January 2003 Mfg.Trust

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This month – World War IV

An address delivered at the Restoration Weekend
by R. James Woolsey 16 November 2002 

See the Resources Page for this Story 

Editor's Preface:

2003 marks a New Year for all of us, an opportunity to reflect and renew. This month’s thought provoking feature by R. James Woolsey provides truly exceptional opportunities to do just that – reflect and renew. Mr. Woolsey is a former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, a renowned scholar and author. His speech below was presented at the Restoration Weekend sponsored by the Center for the Study of Popular Culture on November 16, 2002.

The sparkling clarity of Woolsey’s arguments illuminates the situation in the Middle East, contrasting the reality with what the popular press provides us of the events, with a critical historical perspective. Mr. Woolsey then discusses our country’s critical infrastructure. It has been put together with a sense of openness and ease of access but not a thought of resilience in the face of terrorism. Finally, again drawing on historical arguments, he concludes with an assessment of how we should conduct ourselves abroad.

This topic is a change from our normal Mfg.Trust feature, but we believe this wake-up call is too important to miss. Mfg.Trust often illustrates how new threats impact your everyday life through specific practical examples. This month we illustrate how new threats impact your everyday life through global processes. We hope you enjoy the change of viewpoint.

This speech is longer than our normal article. We moved ancillary material to links on our Resources Page. Visit http://trust.ncms.org, and select the Publications Index tab to fins Congressman Bob Barr’s introduction of James Woolsey, and a provocative Q&A session.

Mr. Woolsey’s speech is reproduced with permission from the Center for the Study of Popular Culture. We encourage you to learn more about that organization at www.frontpagemag.com. NCMS is appreciative of their generosity, and also the courtesies extended us by Mr. Woolsey’s office.

John Sheridan (johns@ncms.org)

WORLD WAR IV

An address delivered at the Restoration Weekend
by R. James Woolsey 16 November 2002 

I have adopted Eliot Cohen's formulation, the distinguished professor at Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies, that we are in World War IV, World War III having been the Cold War. I think Eliot's formulation fits the circumstances much better than describing this as a war on terrorism.

Let me say a few words about who our enemy is in this World War IV, why they're at war with us and (now) we with them, and how we have to think about fighting it both at home and abroad.

First of all, who are they? There are at least three movements, all coming out of the Middle East. The interesting thing is that they've been at war with us for years. The first was the Islamist Shi'a, the ruling clerics, the Mullahs, of Iran. They are a definite minority of the Iranian Shi'ite clerics, but they constitute the ruling force in Iran, they back Hezbollah, and they have been at war with us for nearly a quarter of a century. They seized our embassy personnel as hostages in 1979 in Tehran. They blew up our embassy and our Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983. And they have conducted a wide range of terrorist acts against the United States for something now close to a quarter of a century.

The second group is the fascists -- and I don't use that as an expletive -- the Ba'athist parties of Iraq, and really Syria as well, are essentially fascist parties. They are modeled after the fascist parties of the '30s. They're totalitarian, they're anti-Semitic, they're fascist.

The Ba'athists in Iraq have been at war with us for over a decade. For Saddam, the Gulf War never stopped. He says it never stopped. He behaves as if it never stopped. He tried to assassinate former President Bush in 1993 in Kuwait. He has various ties, generally not amounting to direction and control, but various associations with different terrorist groups over the years, including al-Qaeda. He shoots at our aircraft, again yesterday, over the no-fly zones. He's still at war. He signed a cease fire agreement which he's not observing, and that should make it even clearer that he is still at war with us. And he has been for over 11 years.

