World War IV
By R. James Woolsey
FrontPageMagazine.com | November 22, 2002
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 strife 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 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 -- 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 [because of the opposition to rearmament—ED]. 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. |
