Posted on 12/23/2001 4:57:53 PM PST by OKCSubmariner
(December 20) – Measuring the different degrees of fraud Former CIA chief James Woolsey tells Jeff Barak why the next step in the US war on terrorism must be to bring down Saddam Hussein
Former CIA chief James Woolsey has no doubt as to what should be the next objective in the war against terror: The destruction of Saddam Hussein. Fighting a global war against ter-rorism without targeting Iraq, he says, "is sort of like Hamlet with-out the prince."
Woolsey was here this week for a 13-hour stay in Israel to give the keynote address at the opening of the Herzliya Conference, a speech that won the plaudits of Israel's military and intelligence community. Talking off the cuff – "I haven't written out a speech since I was 12, except for times when I was speak ing in an official capacity" – the ex-CIA head charmed his audience with a mixture of dry humor and tough talk. In the bar of the Dan Accadia afterwards, nursing a glass of red wine during an interview with The Jerusalem Post, Woolsey was continually praised by passers-by for the sharpness of his lecture.
Unlike his Israeli counterparts, such as Mossad head Ephraim Halevy who spoke before him, or former Mossad head Shabtai Shavit, for whom lecturing is a serious business, Woolsey enjoys entertaining his audience: "Mr Chairman," he begins his speech, "I was deeply honored to be asked to be with you here tonight, but to tell you the truth since I'm: a) a lawyer, b) from Washington DC and c) I've spent some time out in the CIA, I'm prettywell honored to be invited into any polite company for any purposes whatsoever."
But the message he brought with him was far from polite conversation. "We are at war to the death. There should be no mistake about this. September 11 galvanized us into serious action in exactly the same way that December 7, 1941, did."
Most of the time, Woolsey notes, American foreign policy is seen as a contest between three schools of thought: Jeffersonianism, which sees the US as a model of democracy and very reluctant to interfere abroad – "Colin Powell is classified as a Jeffersonian;" Hamiltonianism, which puts commerce and business first; and Wilsonianism, which advocates idealism at home and abroad, a strong commitment to international organizations, and a strong involvement in human rights abroad.
But now, he says, there is a fourth school: Jacksonianism. "Jacksonians," according to Woolsey, "share the characteristic of [the seventh US president] Andrew Jackson, where, whenever crossed in any way in which he thought his honor or the country's honor had been fundamentally attacked, Jackson was absolutely and totally ruthless in destroying his enemies. And, I might add, universally successful. "Jacksonians instinctively understand something that a Mideast scholar said to me a few days aftern September 11.
'When this is over, either we are going to be held in contempt in the Mideast as we are now, or we are going to be feared and respected. There is nothing in between.' " With the 80 percent to 90 percent support ratings for President Bush and the approximate 80 percent support for taking out Saddam Hussein's regime,"the Americans are Jacksonians today," Woolsey insists. For Woolsey, Iraq is the "center of gravity" of world terrorism and weapons proliferation. "If you break it, a lot of other things may fall too," he predicts.
CONTAINMENT of Iraq, which was the Clinton policy, is "a mug's game," he maintains. "The problem is while you are containing them, they are working on ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction."
Indeed, Woolsey who resigned as CIA director in December 1994 after two years in the job due to the fallout in the Aldrich Ames case, has few kind words to say about the former American president's handling of the Iraqi regime. "In 1993, Saddam tried to kill former President Bush in Kuwait, and President Clinton lobbed a few cruise missiles into an empty Iraqi intelligence headquarters in the middle of the night. I have never understood why killing Iraqi cleaning women and night watchmen was supposed to be a lesson to Saddam."
The ex-CIA head accepts that there might be logistic reasons for delaying an attack on Baghdad, but notes that even given the experience of the Vietnam war, President George Bush does not have to worry about waning public support for such an operation, should it drag on. "Particularly given the [September 11] attack, I think the president has years – more than three. I mean, there'll be setbacks, and blips in the polls and those sorts of things, but generally speaking people will cut him a lot of slack."
