WHAT COMES NEXT
A Long War
Iraq is only the beginning: Lessons from the battle against communism.
BY R. JAMES WOOLSEY
Saturday, April 19, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT
URL:http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110003373
Shortly after Sept. 11, Eliot Cohen coined the term "World War IV" to describe our current struggle against terrorism and rogue regimes. The Cold War, he wrote, was World War III, and our current war may substantially resemble it--requiring a long and heavy commitment and the defeat of a totalitarian ideology. Some scoff at any such parallel and consider the Cold War analogy overblown.
This is not surprising. Americans love to believe an odd notion that history keeps disproving: that once we have fixed the outside world, it ought to have the good grace to stay fixed. We've been in that mindset twice before in the last 100 years. The popular view after World War I was that we had just "made the world safe for democracy," and after the fall of the Berlin Wall the comparable litany was that "the Cold War is over." Each of these popular slogans in effect sounded a similar call: for a long national beach party.
In both the '20s and the '90s we basked in our recent victories and watched the stock market boom. Both decades "roared," and in both postwar eras we coupled self-indulgence with international irresponsibility. After World War I we shrugged at the rise of rogue governments, in Italy and later in Japan and Germany. After the Cold War we did a bit better on the rogue front in Europe--we stopped Slobodan Milosevic, eventually. But we left Saddam Hussein in place after having him on the ropes and abandoned Afghanistan after helping free it from Soviet domination: two retreats from duty that returned to haunt us.
Only after World War II did we get it right. Because of a remarkable set of leaders and strategists--Truman, Marshall, Acheson, Vandenberg, Nitze, Kennan--we turned, with our allies, relatively quickly and in good order, to fighting the next world war: in the conference halls where we assembled the Marshall Plan and the new era's institutions, on the battlefield in Korea, and in the battle of ideas against communism.
The democracies' success in the ideological struggle during the Cold War was crucial to their victory. In World Wars I and II we made it clear that we were fighting for freedom: in Wilson's Fourteen Points, and Roosevelt and Churchill's Atlantic Charter. But the Cold War was remarkable because in many different ways--the broadcasts of Radio Free Europe, the speeches of Churchill, Truman, JFK and Ronald Reagan, the bold human-rights goals declared at Helsinki--we were able to convince key people on the other side of the Iron Curtain that we were not clashing with their nations, much less their civilization. We got through to Walesa, to Havel, to Sakharov, to Solidarity, and to those who tore down the wall, that this was a war of freedom against tyranny, and that we were on their side. They heard us and became our allies, and we theirs. In no small measure, that is why we won.
The victory has been remarkable. In the 89 years since August 1914, the world has gone from having about a dozen democracies (and in those only men voting) to, by Freedom House's count, 121 today--89 free, 32 partly free. This is literally an order-of-magnitude increase, to over 60% of the world's governments--an extraordinary development within a single human lifetime. Many of these countries became democracies during and at the end of the Cold War, and relatively few did so by force of American arms (although our military capabilities, including nuclear deterrence, protected the democracies while we undermined the communist system). There were many non-military heroes of World War III, including Pope John Paul II, the AFL-CIO, and British civil servants who left a heritage of the rule of law in a number of former colonies.
All along the way, from the occupation of Germany and Japan until today, a number of self-nominated experts on various cultures have said confidently that "X will never be able to operate a democracy," where X at different times has been Germans, Japanese, Catholics, Asians, Africans, Russians. Yet people from quite diverse cultures with little or no history of democracy, even some living in substantial poverty, regularly seem to ignore the experts and successfully hold elections and protect civil liberties under a rule of law: Mongolia and Mali, for instance, are fine democracies. And once a nation solidly becomes a democracy it is generally at peace with its democratic neighbors--democracies almost never make war on one another.
There is no basic incompatibility between Islam and democracy. Well over half of the world's Muslims live in democracies, in Indonesia, Bangladesh, India, Turkey, Mali, the Balkans. There are some special difficulties in the Arab Middle East, and it is true that none of the 22 Arab states is a democracy (although several do a decent job of guaranteeing civil liberties). But the experts who tell us that Arabs will never be able to operate democracies are as wrong as those who have said the same thing about other cultures. There is really only one word for those who persist in such a view: racist.
An ideological meltdown is occurring in Iran, akin to that of the Soviet Empire in the '80s. The ideology of Shiite theocracy is crumbling. The mullahs who succeeded Ayatollah Khomeini have lost the allegiance of the young people, the women, the brave reformers being tortured in prison. One by one, they are losing even the grand ayatollahs. If the mullahs have a brain cell working they will realize that they are in the approximate position of the inhabitants of the Kremlin in 1988 (or Versailles in 1788), and save their skins by dismantling their tyranny. In World War IV, as in World War III, we must understand that different enemies require different tactics. South Korea in 1950 could be saved only by American military power, but Poland in the '80s required a very different touch. Freedom in Iran may well arrive in Polish guise.
Victory in this world war will depend not only on our skill in battle and our effectiveness in rolling up terrorist cells. It will depend on our being able to split as many potential adherents as possible away from our main totalitarian enemies: Sunni Islamists (al Qaeda, its fellow travelers and financiers), Shiite Islamists (Tehran's mullahs, Hezbollah), and Syria, Libya, and Sudan (each with a somewhat different ideological cover story to justify oppression). We will not be able to do this by being feckless--a terrorist prosecution here, a cruise missile there. We have tried that, and it brought us Sept. 11. The democracies must rather change the face of the Middle East, as they have changed Europe.
To do so we need to move smartly to make common cause with the many millions of decent Muslims who want to live in freedom and at peace. Today our potential Muslim allies, even in this country, are often silent because they are intimidated by Islamists and theocratic fanatics. But the Muslim equivalents of Walesa, Havel, and Sakharov are out there. They need our help, and we need theirs. To avoid a clash of civilizations and to reduce the need for the clash of arms, we need to forge another alliance for freedom in this war like the one that won World War III.
Mr. Woolsey is a former CIA director. |
