Though it's hard to recall now, there have been times during the past 25 years when conservative intellectuals were not drawing government salaries. Whenever they are out of power, they pay the bills by giving speeches, staffing right-wing think tanks, and pouring their Manichaean daydreams into pulp fiction.

Conservatives are prolific novelists, if not good ones. Since Sept. 11, 2001, reporters have handled the "factual" statements of the Bush camp with kid gloves, but literary critics long ago donned rubber gloves to dispose of his brain trust's admitted inventions. The ick factor is high, because these Friends of Bill Bennett aren't writing books of virtue. They're putting their steamy, bodice-ripping ids on paper. Why, for example, is there S&M in "1945," Newt Gingrich's 1995 fantasia about the World War II? "She rolled onto him," pants Newt (or, one hopes, ghostwriter William Forstchen), "and somehow was sitting athwart his chest . . . `Tell me or I will make you do terrible things."'

Sometimes these scenes appear to give a disturbing hint of what the authors may want outside the bedroom as well. Lynne (Mrs. Dick) Cheney's satirical third novel, "The Body Politic," concerns a Republican vice president who dies of a heart attack during sex with his mistress. His wife takes his job. "The Body Politic" was first published in 1988, around the time of Dick Cheney's third heart attack. It was rereleased during the recount drama in November 2000, right before the veep-to-be's fourth.

In such company, Richard Perle's out-of-print 1992 novel, "Hard Line," is notable for its chastity. There is no sex at all -- which is merciful, since this is the most thinly veiled of romans clef.

The glowering, caterpillar-browed Perle, a former assistant secretary of defense under Reagan, has long been known as the Prince of Darkness for his ber-hawkish views. He is also a gourmet chef. These days, when he isn't devouring coq au vin at his vacation home in Provence, he's serving on the Defense Policy Board, an influential civilian advisory panel to the Pentagon. Harvard professor Michael Waterman, the menschy hero of "Hard Line," is also a right-wing, Frenchified foodie with a No. 2 position at Defense, a house in Chevy Chase and a wife whose name begins with L. In early 2001, the New Yorker's Nicholas Lemann visited Perle at home and realized that the gurgling French stewpots in the lavishly appointed kitchen were straight out of the book.

What Lemann did not know at the time was just how realistic "Hard Line" would prove to be. The novel was meant as a roman clef of the Cold War. But it prefigures, in detail, the Bush administration's rationale for the invasion of Iraq.

When the book was published, reviewers recognized it as Perle's *self-congratulatory version of the 1986 Reykjavik arms-control summit -- "the struggle for a president's soul," as his alter ego Waterman puts it. It describes an imaginary arms-control summit in Helsinki, where Waterman/Perle prevents the dim, genial, and unnamed president (Reagan right down to the California ranch and the 3x5 cue cards) from being suckered by the Soviets. Charmed by Premier Novikov (i.e., Gorbachev), the president is on the verge of scrapping America's entire nuclear arsenal when Waterman and his small band of renegades convince him the Russians can't be trusted.

It is how Perle's alter ego saves the world that is so unnerving. The Reagan character is about to give away the store -- even the Strategic Defense Initiative -- when a breathless Waterman breaks in. He tells the president that Alexi Marensky, dissident scion of an important Russian family, has learned that Novikov has no intention of honoring an arms ban. The Soviets plan to hide 400 missiles, and components for hundreds more, in an operation code-named Deep Sleep.

The president's eyes went wide. "What?"

"I know it sounds fantastic, Mr. President. But that's what Alexi Marensky says. And I believe he's telling the truth."

The scenario described is eerily similar to how, 10 years after "Hard Line," Perle became one of the intellectual authors of the invasion of Iraq. For Alexi Marensky, insert Ahmed Chalabi, scion of an important Iraqi family. Chalabi, the Iraqi exile whose National Congress was supposed to ride to power on the heels of the Marines, has been close to Perle since they were introduced by neoconservative godfather Albert Wohlstetter in 1985. In the `90s Chalabi began telling Perle, and through him Perle's neocon cronies, that Saddam Hussein was hiding an enormous stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. In 1998, Donald Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith, and Paul Wolfowitz joined Perle in signing a letter to President Clinton demanding regime change in Iraq.

With a new Republican president, Perle and friends got jobs in Washington, and they got their war. But first, just as in "Hard Line," they had to override the objections of the weak-kneed appeasers of Foggy Bottom. In the book, the lead heavy at State even knows the Commies are hiding weapons, but tries to cover it up. The whole novel drips with contempt for those who would negotiate with evil, as the following exchange between Waterman and his sidekick, Parisi, indicate.

[Parisi] waggled his eyebrows in a full Groucho. "And do we get to screw the exalted Department of State?"

The parallels between Perle's book and our present reality go on and on, and range from the trivial to the troubling. The secretary of defense, la Rumsfeld, is a Midwesterner with glasses who wrestled for an Ivy League college. The fictional Perle, Michael Waterman, loves talking to reporters off the record, especially an "old friend" named Ove Anders. This past fall, Dana Milbank of The Washington Post named Perle (long said to be a confidant of Washington Post columnist Robert Novak) as the prime leak suspect in Novak's outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame. The leaker's identity has been taken up by an independent prosecutor.

What matters most, however, is the plot of "Hard Line." It's been swallowed whole by a man who doesn't read books, much less write them. With Bush at the helm, it's Richard Perle's novel -- we're just living in it.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2004/01/11/perles_pulp_fiction/