The following is a speech made by James Woolsey. It was sent to me by my father, a professional military man ("baby-killing thug" to those of you on the left coast) who has a deep interest in foreign policy.
It is a long, but very interesting read. If you take the time to go through it, I believe you will find it worth the effort.
==========
Subject:What do you think?
A Speech by James Woolsey
16 November 2002
I was really quite honored when David asked me a few months ago to be with
you this weekend. But, to tell you the truth, in the 34 years I've been in
Washington until I went straight this last summer and joined Booz Allen
Hamilton as a vice president, I spent the bulk of that time, 22 years, as:
A. a lawyer; and B. in Washington D.C.; and, then, I C. spent some time out
at the CIA in D. the Clinton Administration. So I'm actually pretty well
honored to be invited into any polite company for any purposes whatsoever.
I have adopted Eliot Cohen's formulation, 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. And I think Eliot's formulation
fits the circumstances really 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? Well, there are at least three, but I would say
principally three movements, of a sort, all coming out of the Middle East.
And the interesting thing is that they've been at war with us for years.
The Islamist Shia, the ruling circles, the ruling Clerics, the Mullahs of
Iran, minority -- definite minority of the Iranian Shiite Clerics, but
those who constitute the ruling force in Iran and sponsor and back
Hezbollah, have been at war with us for nearly a quarter of a century. They
seized our hostages in 1979 in Tehran. They blew up our embassy and our
Marine barracks in Beirut in
1983. They've 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 Baathist parties of Iraq and really Syria as well, are essentially
fascist parties or modeled after the fascist parties of the '30s. They're
totalitarian, they're anti-Semitic, they're fascist. The Baathists 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, 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, which he's not observing,
and so it's even clearer that he is at war. And he has been so for at least
11 years.
The third group, and the one that caused us finally to notice, is the
Islamist Sunni. And this is the most, in some ways, I think virulent and
long-term portion of these three groupings that are at war with us, and
will be at war, I think, for a long time. The Wahhabi movement, the
religious movement in Saudi Arabia dating back to the 18th century and with
roots even well before that, was 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
-- Islamist I think is the best formulation -- groups of this sort, more or
less focused on what they call the near enemy. Say the barbaric regime in
Egypt, and to some extent, the Saudi royal family - the attacks in 1979 on
the great mosques in Mecca. They were focusing on what they called the
"near enemy" until sometime in the mid 1990's. Around 1994, they decided to
turn and focus their concentration and effort on what they call the
Crusaders and Jews, mainly us. And they have been at war with us since at
least about 1994, give or take a year or so, in number of well-noted
terrorists incidents, including the Cole and the cast African embassy
bombings 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 may have noticed and have decided at least, in part,
that we are at war with them. If these are the three groupings -- and by
the way, I think of these more or less as 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 to assist one another in one way or another, including
Iraq 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 I'm not ever in elective politics, I can afford
to do this - I refuse to read any articles about public opinion polls. And
with the time I save, I talk to D.C. cab drivers. It is both more enjoyable
and I think in many ways a much better finger on the pulse of the nation.
And 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 the reason we were attacked on
September 11th, was because America's conduct of slavery and the treatment
of the American Indian historically. And as I got into the cab, I saw that
the cab driver was one of my favorite varieties of D.C. cab drivers, an
older, black American long-term resident of D.C., a guy about my age. And
the Washington Times article was open in the front seat to that 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 what 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 -- have been essentially hanging a "Kick Me"
sign on our back in the Middle East. We have given some evidence of being
what bin Laden has actually called a paper tiger.
My friend, Tom Moore, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and maybe
known to some of you here, was a young officer at the end of World War II
and participated in the interrogations of Prince Konoe and several of the
Japanese leaders of the handful who were eventually hanged. And the team he
was with asked all of them, "Why did you do it. Why did you attack us at
Pearl Harbor?" He said, they all said pretty much the same thing. They
said, "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 three quarters of a century. I think we gave a lot of
evidence to Saddam and to the Islamist Shia 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, with
one honorable exception -- President Reagan's strike against Tripoli.But
generally speaking, we litigated instead of doing much else with the
terrorist acts of the '80s.
