Rick Perry has yet to launch his 2012 presidential campaign, but his meeting in Austin last week, reported in National Review and elsewhere, with a set of Republican foreign policy hands seems to offer a glimpse at his emergent platform. Perry reportedly met former Bush aides Doug Feith and William Luti, both strong internal backers of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, Daniel Fata, whose article today is headed, "Why Iraq Still Matters."
The names of invitees to the Wednesday briefing — and impressions from attendees at the meeting —suggested to GOP foreign policy hands that Perry will likely stand on the hawkish side of a foreign policy divide inside the Republican Party.
"These are staunch internationalists, conservatives — very much guys who are committed to victory in the conflicts we are engaged in," said a leader of that wing of the party, which is sometimes called, or calls itself, neoconservative. "These are not the sort of pople Huntsman or Mitch Daniels or even Bachmann would reach out to."
UPDATE: Former George W. Bush NSC aide William Inboden, whom NRO said met with Perry, in fact did not. A source tells me he met with Perry's staff.
