The War on Terror: The Energy Front

front page magazine ^ | 02 may 2006 | James Woolsey

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The following speech was given as part of Restoration Weekend 2006, at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix, Feb. 23-26, 2006 -- The Editors.

I’m honored to be invited but, to tell you the truth, since I was a Washington lawyer for 22 years and then I was with the CIA during the Clinton administration, I’m pretty well honored to be invited into any polite company for any purposes whatsoever.

I was not the originator of the phrase “World War IV.” As far as I know, that was my friend Elliot Cohen in Wall Street Journal op-ed immediately after 9/11. I have mixed feelings about it. Sometimes I use that phrase and sometimes “the long war,” which a lot of people are now starting to use.

The main point is that we should regard this war we’re in as a long one. If you call it the World War IV, the analogy in a sense is to the Cold War, which I call World War III.

But the main idea is that this is a long contest of decades, not years, and it’s one that’s going to require us to do some very innovative and different things, just as the Cold War required us to do some things very differently than we had done in either World War I or World War II.