In 1991, President Bush organized a magnificent coalition against the
seizure of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein. We fought the war superbly -- and then
stopped it while the Republican guard was intact. And after having
encouraged the Kurds and the Shiia to rebel against Saddam, we stood back,
left the bridges intact, left their units intact, let them fly helicopters
around carrying troops and missiles, and we watched the Kurds and Shiia who
were winning in 15 of Iraq's 18 provinces, to 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 didn't care.
And then in 1993, Saddam tries to assassinate former President Bush in
Kuwait with a bomb, and President Clinton fires 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 in
ten years earlier, we left.
And throughout the rest of the '90s, we continued our practice of the
'80s.Instead of sending military force, we usually sent prosecutors and
litigators. We litigate well in the United States. And we would
occasionally catch some small-fry terrorists in the United States or
elsewhere, and prosecute them. And once in a while, lob a few bombs or
cruise missiles from afar. And that was 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. I
think they were quite surprised at what we did in Afghanistan. But, you
have to admit, like the Japanese at the beginning of the '40s, the
Islamists, both Shia and Sunni and the fascist Baathists in the Middle East
at the beginning of the 21st Century, had some rationale and some evidence
for believing 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 that the
infrastructure which serves this wonderful country is the most
technologically sophisticated infrastructure the world has ever seen. We
are a society of dozens -- hundreds of networks. Food processing and
delivery, the internet, financial transfers, oil and gas pipelines, on and
on and on. None of these was put together with a single thought being given
to being resilient against terrorism. All are open, relatively easy access.
Their vulnerable and dangerous points are highlighted. Transformer here,
hazardous chemicals here, cable crossing here because we need to do
maintenance. We haven't had to worry about domestic violence against our
civilian infrastructure, with the exception of Sherman burning some
plantations on his march to the sea, since the British burned Washington in
1814.
So virtually all of our infrastructure has been put together with this
sense of openness and ease of access and resilience -- some resilience --
against random failures. But random failures is not what we saw September
11th and a year ago, and I'm afraid not what we will see in the future.
About seven years ago, one of our communication satellites' computer chip
failed. The satellite lost its altitude control and immediately 90 percent
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 do all the time. 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. 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 air crews and everyone to be very polite to hijackers. This is
also good. And third, even though twice a year going back many years, there
have been crazy people who get into the cockpits of their civilian
airliners and people write in to the FAA and say, you ought to do something
about this, they continue to have flimsy cockpit doors on their airliners.
Let's see. Short knives, polite to hijackers, friendly cockpit doors. 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.
Einstein used to say, "God may be sophisticated, but he's not plain mean."
And what I think Einstein meant by that is, since for him nature and God
were pretty much the same thing, if you're playing against nature and
trying to say, discover a new principle of physics, it's a sophisticated
problem. It's going to be very tough. But there's nobody over there trying
to outwit you and make it harder. In war and terrorism, there is. There is
someone who is trying to do that. And we have not given a single thought to
how to manage our infrastructure for the possibility of an attack on our
own soil, something we have not had to deal with for 200 years -- since
1814 - when the British burned the White House. We have just-in-time
delivery to hold down operational costs 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 and all that just-in-time manufacturing is stopped after four or five
days. Full hospitals. Great idea. Keep hospital costs down. Health care
costs down. Move people through hospitals rapidly. All hospitals 99 percent
occupancy, et cetera. Wonderful idea, until there's a bioterrorist attack
and then thousands or hundreds or thousands or millions of Americans need
some sort of special healthcare.
