America in the Middle East
Friday, 07 September 2007
An Interview with James Woolsey
Conducted by Avi Kupfer
James Woolsey served as the U.S. Director of Central Intelligence from 1993 until 1995. He previously served as advisor during the SALT I talks, as counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services, as undersecretary of the U.S. Navy, as delegate to the START and NST talks, and as chairman of the board of Freedom House.
In your testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives on April 18, you advocated eliminating oil’s strategic role in transportation. Until we fully develop the alternative energies necessary for this transition, how must the U.S. proceed in its foreign policy in non-democratic Middle Eastern countries such as Saudi Arabia, Algeria, and Kuwait, upon which we are so incredibly dependent?
We certainly do the best we can. These countries have different leverages over the price of oil. Kuwait and Algeria don’t really have in their hands—although they are members of OPEC—the leverage that Saudi Arabia does with its reserve capacity. People may be right that we’re reaching peak oil dependence in the Middle East and are moving toward heavier demand coming from India and China. The Saudis may not be able to affect the price of oil the way they were once able nor be able to destroy their competitors, but a lot of investors think they can, and so there’s a certain lack of willingness to criticize and deal straightforwardly with the Saudis on some things for some people. I think it will be easier for people in the government and outside who want to be very blunt with the Saudis about human rights and a number of other issues to be blunt once it’s clear that we’re beginning to move away from oil dependency.
Given Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent announcement that Tehran can now produce industrial-scale uranium, how should the U.S. proceed in dealing with his regime?
I think that we ought to be doing everything possible to weaken his regime with the way we do broadcasting and with support for student and labor groups the way we did with Solidarity during the 1980s and to be prepared if there are riots to turn off Iran’s imports of refined diesel and gasoline, rather than its exports. They import over 40 percent of their diesel and gasoline since they don’t have refineries adequate to the task. I think that we ought to be ready to do that. We don’t know how far along Ahmadinejad may be. It may be that they’re pretty far along in producing highly enriched uranium, or he may be lying, or he may have bought some already from North Korea. We just don’t know. I think that it is an extremely dangerous regime because his regime is ideologically fanatic. I don’t think we can discount the crazy things Ahmadinejad says about Iran being destined to be a martyr nation because he’s an extreme ideologue, and extreme ideologues sometimes show us that they do what they say they’re going to do.
You mentioned a strategy along the lines our support for Poland’s Solidarity movement. Are there willing partners in Iran?
You have nearly half of the country feeling very oppressed, and rightly so. And then half of the country is teenagers or younger, and most of them are pretty restless after the rule of the crazy mullahs. There are indeed a fair share of the Iranian clerics who are traditional Shiite clerics and their views are more like Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in Iraq, not very much like Ahmadinejad. I think the regime has a lot of vulnerability.
Do you see a potential power struggle between the Iranian Shiite regime that seems to be vying for influence in the Muslim world and the longstanding Saudi Arabian Sunni emirate that has held a position of control in recent years?
You’ll see a lot of manifestations of this. The Saudis and the Egyptians and four other Sunni states have said that they’re going to have nuclear programs like Iran, and several of these states have huge amounts of oil and gas, so they’re not likely to be in this to produce electricity. They’re likely to have a fuel cycle, and that gives them the ability to have highly enriched uranium or plutonium, 95 percent of the way toward getting a nuclear weapon. The Saudis are also very concerned these days about the Iranian-backed efforts of the Shiites to convert Sunnis to Shiitism.
How does this regional power scuffle affect U.S. policy in the area?
A number of these states have historically had ties to terrorist groups or are permissive with respect to some such groups. The possibility of nuclear weapons getting into the hands of terrorists is very real. That is one vivid illustration of what could derive from the Sunni-Shiite rivalry.
How does the potential increase in regional nuclear proliferation affect our foreign policy options?
It puts everything on a hair trigger because with some of these states, it can be assured that they won’t be taken over by Islamist groups or extremist viewpoints. It also means that whoever gets them first—say, Iran—will throw its weight around to increase its influence because it doesn’t believe that other countries, particularly non-nuclear countries, will stand up to them. I think Iran would use having a nuclear weapon very vigorously by way of keeping it in the background but always present in trying to establish influence over their neighbors and their use of Hezbollah, Hamas, and Muqtada al-Sadr. These are all pawns for them. Their nuclear weapon is their queen—their most lethal piece—and pawns will be much more vigorous under a queen’s protection.
