with which to influence them. So the agreement is not the significant thing, the question is whether we will have the leverage over the long term to prevent them from doing what they want to do.