All of these networks have their weak points and many of them have
incentives in them to -- not for this purpose of course -- but essentially
to be vulnerable to terrorism. We are not only going to have to go through
our infrastructure -- and this is what I'm spending a lot of my time
working on now -- we are not only going to have to go through our
infrastructure and find the functional equivalent of the flimsy cockpit
doors and get them fixed. Then, we are also going to have to pull together
and take a look at things like our electricity grids, our oil and gas
pipelines, our container ports and the rest and figure out ways to change
the incentives so that they 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 promotion of resilience into the
incentives -- tax or otherwise -- for the way our infrastructure's managed.
That's only one of the two hard jobs we've got.
The other one, in some ways may be even harder. We have to do two things
simultaneously here -- nobody told 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 anyway of Islam. We have to understand that the vast
majority of American Muslims are certainly not terrorists and are not
sympathetic to them. But that there are institutions and individuals and
there are institutions and individuals with a lot of money that are
effectively part of the infrastructure that encourages and supports the
hatred of the West of capitalism and of us that is manifested in terrorism.
We also 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 and under
a Constitution, and that we are at war and some part of that war is here
and now.
Those are very hard choices. One by one. My personal judgment is that none
of the decisions so far made by the Administration goes beyond what is a
reasonable line of taking strong action domestically against terrorism
because the Supreme Court has historically been extremely tolerant of the
Executive, but especially Executive and Congress moving together in times
of crisis and war. In the Civil War, Lincoln suspended habeas corpus even.
In World War II, of course, we had the Japanese-Americans even put in the
relocation camps in the western part of the country. In World War I, there
was some very draconian legislation also upheld by the Supreme Court. And
nothing that has been done so far by the Administration, of course, even
remotely approaches any of those. But we do have to be alert. We do not
want in the mid-21st century people looking back on us having made some of
the kinds of decisions that, for example, were made to incarcerate the
Nisei, the Japanese-Americans in World War II and saying, how in the world
could those people have done that? But this country can do some ugly things
when it gets scared. And one thing to remember about the incarceration of
the Japanese-Americans in World War II is that the three individuals most
responsible were Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the then Attorney General
running for governor of the State of California, Earl Warren, and the man
who wrote the Korematsu decision which upheld the constitutionality of the
acts, Hugo Black. Roosevelt, Warren, and Black, of course, were not famous
for setting up concentration camps. They were names from the liberal side
of the American political spectrum. But even people who say they have those
values 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.
Let me conclude by saying a few words about how I think we have to fight
this abroad.
These three movements, I think, require somewhat different tactics. In some
ways, the most interesting situation right now exists with the Islamist
Shia, the ruling circles of Iran. Because the small minority of Iranian
Shiite 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, mainly 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 grand
Ayatollahs. Ayatollah Montazeri, a very brave man, issuing fatwas against
suicide killings 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 Esfahan, issued a blast against them saying that
what they were doing, supporting tortures, supporting terrorism, was
fundamentally at odds with the tenants of Islam, more student
demonstrations and indeed, the Iranians are having enough trouble keeping
the students down using Iranian muscle, using thugs, they are starting to
have to begin to import Syrians, who don't speak Farsi, in order to be able
to suppress their 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 demonstration 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 and I think that's evidence of the shrewdness of
the President's move.
The fascists, the Baathists 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 even the Syrians could vote for it should
tell us that it was watered down in some important ways from the initial
submission. 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 a resistance by the Iraqis of inspections. Hans Blix, to put
it as gently as I can, does not have a stellar background of
inquisitiveness or decisiveness. When in early 2000, the current U.N.
inspection regime was being set up, the first head of the inspection regime
was actually proposed, who 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 Saddam Hussein, namely Hans
Blix. People can change. We can hope that Hans Blix does not continue as
the Inspector Clouzoof international investigations. I hope he does not.
Let's see. But, if he does, the President under this resolution will have
some tough choices to make and perhaps, as soon as December 8, as to
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. Whether the United States will decide that that is a violation of
the U.N. resolution and we will then take action. 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.