The third group, and the one that caused us finally to notice this war, is the Islamist Sunni. And this is, I think, likely to be the most virulent and long-lasting of the three groups that are at war with us -- they will be at war with us, I think, for a long time. The Wahhabis, the religious movement in Saudi Arabia dating back to the 18th century, were joined in the '50s and '60s by immigration into Saudi Arabia by Islamists, or a more modern stripe of essentially the same ideology, many of them coming from Egypt. And the very fundamentalist - actually "Islamist", I think, is the best formulation -- groups of this sort, for some time more or less focused on attacking what they call "the near enemy": the Mubarak regime in Egypt, and to some extent, the Saudi royal family. The attack in 1979 on the great mosque in Mecca is one example. They were focusing on the near enemy until some time in the mid-1990's. Around then they decided to turn their concentration and effort against what they call "the Crusaders and the Jews", namely us. And they have been at war with us since about 1995, give or take a year or so, as evidenced by several well-known terrorist incidents, including an attack on a reserve facility in Saudi Arabia that killed Americans, the East African Embassy bombings, the Cole, and, of course, September 11th.

What is different after September 11th is not that these three groups came to be at war with us. They've been at war with us for some time. It's that we finally, finally, noticed and decided, at least in part, that we are also at war with them.

I think of these three groups as more or less analogous to three mafia families. They do hate each other and they do kill each other from time to time. But they hate us a great deal more and they're perfectly willing and perfectly capable of assisting one another in one way or another, including assistance between the Iraqi Ba'athists and al-Qaeda.

If that's whom we're at war with, why? Why did they decide to come after us? I think there are two basic reasons.

The first, and the underlying one, was best expressed to me last January by a D.C. cab driver. Now, I resolutely refuse - since, unlike many of you, I'm not involved in elective politics, I can afford to do this -- to read any articles about public opinion polls. And with the time I save I talk to D.C. cab drivers. Talking to cab drivers is both more enjoyable and, I think in many ways, a much better finger on the pulse of the nation than reading about polls. Well I got into a cab last January the day after former President Clinton gave a speech at Georgetown University in which he implied -- he didn't exactly say, but pretty well implied -- that one reason we were attacked on September 11th, was because of American slavery before 1865 and because of our treatment of the American Indian over the years.

As I got into the cab, I saw that the driver was one of my favorite varieties of D.C. cab drivers: an older, black American, apparently a long-term resident of D.C., a guy about my age. The Washington Times was open in the front seat to the story of the President's speech. So as I got in, I said to the cab driver, "I see your paper in the front there. Did you read that piece about President Clinton's speech yesterday?"

He said, "Oh, yeah."

I said, "What did you think about it?"

He said, "These people don't hate us for what we've done wrong. They hate us for what we do right."

You can't do better than that. We're hated because of freedom of speech, because of freedom of religion, because of our economic freedom, because of our equal -- or at least almost equal -- treatment of women, because of all the good things that we do. This is like the war against Nazism. We are hated because of the best of what we are.

But even if hated, why attacked? Well, I would suggest that we have for much of the last quarter of the century -- not all, but much -- been essentially hanging a "Kick Me" sign on our back in the Middle East. We have actually given substantial evidence of being what bin Laden has called a paper tiger.

My friend, Tom Moorer, a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, maybe known to some of you here, was a young naval officer in World War II. Just after the war he participated in the interrogations of Prince Konoye and several of the handful of Japanese leaders who were eventually hanged after war crimes trials. And the interrogation team he was with asked all of them, "Why did you do it. Why did you attack us at Pearl Harbor?" Tom once told me that they all said pretty much the same thing. They said, essentially, "We looked at what you were doing in the '20s and '30s. You were disarming. You wouldn't fortify Wake Island. You wouldn't fortify Guam. Your army had to drill with wooden rifles. We had no idea that this rich spoiled, feckless country would do what you did after December 7 of 1941. You stunned us."

Flash forward some six decades. I think we also gave a lot of evidence to Saddam and to the Islamist Shi'a in Tehran and Hezbollah and to the Islamist Sunni that we were, for a long time, essentially, a rich, spoiled feckless country that wouldn't fight. In 1979, they took our hostages and we tied yellow ribbons around trees and launched an ineffective effort, crashing helicopters in the desert, to rescue them. In 1983, they blew up our embassy and our marine barracks in Beirut. What did we do? We left. Throughout much of the 1980's, various terrorist acts were committed against us. We would occasionally arrest a few small fry. There was one honorable exception -- President Reagan's strike against Tripoli. But generally speaking, we prosecuted individuals when we could - essentially we litigated - in response to the terrorist acts of the '80s.

