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James Woolsey
Former Director, CIA
The Long War of the 21st century will be long decades, not years because of the nature of one of our three enemies. We are essentially at war with three totalitarian movements generated, most of them, in the early part of the 20th century in the Middle East. First, are the fascists: the Baathists of Iraq and Syria, and to some extent some of the other Arab nationalist movements such as Muammar Qaddafi's essentially fascist movements. The Baathists were modeled after the fascists when they were founded in the 1920s and 1930s. They act like fascists. But they have been dealt, assuming we succeed in Iraq, a very heavy blow. If you were Bashar al-Assad today, you would be shaking in Syria. There may be, if Iraq works out reasonably well over the course of the next few years, some cause to say that the fascist movements of the Middle East have been dealt a very heavy blow indeed.
The second two groups are both Islamist. When I use Islamist I mean a totalitarian movement masquerading as a religion. One of these totalitarian movements is the ruling circles in Tehran of Ali Khamenei and Ali-Akbar Rafsanjani, and those who followed Khomeini. They rule a country that is increasingly restive. Half of Iran is 19 and younger never knew the Shah. The 19-year-olds and younger are angry with these mullahs; the women are angry with them; and a large number of the Iranian clerics including several of the particularly more senior clerics, the Ayatollahs and Grand Ayatollahs in the holy city of Qum are quite hostile to the ruling circles of Iran. Their theocracy is at odds with the Shiite tradition, generally a tradition of separation of mosque and state. Also. it has been abominably unsuccessful and brutal. It is in violation with the mainline Shiite tradition, characterized by Ayatollah Sistani in Iraq, and historically has separated mosque and state. The rulers in Tehran and their instrumentalities, such as Hezbollah, are severe threats to their own people especially with nuclear weapons programs and to the peace of the Middle East. But they should feel somewhat like the inhabitants of the Kremlin in the mid-1980s or Versailles in the mid-1780s: The storm isn't overhead yet, but if they just look out on the horizon, they can probably see it gathering.
The reason this will be a long war is the third group, the Islamists from the Sunni side of Islam, with Al Qaeda as their cutting edge. They have strong ideological support, which is not there on the Shiite side of the division within Islam. Sunni Muslims for large stretches of their history have had the caliphate, the union of mosque and state. Bin Laden says that the darkest era in history for Islam was in the early 1920s Kemal Ataturk having disestablished the caliphate and setting up the secular, now democracy, Turkey.
The other reason Islamists from the Sunni side of Islam will be with us for a long time is that they're able to draw on the ideological support of the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia. The Wahhabis' relationship to the ruling family of Saudi Arabia is a complex and long one, going back into the 18th century, but these days it's quite close and collaborative. The Wahhabis are a very angry, hateful offshoot of the great religion of Islam. They bear about the same relationship to the generally just and fine teachings of Islam that Torquemada bore to the Sermon on the Mount.
In the late 1970s, two things happened within the thinking of the rulers of the Saudi Kingdom: They realized they had suddenly got very wealthy; and they realized they were very frightened. They're very wealthy because the oil spikes of the 1970s pushed their earning from foreign oil from about $2 billion a year at the beginning of the decade to some $20 billion at the end of the decade. They have been able to, and have spent, something like $70 billion through the Wahhabis in spreading their form of religion, so to speak, around the world.
They also got very frightened because the Shah fell to a Shiite Islamist movement, and because of the takeover of the Great Mosque in Mecca as part of a coup attemp by their own Islamists. The resolution of these vectors was to give the Wahhabis all the money they could want and encourage them to spread their hatred outside the Kingdom. The Saudis seem surprised these days if there has been some blowback from that hatred. They should not be surprised; it's understandable, if you set fires in all of your neighbors' yards in a hot California summer, you may get your own house caught on fire, and that is, ideologically, what the Saudis have been doing for some time.