As time goes on, 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 -- if this winter passes it will be another
year before we can move again and he 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, here 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, are al-Qaeda, are in many ways, going
to be the hardest to deal with because they are fueled by oil money from
the Gulf, Saudi Arabia principally. They are wealthy in and of themselves.
They're present in some 60 countries and they are fanatically like the
Wahhabis, who are their first cousins. They are fanatically anti-Western,
anti-modern, anti-Christian, anti-Jewish. If you want to get a feel for the
infrastructure, the intellectual infrastructure -- if you can call it that
-- of their thinking, there are websites where one can go to pull in what
the sermons are on any given Friday throughout Saudi Arabia. I looked at
one such set of sermons two or three weeks ago before some discussions we
were having the defense policy board. And the three main themes that week
were that all Jews are pigs and monkeys. The second major theme was that
all Christians and Jews are the enemy and it is our obligation to hate them
and destroy them. And the third was that women in the United States
routinely commit incest with their fathers and brothers and it is a common
and accepted thing in the United States.
This is not extraordinary. This is the routine Wahhabi view. One Wahhabi
cleric was interviewed by a Washington Post reporter a few weeks ago in
Saudi Arabia. The Post 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." This is the
moderate view. And 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 today is the soil in
which anti-Western and anti-American terrorism grows.
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, but I think it's the only
thing that we can do. If you look at the world 85 years ago in the spring
of 1917, when this country entered World War I, there were about 10 or 12
democracies in the world. The United States, Canada, Australia, New
Zealand, Britain, France, Switzerland, a couple of countries in Northern
Europe. It was a world of empires, of kingdoms, of colonies, and of various
types of authoritarian regimes through the world. Today, Freedom House,
which I think does the best work on this sort of thing, says that there are
120 out of 192 countries in the world that are democracies. The world is
about evenly divided between what Freedom House calls free, such as the
United States; and what it calls partly free, such as Russia. But there are
still 120 countries with some parliamentary contested elections and some
beginnings, at least, of the rule of law. That is an amazing change in the
lifetime of many individuals now living -- from a 10 or 12 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, both in
winning World War I -- helping win World War I -- in prevailing, along with
Britain, in World War II; and eventually, 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 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; nobody with a Chinese Confucian background is
going to be able to run a democracy. It took some help, but the Germans and
the Japanese and now, even the Russians, and Taiwanese seem to have figured
it out. In spite of vast cultural differences, very different from the
Anglo-Saxon world of parliament that Westminster and the early United
States a lot of people seemed 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 Bahrein extent and others. Of the 24 Muslim-predominant non-Arab states,
about half are democracies. They include some of the poorest countries in
the world. Bangladesh, Mali - Mali is almost an ideal democracy. Nearly 200
million Muslims live in a democracy in India. Outside one province, they
are generally at peace with their Hindu neighbors. 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; all five of those are working on weapons of mass destruction of
one type or another.
The Mideast presents a serious and massive problem of pathological
predators next to vulnerable autocracies. I don't believe this terror war
is ever really going to go away until we change the face of the Middle
East. 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 largely democratic,
even including Russia. These changes that have taken place over the course
of the last 85 years are a remarkable achievement. The ones that still have
to be undertaken in a part of the world that has historically not had
democracy, which has reacted angrily against intrusions from the outside,
particularly the Arab Middle East, presents a huge challenge. But I would
say this, both to the terrorists and to the pathological predators such as
Saddam Hussein and to the autocrats as well, the barbarics, 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 best expressed by President Reagan, but also
very importantly at the beginning by President Truman, that this was not a
war of us against them. It was not a war of countries. It was a war of
freedom against tyranny. We have to convince the 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. But I think we need to say to both the terrorists and the
dictators and also to the autocrats who from time to time are friendly with
us, that we know, we understand we are going to make you nervous. We want
you to be nervous. We want you to realize 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.