In 1991, President Bush organized a magnificent coalition to reverse the seizure of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein. We fought the war superbly -- and then stopped it while Saddam's Republican Guard was intact. Then after having encouraged the Kurds and the Shi'a to rebel against Saddam, we stood back, left the bridges intact, left their elite units intact, let them fly armed and troop-carrying helicopters around, and watched the Kurds and Shi'a who were winning in 15 of Iraq's 18 provinces, be massacred. And the world looked at us and said: Well, we know what the Americans value. They save their oil in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and after that, they don't care.

And then in 1993, Saddam tried to assassinate former President Bush in Kuwait with a bomb, and President Clinton fired a couple of dozen cruise missiles into an empty building in the middle of the night in Baghdad, thereby retaliating quite effectively against Iraqi cleaning women and night watchmen, but not especially effectively against Saddam Hussein.

In 1993, our helicopters were shot down in Mogadishu and, as in Beirut ten years earlier, we left.

Throughout the rest of the '90s, we continued our practice of the '80s. Instead of sending military force, we usually sent litigators. We litigate well in the United States. We would occasionally catch some small-fry terrorists in the United States or elsewhere and prosecute them. And once in a while, we would lob a few bombs or cruise missiles from afar. And that was about it until after September 11th.

So I would suggest that our response after September 11th in Afghanistan, like our response against the Japanese after Pearl Harbor, was something that was quite surprising to our enemies in the Middle East who attacked us. But, you have to admit, like the Japanese at the beginning of the '40s, the Islamists, both Shi'a and Sunni, and the fascist Ba'athists, had at the beginning of the 21st Century some reasonable basis for believing that this rich, spoiled, feckless country would not fight.

If that's why we're at war, how must we fight it at home and abroad?

At home the war is going to be difficult in two ways. One is the subject I spend full time on now at Booz Allen: how to deal with the lack of resilience in our infrastructure.

The infrastructure that serves this wonderful country is the most technologically sophisticated the world has ever seen. We are a society of dozens -- hundreds -- of complex networks: food processing and delivery, the internet, financial transfers, the electricity grid, oil and gas pipelines, on and on and on. None of these was put together with a single thought being given to making them resilient against terrorism. All are open and relatively easy to access. Their vulnerable and dangerous points are highlighted for maintenance, safety, or environmental reasons: we advertise "Transformer Here", "Hazardous Chemicals Here", "Cable Crossing Here". We haven't had to worry that this might not be the smartest thing in the world because, before September 11, we experienced extremely destructive intentional violence against major civilian infrastructure in North America only twice in our history, at least that I can think of: Sherman's burning Atlanta in 1864 and the British burning Washington in 1814. And neither the Civil War nor the War of 1812 has been driving our infrastructure design recently.

So virtually all of our infrastructure has been put together with this spirit of openness and ease of access. There is some resilience against random failures. But random failures are not what we saw September 11th, 2001. And I'm afraid they will not be our toughest problem in the future either.

About seven years ago one of our communication satellites had a computer chip fail. The satellite lost its attitude control and immediately about 90% of the pagers in the country went down. The next day they were back up again because somebody had figured out how to reroute them to a different satellite. That's the kind of thing we cope with easily. But that's not what happened a year ago September 11th.

In the preparations for September 11th that were taking place sometime in the late 1990's or 2000, a group of very sharp and very evil men sat down and said to themselves, something like this: "Let's see. The foolish Americans, when they do baggage searches at airports, ignore short knives like box cutters. And short knives can slit throats just as easily as long knives. This is good. Second, if you can believe it, they conduct themselves with respect to airplane hijackings as if all hijackings are going to go to Cuba and they're just going to have to sit on the ground for a few hours. So they tell their aircrews and everyone to be very polite to hijackers. This is also good. And third, even though about twice a year, going back many years, there have been crazy people who get into the cockpits of their civilian airliners, and passengers and crew write in to the FAA and say, 'you ought to do something about this', they continue to have flimsy cockpit doors on their airliners. Also good. Let's see: short knives permitted, polite to hijackers, flimsy cockpit doors. That means we can take over airliners, fly them into buildings, and kill thousands of them."

