Richard Perle has almost always gone along with the Bush administration's policies.

But now the longtime neoconservative policy wonk is trying to get in on an oil-drilling deal with Iraqi Kurds despite the administration's public opposition to such deals there.

Perle, one of the most influential proponents of 2003 invasion of Iraq, is in talks to join a consortium of investors with the Kurdish Regional Government, today's Wall Street Journal reports.

The Bush administration has publicly discouraged energy firms from making unilateral deals with Iraqi Kurds until after Iraq's federal government in Baghdad agrees to a law for sharing future revenues. Disagreements over oil money have inflamed sectarian tensions in Iraq and undermined political unity.

But investigators are looking into whether the Bush administration privately gave the go-ahead to energy firms seeking the lucrative deals with the Kurds.

The Journal reports that Perle is talking with a Turkish firm, AK Group International, and also a representative from the government of Kazakhstan. They are targeting the co-called "K18 concession" which is near the city of Erbil and is estimated to hold 150 million or more barrels of oil.

Houston-based Endeavour International would conduct the exploration and drilling, according to the Journal.

During the run-up to the Iraq war, Perle was chairman of the Defense Policy Board, which advises the Pentagon. He is currently a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank in Washington.

This week, we learned that the White House knew about last year's deal between Texas-based Hunt Oil and the Kurdish Regional Government.

Apparently the threat it posed to the fragile negotiations in Baghdad didn't concern the president as much as he suggested in public.

The Kurds have made a lot of friends in Washington during the past few years -- especially among Republicans.

It's a relationship that's bolstered by aggressive lobbying by the Kurds. The Kurdish Regional Government has 11 active contracts with U.S. lawyers and lobbyists, according to the State Department's database maintained under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The Kurds have been shelling out far more money on K Street than any other group or government in Iraq.

A key ally for the Kurds is the firm Barbour Griffith Rogers, the lobbying shop founded by Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, formerly head of the Republican National Committee. BGR receives $700,000 a year from the Kurdish Regional Government. Their agreement says the firm will "arrange meetings" with U.S. media and government officials.

The firm has a separate agreement with the Kurdistan Democratic Party for a $262,500 annual fee, according to the FARA database.

The Kurdish Regional Government also has a deal with the Republican-linked firm Russo, March and Rogers for running a "media campaign" and a "public relations campaign."

The Washington Post last year also noted the Kurds efforts to reach out to evangelical Christians.

In the past year, the Kurds have spent more than $3 million to retain lobbyists and set up a diplomatic office in Washington. They are cultivating grass-roots advocates among supporters of President Bush's war policy and evangelicals who believe that many key figures in the Bible lived in Kurdistan. And they are seeking to build an emotional bond with ordinary Americans, like those forged by Israel and Taiwan, by running commercials on national cable news channels to assert that even as Iraq teeters toward a full-blown civil war, one corner of the country, at least, has fulfilled the Bush administration's ambition of a peaceful, democratic, pro-Western beachhead in the Middle East.

The Kurds are probably watching this year's campaign very closely.

As we reported earlier, Chairman Waxman of the House Oversight Committee claimed today that the Bush Administration knew about the Hunt Oil deal way before it happened-- something the administration has denied regularly.

According to Waxman, there were nearly a dozen contacts between various levels of the administration and Hunt Oil as the deal was taking place. Hunt regularly informed the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board of his intentions to seek a deal with the Kurdistan government. Management at Hunt also regularly met and communicated with the U.S. Regional Reconstruction Team (RRT), as well as State Department personnel.

So let's go through a little time line of the events and communication leading up to Sept. 8, 2007-- the day the Hunt Oil deal was finalized with the Kurdistan government.

June 12 and 15: Hunt Oil officials meet with officials from the RRT for the Kurdistan region, "to investigate investment prospects" in the Kurdish region. Hunt Oil General Manager Ken McDonald, asks RRT members if the deal between Hunt Oil and Kurdistan is in violation of U.S. policy:

I specifically asked if the USG had a policy toward companies entering into contracts with the KRG and [redacted] replied that there was no policy, neither for nor against.

July 12, 2007: Ray Hunt, president and CEO of Hunt Oil sends a letter to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, letting them know he is pursuing an oil deal in Kurdistan:

We were approached a month or so ago by representatives of a private group in Kurdistan as to the possibílity of our becoming interested in that region. We had one team of geoscientists travel to Kurdistan several weeks ago and were encouraged by what we saw. We have a larger team going back to Kurdistan this week but who they will actually meet with while they are there and what the relationships of those people might be with the Government of Kurdistan are both unclear at this time.

August 2007: Hunt Oil representatives exchange a series of emails with State Department personnel discussing their return to Kurdistan.

August 30, 2007: Ray Hunt sends another letter to the Advisory Board to let them know he will be in Kurdistan the week of September 3:

While my schedule is still fluid, there is a high likelihood that I will meet with President Masoud Barzani, the Prime Minister, the Oil Minister and various other individuals associated with the government of Kurdistan.

September 5, 2007: McDonald informs the RRT in Erbil that "Hunt is expecting to sign an exploration contract" with the Kurdistan Regional Government. That same day, the RRT leader sends an e-mail summary of the meeting to the Embassy in Baghdad and the State Department headquarters in Washington. A second synopsis of the meeting is sent to the Embassy in Baghdad in a situation report the following day.

September 8, 2007: The Hunt Oil contract is finalized with the Kurdistan Regional Government.

September 13, 2007: A State Department official contacts Hunt Oil to describe another "good opportunity for Hunt" in Iraq, prompting a Hunt Oil official to write Ray Hunt: "This is really good for us. . .I find it a huge compliment that he is 'tipping' us off about this . . .This is a lucky break."

As we reported, the RAND Corporation, released a long quashed critical report yesterday on the role of the White House, Defense Department and State Department in Iraq.

"After Saddam: Prewar Planning and the Occupation of Iraq" was put on the RAND Corporation website late Monday. The New York Times dug into more detailed excerpts in a Blog post from their Baghdad Bureau.

The report confirms much of the conventional wisdom of our failures there, as well as what has said by military leaders-- that after the fall of Saddam Hussein there were too few people, and not enough planning.

But not for lack of trying. The report states that while there was "a range of possible postwar challenges" and "suggested strategies for addressing them," "few if any, made it into the serious planning phases" to be incorporated into Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Like the most recent study released by the Army, the RAND report also lays blame on Gen. Tommy Franks and his inopportune decision to restructure the operations in Iraq after the fall of Saddam-- a tactic that made creating a "stable, reasonably democratic Iraq" more "difficult to achieve."

On the role of the DOD in the chaos surrounding post-Saddam Iraq, the report faults the decision to make the Department of Defense the lead agency in 2003:

While this may have made sense in theory, it did not work in practice. . . DoD's lack of capacity for civilian reconstruction planning and execution continued to pose problems throughout the occupation period.

The report also comes down hard on the "Future of Iraq" project designed by the State Department:

Press reports have widely described the Future of Iraq project as a State Department "plan" for the reconstruction of Iraq. Such a characterization is unwarranted. Plans require a concrete set of prioritized steps that should be taken in a given situation, and a plan ideally assigns responsibility for each of those steps. The Future of Iraq project did not contain any such prioritization; it was not something that could be taken off the shelf and immediately executed.