[This message has been edited by David (edited 18 January 2003).]
It is a long, but very interesting read. If you take the time to go through it, I believe you will find it worth the effort.
==========
Subject:What do you think?
A Speech by James Woolsey
16 November 2002
I was really quite honored when David asked me a few months ago to be with
you this weekend. But, to tell you the truth, in the 34 years I've been in
Washington until I went straight this last summer and joined Booz Allen
Hamilton as a vice president, I spent the bulk of that time, 22 years, as:
A. a lawyer; and B. in Washington D.C.; and, then, I C. spent some time out
at the CIA in D. the Clinton Administration. So I'm actually pretty well
honored to be invited into any polite company for any purposes whatsoever.
I have adopted Eliot Cohen's formulation, 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. And I think Eliot's formulation
fits the circumstances really 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? Well, there are at least three, but I would say
principally three movements, of a sort, all coming out of the Middle East.
And the interesting thing is that they've been at war with us for years.
The Islamist Shia, the ruling circles, the ruling Clerics, the Mullahs of
Iran, minority -- definite minority of the Iranian Shiite Clerics, but
those who constitute the ruling force in Iran and sponsor and back
Hezbollah, have been at war with us for nearly a quarter of a century. They
seized our hostages in 1979 in Tehran. They blew up our embassy and our
Marine barracks in Beirut in
1983. They've 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 Baathist parties of Iraq and really Syria as well, are essentially
fascist parties or modeled after the fascist parties of the '30s. They're
totalitarian, they're anti-Semitic, they're fascist. The Baathists 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, 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, which he's not observing,
and so it's even clearer that he is at war. And he has been so for at least
11 years.
The third group, and the one that caused us finally to notice, is the
Islamist Sunni. And this is the most, in some ways, I think virulent and
long-term portion of these three groupings that are at war with us, and
will be at war, I think, for a long time. The Wahhabi movement, the
religious movement in Saudi Arabia dating back to the 18th century and with
roots even well before that, was 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
-- Islamist I think is the best formulation -- groups of this sort, more or
less focused on what they call the near enemy. Say the barbaric regime in
Egypt, and to some extent, the Saudi royal family - the attacks in 1979 on
the great mosques in Mecca. They were focusing on what they called the
"near enemy" until sometime in the mid 1990's. Around 1994, they decided to
turn and focus their concentration and effort on what they call the
Crusaders and Jews, mainly us. And they have been at war with us since at
least about 1994, give or take a year or so, in number of well-noted
terrorists incidents, including the Cole and the cast African embassy
bombings 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 may have noticed and have decided at least, in part,
that we are at war with them. If these are the three groupings -- and by
the way, I think of these more or less as 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 to assist one another in one way or another, including
Iraq 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 I'm not ever in elective politics, I can afford
to do this - I refuse to read any articles about public opinion polls. And
with the time I save, I talk to D.C. cab drivers. It is both more enjoyable
and I think in many ways a much better finger on the pulse of the nation.
And 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 the reason we were attacked on
September 11th, was because America's conduct of slavery and the treatment
of the American Indian historically. And as I got into the cab, I saw that
the cab driver was one of my favorite varieties of D.C. cab drivers, an
older, black American long-term resident of D.C., a guy about my age. And
the Washington Times article was open in the front seat to that 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 what 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 -- have been essentially hanging a "Kick Me"
sign on our back in the Middle East. We have given some evidence of being
what bin Laden has actually called a paper tiger.
My friend, Tom Moore, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and maybe
known to some of you here, was a young officer at the end of World War II
and participated in the interrogations of Prince Konoe and several of the
Japanese leaders of the handful who were eventually hanged. And the team he
was with asked all of them, "Why did you do it. Why did you attack us at
Pearl Harbor?" He said, they all said pretty much the same thing. They
said, "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 three quarters of a century. I think we gave a lot of
evidence to Saddam and to the Islamist Shia 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, with
one honorable exception -- President Reagan's strike against Tripoli.But
generally speaking, we litigated instead of doing much else with the
terrorist acts of the '80s.