That is not a random failure. That is a planned use of part of our infrastructure to kill Americans. It's going for the jugular, going for the weak point. Protecting against random failures won't prevent that.

Einstein used to say, "God may be sophisticated, but He's not plain mean." What I think Einstein meant by that (since for him nature and God were pretty much the same thing) was that if you're playing against nature and trying to, say, discover a new principle of physics, it's a sophisticated problem, and it may be very tough. But there's nobody over there trying to outwit you and make it harder. In war and terrorism, however, there is. There is someone who is not only trying to make it harder, he is trying to kill you. But we have not given a single thought to how to manage our modern infrastructure to make it resilient against deadly attacks on our own soil - a threat we have not had to deal with for well over a century.

For example, we have just-in-time delivery to hold down inventories and operating costs. This is fine until somebody puts a dirty bomb in one of the 50,000 containers that crosses U.S. borders every day and people decide they have to start inspecting virtually all of the containers at ports instead of the 2% that are inspected now. Then all of that just-in-time manufacturing is stopped after four or five days. Full hospitals? Great idea. Keeps hospital and health care costs down. Move people through hospitals rapidly. Keep all hospitals at close to 100% occupancy. All wonderful ideas -- until there's a bioterrorist attack and thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or millions of Americans need emergency health care.

All of our networks have their weak points. Many of them operate according to incentives, established to promote efficiency or for other purposes of course, that make them more vulnerable to terrorism. We are first of all going to have to go through our infrastructure and find the other networks' functional equivalent of flimsy cockpit doors and get these vulnerabilities fixed. Then we are also going to have to pull the relevant decision-makers together and take a look at our electricity grids, our oil and gas pipelines, our container ports and the rest and figure out ways to change the incentives so that we build in resilience, and do it in such a way that it's compatible with economic freedom in a market economy. We don't want some bureaucrat up there ordering people to do this and this and this. But we have to get some resilience, some encouragement of resilience, into the incentives that drive the nature of all these networks, using tax benefits or some other tool. But that's only one of the two hard domestic jobs we've got.

The other one in some ways may be even harder: fight terrorism effectively without forgetting who we are. We have to do two things simultaneously here -- nobody promised us it was going to be easy. We have to fight successfully in the United States against terrorist cells and organizations that support terrorism and we have to deal with the extremely difficult fact that some of these are, at least superficially, religiously rooted in one aspect of Islam. We have to understand that the vast majority of American Muslims are certainly not terrorists and are not sympathetic to them. But there are institutions and individuals in this country, and some of them have a great deal of money, that are effectively part of the infrastructure that encourages and supports the hatred that underpins terrorism.

In dealing with this problem, however, we have to remember who we are. We are creatures of Madison's Constitution and his Bill of Rights and we have to, step by step, intervention by intervention, remember both that we are Americans under our Constitution, and that we are at war, and some part of that war is here and now in this country.

This poses very hard choices. My personal judgment is that none of the decisions so far made by the Administration goes beyond what is Constitutionally acceptable in taking strong action domestically against terrorism under the current circumstances. The Supreme Court has historically been extremely tolerant of the Executive, and even more tolerant of the Executive and Congress acting together, in times of severe crisis and war. In the Civil War, Lincoln even suspended habeas corpus. In World War II, of course, we even had the Japanese-Americans put in the concentration camps in the western part of the country. (They were like the British camps for the Boers in the Boer war, not the German camps of WW II, but they were still concentration camps.) In World War I, there was some very draconian legislation, also upheld by the Supreme Court. Nothing that has been done so far by the Administration, of course, even remotely approaches any of those steps.