I had a short debate at the Pentagon some months ago, with a Saudi spokesman, advisor of the crown prince. Before the debate, I went online and read some of the translations of what the Saudi religious ministry distributes in the world, when it distributes, week after week, the themes of the mosque sermons in the Kingdom. That particular week the main themes had been and this is distributed by the Saudi religious ministry, this is not some individual imam sounding off like, occasionally, an American fundamentalist preacher does and saying something ugly; this is government-sponsored dissemination to religious institutes in the United Sates, in Pakistan and throughout the world. The three main themes that week were: A) All Jews are pigs and monkeys; B) It is the obligation of all Muslims to hate and if appropriate possibly kill Christians and Jews; C) American women routinely sleep with their fathers and brothers, incest is a common way of life in the United States, and that just shows how rotten the Americans are.
We have Islamist movements trying to speak for that great religion and other, hundreds of millions of good and decent and reasonable Muslims who do not want to be terrorists, who do not want to live in totalitarian states resisting. In a sense, the reason this war will last so long is that we have been caught in the midst of this civil war within Islam. Why Are We at War?
Why did they decide to come at us? They decided, essentially, all three of these movements, at one time or another over the last quarter-century, for the same reason Hitler decided to declare war on us in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor: He knew he would have to face us eventually. We stood as the major barrier in the world to the Thousand Year Reich, and it was a war to the death. I fear to tell you this will be a war to the death. We will not end this by Al Qaeda producing a Gorbachev. This is more like the war with the Nazis than anything else.
Now, why? There are a couple reasons. The long-term reason was best summed up for me by a taxi driver in the District of Columbia two and a half years ago. It was February of '02 former President Clinton had given a speech the day before at Georgetown University in which he had implied, not exactly said, that 9/11 was in part a payback for American slavery and the treatment of the American Indian. I got in the taxi, saw right away that the cab driver was one of my favorite substitutes for public opinion polls; he was an older black guy, about my age, Redskins ball cap, picture of his family on the dashboard, had clearly been driving a cab in the District for a long time. I said, "I see your newspaper there in the front seat and what it's open to; did you read that article about president Clinton's speech?"
He said, "Oh, yeah." I said, "What did you think of it?" He said, "These people don't hate us for what we've done wrong; they hate us for what we do right."
I would submit, you can't do better than that. You, we, are hated not for our transgressions, but because of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, equal treatment of women well, not quite almost equal better than they do, anyway. We are hated for the best things about our society, not the worst.
Why they decided to come after us in recent years is in part a result of the history the bipartisan history of the last quarter-century in terms of dealing with the Middle East. We have done a reasonably thorough job, while not trying to, of creating the impression among the people of the Middle East that we do not give a damn about them; that we believe their role is to be quiet and subservient filling station attendants and to pump their petroleum for our SUVs; and that we are cowards. How in the world did we do that?
Assume Mr. Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's No. 2, is talking to a representative of Al Qaeda, of Iraq and of the governing circles of Iran a couple of years before 9/11. He is explaining why we need to move forward against the Americans. Imagine him saying: "The Americans in 1979, our brothers in Tehran seized their Embassy personnel as hostages, and what did they do? They tied yellow ribbons around trees. In 1982-83, our brother in Hezbollah in Lebanon blew up their Embassy and their Marine barracks, killed hundreds of them, and what did they do? They left. Throughout the '80s, we were able to launch attacks against them the Achille Lauro and others. Reagan dropped some bombs on Tripoli once, but other than that they sent not the aircraft carriers, but the lawyers. They dealt with this as if it was a law enforcement matter. They arrested a few small fries and prosecuted them. In 1991, the elder Bush had 500,000 troops in Iraq, he had done a very interesting job of rallying the world to throw Saddam out of Kuwait. Then they encouraged the Kurds and Shia to rebel against Saddam. And, the Kurds and Shia were succeeding in 15 of Iraq's 18 provinces. Then what did they do? The Americans signed a cease-fire agreement, letting the Republican Guard and its armed helicopters stay intact, and they stepped back and watched tens of thousands of Kurds and Shia be massacred. That should say very clearly that when the Americans are in the Middle East, once the oil of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait is safe, they do not give a damn about the people of the Middle East.