In 1991, President Bush organized a magnificent coalition against the
seizure of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein. We fought the war superbly -- and then
stopped it while the Republican guard was intact. And after having
encouraged the Kurds and the Shiia to rebel against Saddam, we stood back,
left the bridges intact, left their units intact, let them fly helicopters
around carrying troops and missiles, and we watched the Kurds and Shiia who
were winning in 15 of Iraq's 18 provinces, to 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 didn't care.
And then in 1993, Saddam tries to assassinate former President Bush in
Kuwait with a bomb, and President Clinton fires 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 in
ten years earlier, we left.
And throughout the rest of the '90s, we continued our practice of the
'80s.Instead of sending military force, we usually sent prosecutors and
litigators. We litigate well in the United States. And we would
occasionally catch some small-fry terrorists in the United States or
elsewhere, and prosecute them. And once in a while, lob a few bombs or
cruise missiles from afar. And that was 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. I
think they were quite surprised at what we did in Afghanistan. But, you
have to admit, like the Japanese at the beginning of the '40s, the
Islamists, both Shia and Sunni and the fascist Baathists in the Middle East
at the beginning of the 21st Century, had some rationale and some evidence
for believing 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 that the
infrastructure which serves this wonderful country is the most
technologically sophisticated infrastructure the world has ever seen. We
are a society of dozens -- hundreds of networks. Food processing and
delivery, the internet, financial transfers, oil and gas pipelines, on and
on and on. None of these was put together with a single thought being given
to being resilient against terrorism. All are open, relatively easy access.
Their vulnerable and dangerous points are highlighted. Transformer here,
hazardous chemicals here, cable crossing here because we need to do
maintenance. We haven't had to worry about domestic violence against our
civilian infrastructure, with the exception of Sherman burning some
plantations on his march to the sea, since the British burned Washington in
1814.
So virtually all of our infrastructure has been put together with this
sense of openness and ease of access and resilience -- some resilience --
against random failures. But random failures is not what we saw September
11th and a year ago, and I'm afraid not what we will see in the future.
About seven years ago, one of our communication satellites' computer chip
failed. The satellite lost its altitude control and immediately 90 percent
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 do all the time. 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. 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 air crews and everyone to be very polite to hijackers. This is
also good. And third, even though twice a year going back many years, there
have been crazy people who get into the cockpits of their civilian
airliners and people write in to the FAA and say, you ought to do something
about this, they continue to have flimsy cockpit doors on their airliners.
Let's see. Short knives, polite to hijackers, friendly cockpit doors. 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.
Einstein used to say, "God may be sophisticated, but he's not plain mean."
And what I think Einstein meant by that is, since for him nature and God
were pretty much the same thing, if you're playing against nature and
trying to say, discover a new principle of physics, it's a sophisticated
problem. It's going to be very tough. But there's nobody over there trying
to outwit you and make it harder. In war and terrorism, there is. There is
someone who is trying to do that. And we have not given a single thought to
how to manage our infrastructure for the possibility of an attack on our
own soil, something we have not had to deal with for 200 years -- since
1814 - when the British burned the White House. We have just-in-time
delivery to hold down operational costs 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 and all that just-in-time manufacturing is stopped after four or five
days. Full hospitals. Great idea. Keep hospital costs down. Health care
costs down. Move people through hospitals rapidly. All hospitals 99 percent
occupancy, et cetera. Wonderful idea, until there's a bioterrorist attack
and then thousands or hundreds or thousands or millions of Americans need
some sort of special healthcare.