But we do have to be alert. We do not want, in the mid-21st century, for our children and grandchildren to look back on our having made some decisions that, for example, are as awful as the decision to incarcerate the Nisei, the Japanese-Americans, in World War II and say, "how in the world could those people have done that?" But this country can do some ugly things when it gets scared. One reason to do everything we can to stop terrorism within the limits the Constitution permits us is to reduce the likelihood of terrible terrorist incidents -- both in order to save lives and in order to keep the country from getting scared and doing ugly things. One thing to remember about the incarceration of the Japanese-Americans in the early 40's is that three of the individuals who were most responsible for that step were Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the then-Attorney General, running for Governor, of the State of California, Earl Warren, and the Supreme Court Justice who wrote the Korematsu decision which upheld the constitutionality of the incarceration, Hugo Black. Roosevelt, Warren, and Black, of course, are not generally names associated with such acts as setting up concentration camps. They were leading names -- in some ways the three most important names -- from the liberal side of the American political spectrum in the twentieth century. But even people who aren't normally inclined to set up concentration camps can do some ugly things if they are scared and they believe the country is scared.

What we have to do is manage this domestic war in such a way as to move decisively and effectively against terrorist cells and those who support them and, at the same time, make sure that we don't slip into extraordinarily ugly, anti-constitutional steps. This is not easy. But nobody promised us a rose garden. And it will in some ways, I think, be one of the hardest aspects of the war for a long time.

Let me turn to how I think we have to fight this war abroad.

Each of these three movements, I think, requires somewhat different tactics.

In some ways, the most interesting situation right now exists with the Islamist Shi'a, the ruling mullahs of Iran -- because the small minority of Iranian Shi'ite mullahs who constitute the ruling circles of Iran, are effectively in the same position that the inhabitants of the Kremlin were in 1988 or the inhabitants of Versailles in 1788: namely, the storm isn't quite overhead yet, but if they look at the horizon they can see it gathering. They have lost the students. They have lost the women. They have lost the brave newspaper editors and professors who are in prison, some under sentence of death and being tortured. They are one by one losing the Ayatollahs. Ayatollah Montazeri, a very brave man, has been issuing fatwas against suicide killings and has been under house arrest for five years. Early this past summer, Ayatollah Taheri, who was a very, very hard line supporter of the mullahs in the City of Isfahan, issued a blast against them early in the summer saying that what they were doing, supporting torture, supporting terrorism, was fundamentally at odds with the tenets of Islam. There have been more student demonstrations and indeed, the Iranians are having enough trouble keeping the students down using Iranian muscle, using their own thugs, that they are starting to have to begin to import Syrians, who don't speak Farsi, in order to be able to suppress the student demonstrations.

Keep your eye on Tehran. I can't claim that it's going to change soon. The mullahs have a great deal of power. They have oil money and the military force and the rest. But, there are, I think, some tectonic shifts below the surface there.

With respect to our own conduct, I think the President did exactly the right thing in the early part of the summer, when after the student demonstrations surrounding Taheri's blast, he issued a statement basically saying that the United States was on the side of the students, not the mullahs. And it drove the mullahs absolutely crazy. I think that's evidence of the shrewdness and wisdom of the President's move. Of course military force isn't being contemplated here - we don't want to drive all these wonderful freedom-loving students, women, reformers (and some Ayatollahs) into the arms of the mullah-dictators.

The fascists, the Ba'athists in Iraq, are of course at the front of everybody's concern. I think that it is good that we were able to get a unanimous resolution through the Security Council. But the fact that it was unanimous should tell us that if even the Syrians could vote for it then it was watered down in some important ways from the initial proposal. One can argue now that the resolution requires the United States to go through Hans Blix in order to find a violation of the Security Council Resolution, whether it's in the declaration, which Saddam owes on December 8, or in resistance by the Iraqis to inspections.

Hans Blix, to put it as gently as I can, does not have a stellar background of inquisitiveness or decisiveness regarding inspections. When in early 2000 the current U.N. inspection regime was being set up, the first head of the inspection regime, Rolf Ekeus, was actually proposed by Kofi Annan. Ekeus would have been fine. The French and Russians and Chinese, carrying Iraq's water, objected to him and Kofi Annan found the one U.N. bureaucrat who would be acceptable to them and to Saddam Hussein, namely Hans Blix.