"In 1993, Saddam tried to assassinate the first Bush on a trip to Kuwait. Clinton fired two-dozen cruise missiles into an empty Iraqi intelligence headquarters in the middle of the night. It was a devastating response against Iraqi cleaning women and night watchmen, but not against our brother Saddam. In 1993, we helped shoot down their helicopters in Mogadishu, and what did they do? They left. Throughout the rest of the '90s, we succeeded in launching several effective terrorist attacks against them and, again, one launch of some cruise missiles into Afghanistan and Sudan in '98. Other than that, again they sent the lawyers, arrested a few small fries, one or two more senior of our terrorists. So I tell you, it is risk-free to attack these cowards, and they will have no support in the Middle East because they don't care about its people and they only care about its oil."
The ruling circles in Japan thought something rather similar about us in 1941, based on our behavior in the '20s and '30s. Just as after Pearl Harbor the Japanese were rather surprised at our response, so the military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq have surprised both the totalitarian Islamists and the fascists of the Middle East. But, you would have to admit that either my imaginary Zawahiri giving the advice I just gave or the advice that was given to the Japanese ruling circles to attack at Pearl Harbor had some evidence on their side.
How Do We Fight It?
We are children of Madison's Constitution and his Bill of Rights. We are not a race, a religion, a language; we are defined by our founding documents. We have to always keep that front and center. But the Constitution has been interpreted since the days of the Civil War as giving substantial authority to the president in wartime, especially and on some issues exclusively if he is supported by the Congress. If there's legislation, Congress can set up sundown provisions, such as those of the Patriot Act. It's important to realize also that Justice Robert Jackson, in an important Supreme Court decision, said that "the Constitution is not a suicide pact." We have the authority to take strong steps if need be, and we have historically, even when we have done that, gotten our liberties back, almost all of them, after wars. But, as we make decisions about things like, if you search one male from the Middle East on an airplane, do you really have to search ten other people, including white-haired grandmothers, for their fingernail clippers? If we opt for political correctness in all cases, to the extent that we make ourselves less than effective, we may be making it more likely that a terrorist act could succeed; that is bad enough because of the deaths and destruction. We're creating the risk that if there is another successful terrorist attack or worse, more than one the country could get very scared. And even this wonderful country, when it gets scared, can do ugly things.
In 1942, in this state, we built concentration camps for 120,000 Japanese Americans. The Japanese Americans were in them because of who they were, not what they had done. It was probably the single greatest infringement on civil liberties by the federal government in the 20th century in the United States. Three individuals were heavily responsible for that: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt; then-attorney general of California (running for governor) Earl Warren; and the Supreme Court justice who wrote the decision in Korematsu v. the United States that upheld the constitutionality of the camps, Hugo Black. Along with Martin Luther King Jr., Roosevelt, Warren and Black are three of the four greatest names in liberalism in 20th century America. Even they did it, because the country was scared.
We live in a society marked by hundreds of complex networks: the Internet; oil and gas pipelines; food production and delivery; the electricity grid. As these networks get more complex, people who write in chaos theory will tell you that they become more and more liable to fail as a result of random interference. Sometimes the random interference can be very small: last August, a tree branch fell on a power line in Ohio, and within minutes some 50 million consumers were out of electricity. I would call that kind of cascading effect from accidental interference a malignant effect. It's not what happened on 9/11.
