Whenever members of this Washington clique are confronted with their economic interests in the wars they support, they invariably respond the way Perle did: the entire suggestion is preposterous, simple-minded, vaguely terrorist. The neocons—a group that includes Cheney, Rumsfeld, Shultz, Jackson and, I would argue, Kissinger—take great pains to project themselves as egghead intellectuals or hawkish realists, driven by ideology and big ideas, not anything so worldly as profit.