People can change. We can hope that Hans Blix does not continue to be the Inspector Clousseau of international arms inspections. Let's see. But if he follows his previous path, the President under this resolution will have some tough choices to make, and perhaps as soon as December 8, about whether the United States will, on its own, declare what will certainly be a lie -- Saddam's declaration that he has no weapons of mass destruction programs -- to be a lie in fact. If the declaration itself is a lie it is a violation of the U.N. resolution and we will then be free to take action, if the President so decides.

I must admit I hope that happens, because I don't believe there is any way to solve this problem of Iraq without removing Saddam forcefully. I wish it were otherwise, but I see no way around it.

If this winter passes -- and winter is when you want to fight in this region because our troops will have to wear heavy protective gear against chemical weapons -- it will be another year before we can move again and Saddam will then be even closer to having nuclear weapons and will have even more sophisticated delivery means for the chemical and bacteriological weapons than he already has. It is a shame. It is unfortunate. But it is the dilemma that is presented to us, and particularly to the President, beginning around December 8. And I believe that he deserves, whatever he decides, all the support any of us can give him.

The third group, the Islamist Sunni, al-Qaeda and like-thinkers, are in many ways going to be the hardest to deal with. They are fueled by oil money from the Gulf, Saudi Arabia principally. They are wealthy in and of themselves. They are present in some 60 countries and they loathe us, like the Wahhabis, who are their first cousins. They are fanatically anti-Western, anti-modern, anti-Christian, anti-Jewish, and anti-most-Muslims. If you want to get a feel for the intellectual infrastructure - if you can call it that -- of this Wahhabi-Islamist movement there are websites where one can go to pull in what the sermons are on any given Friday throughout Saudi Arabia. I looked at translations of one such set of sermons two or three weeks ago before some discussions we were having in the Defense Policy Board. The three main themes that week were: (1) that all Jews are pigs and monkeys; (2) that all Christians and Jews are the enemy and it is our obligation to hate them and destroy them; and (3) that women in the United States routinely commit incest with their fathers and brothers and this is an ordinary and accepted thing in the United States.

This was not an extraordinary week -- this is the routine Wahhabi view. One Wahhabi cleric was interviewed by an American reporter a few weeks ago in Saudi Arabia. The reporter asked him, "Tell me. I'm a Christian. Do you hate me?" And the Wahhabi Cleric said, "Well, of course, if you're a Christian, I hate you. But, I'm not going to kill you." In these circles this is the moderate view.

We need to realize that just as angry German nationalism of the 1920's and 1930's was the soil in which Nazism grew -- not all German nationalists became Nazis, but that was the soil in which it grew -- so the angry form of Islamism and Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere today is the soil in which anti-Western and anti-American terrorism grows.

So this is going to be a long war, very long indeed. I hope not as long as the Cold War, 40 plus years, but certainly longer than either World War I or World War II. I rather imagine it's going to be measured, I'm afraid, in decades.

Is there any answer? Is there any potential end to this? Now, what I'm about to say is going to sound rather idealistic to some of you, but I think it's the only way that we can prevail.

If you look at the world a little over 85 years ago, in the spring of 1917 when this country entered World War I, there were at most about a dozen democracies in the world: the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Britain, France, Switzerland, a few countries in Northern Europe (and even those were almost all only democracies for the male half of their populations). It was a world of empires, of kingdoms, of colonies, and of various types of authoritarian regimes.

Today, Freedom House, which I think does the best work on this sort of thing, says that there are 120 out of the 192 countries in the world that are democracies. The democratic world is divided between what Freedom House calls free nations (80 or so), such as the United States, and the other democracies, such as Russia, which it calls partly free. But there are still 120 countries with parliamentary institutions, contested elections and some elements, at least, of the rule of law. That is an amazing change, literally an order of magnitude change, within the lifetime of many individuals now living -- from a dozen to 120 democracies in the world.