All of these networks have their weak points and many of them have
incentives in them to -- not for this purpose of course -- but essentially
to be vulnerable to terrorism. We are not only going to have to go through
our infrastructure -- and this is what I'm spending a lot of my time
working on now -- we are not only going to have to go through our
infrastructure and find the functional equivalent of the flimsy cockpit
doors and get them fixed. Then, we are also going to have to pull together
and take a look at things like our electricity grids, our oil and gas
pipelines, our container ports and the rest and figure out ways to change
the incentives so that they 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 promotion of resilience into the
incentives -- tax or otherwise -- for the way our infrastructure's managed.
That's only one of the two hard jobs we've got.
The other one, in some ways may be even harder. We have to do two things
simultaneously here -- nobody told 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 anyway of Islam. We have to understand that the vast
majority of American Muslims are certainly not terrorists and are not
sympathetic to them. But that there are institutions and individuals and
there are institutions and individuals with a lot of money that are
effectively part of the infrastructure that encourages and supports the
hatred of the West of capitalism and of us that is manifested in terrorism.
We also 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 and under
a Constitution, and that we are at war and some part of that war is here
and now.
Those are very hard choices. One by one. My personal judgment is that none
of the decisions so far made by the Administration goes beyond what is a
reasonable line of taking strong action domestically against terrorism
because the Supreme Court has historically been extremely tolerant of the
Executive, but especially Executive and Congress moving together in times
of crisis and war. In the Civil War, Lincoln suspended habeas corpus even.
In World War II, of course, we had the Japanese-Americans even put in the
relocation camps in the western part of the country. In World War I, there
was some very draconian legislation also upheld by the Supreme Court. And
nothing that has been done so far by the Administration, of course, even
remotely approaches any of those. But we do have to be alert. We do not
want in the mid-21st century people looking back on us having made some of
the kinds of decisions that, for example, were made to incarcerate the
Nisei, the Japanese-Americans in World War II and saying, how in the world
could those people have done that? But this country can do some ugly things
when it gets scared. And one thing to remember about the incarceration of
the Japanese-Americans in World War II is that the three individuals most
responsible were Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the then Attorney General
running for governor of the State of California, Earl Warren, and the man
who wrote the Korematsu decision which upheld the constitutionality of the
acts, Hugo Black. Roosevelt, Warren, and Black, of course, were not famous
for setting up concentration camps. They were names from the liberal side
of the American political spectrum. But even people who say they have those
values 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.
Let me conclude by saying a few words about how I think we have to fight
this abroad.
These three movements, I think, require somewhat different tactics. In some
ways, the most interesting situation right now exists with the Islamist
Shia, the ruling circles of Iran. Because the small minority of Iranian
Shiite 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, mainly 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 grand
Ayatollahs. Ayatollah Montazeri, a very brave man, issuing fatwas against
suicide killings 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 Esfahan, issued a blast against them saying that
what they were doing, supporting tortures, supporting terrorism, was
fundamentally at odds with the tenants of Islam, more student
demonstrations and indeed, the Iranians are having enough trouble keeping
the students down using Iranian muscle, using thugs, they are starting to
have to begin to import Syrians, who don't speak Farsi, in order to be able
to suppress their 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 demonstration 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 and I think that's evidence of the shrewdness of
the President's move.
The fascists, the Baathists 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 even the Syrians could vote for it should
tell us that it was watered down in some important ways from the initial
submission. 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 a resistance by the Iraqis of inspections. Hans Blix, to put
it as gently as I can, does not have a stellar background of
inquisitiveness or decisiveness. When in early 2000, the current U.N.
inspection regime was being set up, the first head of the inspection regime
was actually proposed, who 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 Saddam Hussein, namely Hans
Blix. People can change. We can hope that Hans Blix does not continue as
the Inspector Clouzoof international investigations. I hope he does not.
Let's see. But, if he does, the President under this resolution will have
some tough choices to make and perhaps, as soon as December 8, as to
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. Whether the United States will decide that that is a violation of
the U.N. resolution and we will then take action. 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.