A war is being fought here. Our soldiers, and to some extent our CIA and others, are used to, in fighting a war, putting themselves in the position of an enemy and figuring out what the enemy may do. We're not used to thinking that way about our infrastructure. We have to deal with both malignant and malevolent interference with our economy and our networks. Sometimes, if you fix one of these things, you don't fix the other. We have electricity grids that need spare transformers because transformers can be taken out and the grid could be in part taken down. We need an incentive system that provides for spare transformers. But, if you do what a lot of people do now and you have a spare transformer you put it right beside the existing transformer so it's easy to switch from one to the other, which makes sense as long as you're worried about accidental loss of power it's really stupid if you're worried about terrorism.
We don't get to say as a society, We're not interested in malevolent effects, we want to only work on the malignant ones. That's what I think sometimes our European friends do. But if you have a bias toward only working on malignant problems, you're not dealing with the whole world of today.
The War Abroad
I do not think we win this war unless and until we change the nature of the Middle East and its governments. Talk about a big job. In the 22 Arab states, according to a recent report by a group of Arab intellectuals to the UN, over half of the women are illiterate. Many of these states have oil money. Try to run a decent society where a mother can't read to her children, much less fulfill other obligations of citizenship. In those 22 states, there are no democracies. And 63 percent of the world is democratic states: 121 democracies, 89 operating under the rule of law, 32 electoral democracies with problems, such as Indonesia, with rule of law. The Arab world is completely out of the mainstream here. The majority of the world's Muslims live in democracies: Indonesia, Bangladesh, Turkey, Mali, Senegal, the huge Muslim population of India. We do not have a Muslim problem. We have a totalitarianism-coming-out-of -the-Middle East problem.
The other difficulty with the Arab world is that, if you add it and Iran together, their population approximates that of the U.S. and Canada. Other than oil and gas, they sell to the outside world less than Finland a country of 5 million people. Their economies are focused entirely on petroleum and gas production, and as a result they are not really building up the kind of middle class that one needs in order to contribute to the growth of a society that can operate under the rule of law and democratically.
The world in which we could say, We have written you off, you live under dictators or brutal kings, we don't care, we're not going to interfere, please just keep pumping your oil so we can drive our SUVs that world is gone with the wind. It was a world in which realpolitik was practiced. To some extent, we still need to practice realpolitik; we can't change the entire Middle East at once; we're going to have to get along with the Saudis, with all their problems, for a time, the way we got along with Stalin during World War II, because we had a more immediate problem: Adolf Hitler.
As we focus on these changes we need to make, we have to realize few of them will be brought about by force. As we've gone from 20 democracies in August of 1945 to 121 today, only three were done by American arms: South Korea was saved by U.S. forces, and after a 30-year delay with dictatorships; Panama; and Grenada. The rest of this spread of democracy in the world since 1945 has come about through all sorts of different ways. It was done under protection of American military power and alliances and deterrents and containment of the Soviet Union, but it was done by a lot of people. In Poland, the Pope and the AFL-CIO and its assistance to Solidarity were of crucial importance. In Spain, a brave king had a major role. In the Philippines, "People Power." Things changed, principally because, as we held our military enemies at bay, we convinced the good and decent people of the communist world that this was not a clash of civilizations, the United States against the Soviet Union, East against West. It was a war of freedom against tyranny, and we were on their side. In time, Lech Walesa, Vαclav Havel, Andrei Sakharov, Solidarity heard us, and joined us, and we won the Cold War, together with the people of the East. We have to do the same thing now.
We have to convince the hundreds of millions of good and decent Muslims in the world that we are on the same side. There's only one way we are going to be able to do that. We're going to have to say in the years to come, to the autocrats and monarchs, the non-constitutional monarchs of the Middle East: We understand when you say that you resent it that we come over here and try to tell you how to run things. We want you to understand we're not asking you to set up a government like ours; we just want governments that are responsive to their people, according to your own traditions. But responsive to your people doesn't mean that you get to make all of the decisions. You tell us that we're troublemakers and that you're very worried about what we're doing. You should be worried, because now, for the fourth time in 100 years, we're finally awake again and we're on the side of those whom you most fear: your own people.
