From the July 13 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor:
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O'REILLY: Hi, I'm Bill O'Reilly. Thanks for watching us tonight. Why should you care about the violence in Israel and Lebanon? That is the subject of this evening's "Talking Points Memo."
The answer to that question is because it affects your life. Every time stuff like this happens, the price of oil goes up and the worldwide economy totters.
It's exactly what Iran wants. And Iran is behind the terror attacks on Israeli forces. The whole thing is part of World War III, ladies and gentlemen. Islamic fascism against the West. That global conflict, unfortunately, is here for the foreseeable future.
[...]
O'REILLY: Yeah. Last question, Mr. Cook. Military action, you know, look, here's what Iran's going to do. It's going to push us as far as it can. It's going to do as much damage to the world as it can. And then it'll draw back, if it thinks military action is coming its way, correct?
STEVEN COOK (fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations): I think that's precisely the case. And there won't be much upside for the United States to take military action directly against Iran. They have too many cards that they can play against us. They have cards to play against us in Afghanistan, cards to play -- continue to make our lives miserable in Iraq. And obviously as we've seen, they've continued -- they've heated up the border between Israel and Lebanon.
O'REILLY: All right, World War III, right?
COOK: Possibly.
O'REILLY: I think we're in it. I absolutely think we're in it.
From the July 10 edition of Fox News' The Big Story with John Gibson:
GIBSON: From Kim Jong Il's missile testing to the Iranian president ranting that he'll wipe Israel off the map, and the fight to weed terrorists out of Iraq, some are calling the global war on terror something else, something more like World War III. Here now, Michael Ledeen, a columnist and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a public-policy research institute. Michael, it was a columnist in the New York Daily News today saying this is World War III, and it's on. Do you agree with him?
LEDEEN: Well, it's certainly on. It's more like World War IV, because there was a Cold War, which was certainly a world war. But sure, it's global, and it's on.
GIBSON: Where do we count the start of it?
LEDEEN: Well, that's always difficult to do. Probably the start of it was the Iranian revolution of 1979, when you had the first fanatical Islamic regime declare war on us, and that was explicit in the fall of 1979.
GIBSON: What would be the hallmarks of this? I mean, we know there's a war on terror. But the proposition put forward is that if you look at all of this stuff, what the Iranians are threatening to do, what the North Koreans are threatening to do, what the Japanese are threatening to do, what we are prepared to do and have done, that there really is one large world war under way. Does that concept hold together?
LEDEEN: Yeah, I think so. I think the president had it right at the beginning, and he seems to have forgotten about it, when he said that we're not going to distinguish between terrorist organizations and countries that support and feed and house and train and arm them. And so if you help terrorists, we're going to treat you as if you are a terrorist yourself. Well, there are many terrorist regimes around the world right now, and we're going to have to try to cope with them.
GIBSON: Michael, if the -- there is World War IV and it's under way, if that's a correct assumption --
LEDEEN: It is.
GIBSON: -- what should we be doing right now that we're not doing?
LEDEEN: We should be doing what we did most effectively in World War III. The way we won World War III was not by invading and bombing primarily, it was by bringing down regimes that were palpably failures, like the Soviet Union and the Soviet empire in general. If you look at the terrorist sponsors, Syria, Iran, North Korea, and so forth, all of whom work very closely together and so forth, these are all failed regimes. Their people hate them. They're not even feeding their people, even though some of them are drowning in oil revenues. So we should be supporting revolution in those countries against them, exactly as we did in Poland and Hungary and Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union itself. It worked in World War III, I don't see why it shouldn't work in World War IV.
GIBSON: Well, what if you throw into the mix the obvious, that we're not operating against states, we're not operating against governments in all cases, but what we call terrorists?
LEDEEN: It's exactly the same case. We are operating against states like Iran and Syria and North Korea. And in World War III, during the Cold War, the Soviet Union certainly supported terrorism around the world, as did allies of theirs like the Cubans and the Chinese and the North Koreans.
GIBSON: All right, Michael Ledeen, columnist, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Michael, thanks.
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