Nothing like that has ever happened in world history. Needless to say, we have had something to do with this, in helping win World War I, in prevailing, along with Britain, in World War II, and in prevailing in the Cold War. And along the way, a lot of people said, very cynically, at different times -- fill in the blanks - "the X's will never be able to run a democracy": the Germans will never be able to run a democracy; the Japanese will never be able to run a democracy; the Russians will never be able to run a democracy; no nation with a Chinese culture is going to be able to run a democracy. It took some help, but the Germans and the Japanese and now, even the Russians, the Taiwanese, and many other nations and cultures seem to have figured it out. In spite of vast cultural differences, people with backgrounds very different from the Anglo-Saxon world of Westminster and the founding fathers of the United States seem to have figured it out.

In the Muslim world, outside the 22 Arab states, which have no democracies -- some reasonably well-governed states that are moderating and changing, such as Bahrain, Qatar and others, but no democracies - there are another 16 Muslim-predominant non-Arab states. Half of these are democracies. They include some of the poorest countries in the world: Bangladesh, Mali. Mali has recently been almost an ideal democracy. Well over 100 million Muslims live in a democracy in India. Outside one province, they are generally at peace with their Hindu neighbors.

The problem is not basically Islam. There is a special problem in the Middle East for historical and cultural reasons. Outside of Israel and Turkey, the Middle East essentially consists of no democracies. It has, rather, two types of governments -- pathological predators and vulnerable autocrats. This is not a good mix. Five of those states: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan and Libya sponsor and assist terrorism in one way or another; and all five are working on weapons of mass destruction of one type or another.

The Middle East thus presents a serious and massive complex of problems: pathological predators with vulnerable autocracies as neighbors, work on weapons of mass destruction by the predators, terrorist havens, and everything financed by the revenues of two-thirds of the world's oil. I don't believe this terror war is ever really going to go away until we change the face of the Middle East the way we have changed the face of Europe.

Now, that is a tall order. But, it's not as tall an order as what we have already done. In 1917, Europe was largely monarchies, empires, and autocracies. Today, outside Belarus and Ukraine, it is democratic, even including Russia. These changes that have taken place over the course of the last 85 years are a remarkable achievement. What remains to be undertaken is similarly to change a part of the world that has historically not had democracy, that has reacted angrily against intrusions from the outside, and that presents a huge challenge.

But I would say this to the terrorists and the pathological predators such as Saddam Hussein, and to the autocrats as well: the Mubaraks, the Saudi Royal family. They have to realize that now, for the fourth time in 100 years, we've been awakened and this country is on the march. We didn't choose this fight, but we're in it. And being on the march, there's only one way we're going to be able to win it. It's the way we won World War I fighting for Wilson's 14 points, the way we won World War II fighting for Churchill's and Roosevelt's Atlantic Charter, and the way we won World War III fighting for the noble ideas I think most eloquently expressed by President Reagan, but also very importantly at the beginning by President Truman. We won these wars with our allies in no small measure because we made it clear that these were not wars of us against them. They were not wars between countries or civilizations. They were wars of freedom against tyranny.

We have to convince the good people of the Middle East that we are on their side, as we convinced Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel and Andrei Sakharov that we were on their side. This will take time. It will be difficult. For some countries the development of lasting democracy will take many years.

But I think we need to be clear what we are about - to say not only to the terrorists and dictators and but also to the autocrats who from time to time are, or at least pretend to be, friendly with us: we know, we understand, we are going to make you nervous. But in the last analysis, if you don't change you should be nervous. In that case we want you nervous. We want you to realize that now, for the fourth time in 100 years, this country is on the march. And we are on the side of those whom you most fear -- your own people.

About the Author

R. James Woolsey is an attorney and former (1993-95) Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. His distinguished career spans government leadership, law practice, corporate leadership, government diplomacy, foreign policy and negotiation, and civic leadership.

Mr. Woolsey is a frequent contributor to major publications, and from time to time gives public speeches, on the subjects of foreign affairs, defense, energy, and intelligence.

More biographical detail is available http://www.csis.org/html/4woolsey.htm

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