As time goes on, 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 -- if this winter passes it will be another
year before we can move again and he 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, here 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, are al-Qaeda, are in many ways, going
to be the hardest to deal with because they are fueled by oil money from
the Gulf, Saudi Arabia principally. They are wealthy in and of themselves.
They're present in some 60 countries and they are fanatically like the
Wahhabis, who are their first cousins. They are fanatically anti-Western,
anti-modern, anti-Christian, anti-Jewish. If you want to get a feel for the
infrastructure, the intellectual infrastructure -- if you can call it that
-- of their thinking, there are websites where one can go to pull in what
the sermons are on any given Friday throughout Saudi Arabia. I looked at
one such set of sermons two or three weeks ago before some discussions we
were having the defense policy board. And the three main themes that week
were that all Jews are pigs and monkeys. The second major theme was that
all Christians and Jews are the enemy and it is our obligation to hate them
and destroy them. And the third was that women in the United States
routinely commit incest with their fathers and brothers and it is a common
and accepted thing in the United States.
This is not extraordinary. This is the routine Wahhabi view. One Wahhabi
cleric was interviewed by a Washington Post reporter a few weeks ago in
Saudi Arabia. The Post 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." This is the
moderate view. And 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 today is the soil in
which anti-Western and anti-American terrorism grows.
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, but I think it's the only
thing that we can do. If you look at the world 85 years ago in the spring
of 1917, when this country entered World War I, there were about 10 or 12
democracies in the world. The United States, Canada, Australia, New
Zealand, Britain, France, Switzerland, a couple of countries in Northern
Europe. It was a world of empires, of kingdoms, of colonies, and of various
types of authoritarian regimes through the world. Today, Freedom House,
which I think does the best work on this sort of thing, says that there are
120 out of 192 countries in the world that are democracies. The world is
about evenly divided between what Freedom House calls free, such as the
United States; and what it calls partly free, such as Russia. But there are
still 120 countries with some parliamentary contested elections and some
beginnings, at least, of the rule of law. That is an amazing change in the
lifetime of many individuals now living -- from a 10 or 12 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, both in
winning World War I -- helping win World War I -- in prevailing, along with
Britain, in World War II; and eventually, 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 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; nobody with a Chinese Confucian background is
going to be able to run a democracy. It took some help, but the Germans and
the Japanese and now, even the Russians, and Taiwanese seem to have figured
it out. In spite of vast cultural differences, very different from the
Anglo-Saxon world of parliament that Westminster and the early United
States a lot of people seemed 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 Bahrein extent and others. Of the 24 Muslim-predominant non-Arab states,
about half are democracies. They include some of the poorest countries in
the world. Bangladesh, Mali - Mali is almost an ideal democracy. Nearly 200
million Muslims live in a democracy in India. Outside one province, they
are generally at peace with their Hindu neighbors. 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; all five of those are working on weapons of mass destruction of
one type or another.
The Mideast presents a serious and massive problem of pathological
predators next to vulnerable autocracies. I don't believe this terror war
is ever really going to go away until we change the face of the Middle
East. 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 largely democratic,
even including Russia. These changes that have taken place over the course
of the last 85 years are a remarkable achievement. The ones that still have
to be undertaken in a part of the world that has historically not had
democracy, which has reacted angrily against intrusions from the outside,
particularly the Arab Middle East, presents a huge challenge. But I would
say this, both to the terrorists and to the pathological predators such as
Saddam Hussein and to the autocrats as well, the barbarics, 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 best expressed by President Reagan, but also
very importantly at the beginning by President Truman, that this was not a
war of us against them. It was not a war of countries. It was a war of
freedom against tyranny. We have to convince the 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. But I think we need to say to both the terrorists and the
dictators and also to the autocrats who from time to time are friendly with
us, that we know, we understand we are going to make you nervous. We want
you to be nervous. We want you to realize 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.
[This message has been edited by David (edited 18 January 2003).]