How does Iran’s movement of its various pieces affect our efforts to rebuild Iraq?
Iran has been bad enough in using the Revolutionary Guard to move explosive devices to Iraq to help support and train al-Sadr’s forces to kill Americans and Sunnis. They’ve been quite intrusive and vigorous in trying to dominate the south, and; nuclear weapons would make them more so.
With Iran-supported Shiite paramilitary operations as well as Sunni guerilla movement contributing to Iraq’s destabilization, is there a U.S. policy that can effectively deal with extremism from both sides?
You have to kill and capture them both. You have to kill and capture Sadr’s forces and Iranians who are infiltrating and you have to kill and capture al Qaeda in Iraq.
How would such a policy influence the U.S. military presence in Iraq?
At some point one might be able to reduce the numbers, but that has to be driven by the situation on the ground and not something a priori.
You have often been described as a Scoop Jackson Democrat, advocating a strong international presence for the U.S. How, if at all, has the war in Iraq affected your philosophy on U.S. foreign policy?
Although it’s something I already knew, when you decide to use force, you should use force overwhelmingly and devastatingly. We didn’t send enough troops to Iraq. The two divisions we had ready to go, they called off sending them right after Baghdad fell. They made a terrible mistake in not letting the U.S. military have some of the oil revenues directly to employ people and work with local sheiks to protect people as they are employed. They were able to do that a little bit with the money that was captured from Saddam and the Baathists. I saw that working when I was over there in early 2004. [Former Director of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance in Iraq L. Paul] Bremer refused to let any of the oil revenue money go directly to U.S. military commanders although both the Defense Department and the State Department wanted that to happen. He insisted that everything go through these big contractors. You don’t need big American contractors to hire Philippine workers to rebuild irrigation projects in Iraq. Iraqis have been building irrigation projects for about six or seven thousand years. We should have been employing local Iraqis to do a lot of that work.
Another thing that I think the administration did not do effectively was to establish a constitution. It took them a very long time, and they should have just given the Iraqis back their 1925 constitution, which the Baathist coup took away in 1959. I wrote a piece with Bernard Lewis in the Wall Street Journal in October 2003 just after Baghdad fell and shortly after Bremer was appointed. It said to give them back their 1925 constitution. It provided for a constitutional monarch, had elected officials, had a bill of rights. It was a fine constitution.
They could have amended it because it had amendment procedures. They could have amended it if they wanted it moved from a king to a president. Tradition and history mean a lot in that part of the world, and by starting over, we put ourselves in the position of coming in and doing something new and different that they’re still arguing about. I think they would have settled down politically long ago if we had given them back their 1925 constitution and left much of the Iraqi army intact. I think it would have helped in pulling the nation together, and that’s what we’re having the most problem with right now. They have finally started fighting not “search and destroy” but what they call “clear, hold, and build,” which is the right approach. It’s the one that [General David] Petraeus is using, and he’s been successful on the ground. You can see it in the reports from the scholars at Brookings and a lot of places. Now that they’re finally fighting with the right strategy after three years under the wrong one, things are going better on the ground despite the terrible suicide attacks against civilians. The real problem that they don’t seem to be able to solve is to have a coherent government, and I think that would more readily have come about if they had been given back their own constitution.
Do you think a greater consciousness of history and tradition would positively affect Middle East policy?
You want to build on institutions of public reason that already exist in those countries and cultures. Even countries or cultures that do not have much of a democratic tradition in the sense of balloting often do have institutions that are based on consulting processes and reason and argument and consensus rather than on force. I think we did a better job building on Afghan institutions in helping to put together a government in Afghanistan than by starting fresh in Iraq.
Would you advocate political solutions before more economic and military ones?
It’s not an either/or. You have to kill and capture al Qaeda in Iraq and as much of Sadr’s militia that you can in order to give government a chance. On economics, there should have been a lot more small-scale rebuilding locally, directly protected by and funded through the U.S. military commanders who could have worked directly with individual sheiks to employ their people. Politically, there needed to be a pulling together of various factions to find some way to run the country. As I said, I think that would have been much easier under the 1925 constitution than it has been by starting from scratch. You have to do all of these things.
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