Woolsey also has little doubt Iraq was implicated in the wave of anthrax letters that hit the US after September 11. As he ironically told the audience at Herzliya: "It is possible that there is no tie between the anthrax mailed in the US and those who perpetrated September 11, that it is entirely the product of, let's say, a crazed, American Nazi Ph.D. microbiologist in a well-equipped laboratory in a cave somewhere under Trenton, N.J. That's possible. "But if this crazed microbiolo-gist had nothing to do with September 11, then it is a coincidence that he was ready to mail the anthrax one week later. Or, he was thinking about it and then after September 11 very quickly organized his laboratory and started mailing anthrax in one week.
"Now if you think both of those scenarios are pretty unlikely, as I do, then the only other alternative is that September 11 and the anthrax had something to do with one another. And if those who suggest that if there is an American or an independent terrorist group involved, that means that Iraq is not involved, that's nonsense. There is no sole source of contracting requirement for international terrorism. Joint ventures are entirely allowed."
While overthrowing Saddam would take more effort than destroying the Taliban, Woolsey is confident it is possible, and less dif-ficult than in 1991 because of the depleted state of the Iraqi military and defense systems. And this time, Woolsey maintains, there is no need for a broad coalition "in which we listen to the lowest common denom-inator." In fact, "only one ally is essential – Turkey – for access to Arab land bases near Iraq and land access to northern Iraq and for the expertise of its military. We would have other countries with us – I believe, I trust this one [Israel] and Britain, but we do not need a crowd to do this."
WOOLSEY is less clear when it comes to Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority. While he says that earlier he had some hope that Arafat "might have had a tiny shred of Anwar Sadat in him, just enough maybe to get some kind of deal done," this hope was extinguished when Arafat rejected then-prime minister Ehud Barak's offer at Camp David. But this does not mean Arafat should receive the same treatment as Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden.
In fact, like many others, Woolsey seems to grope towards unilateral separation. "If it stays as hopeless as it looks right now, some way of doing the fencing off option seems to me something that has to be con-sidered." Acknowledging that he doesn't have a grasp of the details of which roads go where, which settlements are where, "but in principle, it seems to me Israel would be able to hold on to strategically important territory and make sure that no more weapons came into the PA. But the key thing is: Are you going to let Palestinians come and go into Israel working, because as long as they can come and go, they can have suicide bombers... I don't know how you keep the suicide bombers out unless you separate the economies."
Perhaps Israel should go back into the PA-controlled areas and take them over? Woolsey is not convinced that that is the best option. "Somebody is going to have to end up governing the Palestinians. If it's Israel, that is a huge, terribly debilitating burden to undertake. Maybe Israel is willing to do it, maybe it's the only option but it sure would not be the first one I would take... Occupations of a hostile population are not easy to run."
Returning to his favorite theme of regime change in Iraq, Woolsey points out that Baghdad helps sup-port Palestinian terror, with the donations it sends to the families of suicide bombers and those wounded in clashes with IDF soldiers.
"I continue to think, although I can't be sure, good things will hap-pen if we start overthrowing regimes that back terrorism. However we phase it, we've got about half a dozen loci of terrorisms that, in one way or another, have to be changed: change the policy, change the people or change the structure. In Iraq, I think you have to change the whole structure." For other terror centers, such as the PA and Libya, the measures need not necessarily be so harsh. "Mr Qadaffi has already gotten the message" he says. "If you read anything he has written since September 11, he sounds – not a little bit, but exactly – like Tony Blair."
Iran, too, is changing, Woolsey says, and not just in elections which routinely deliver, 70 percent to 75 percent votes for reformers, but in demonstrations of young people after soccer games in Iran over the course of the last month or so. "The chants have been "Long Live Freedom," "We love America," and my favorite recent one – "Death to the Taliban in Kabul and in Teheran. "Something is happening in Iran. It has not happened yet, but there is some hope, not for reform by the mullahs but for the tumult of another revolution, not tomorrow, per-haps not even within the next few months, but the Mullahs are afraid and they should be. If the Baathist regime is replaced in Iraq, we will have begun to reshape the Middle East."
In a quick survey of the new leaders in the Middle East, Woolsey has scant regard for Bashar Assad: "I had some hopes for him for a few months... but it sure doesn't look like it's borne out at all. He's a big disappointment for anybody who hoped for change in Syria."
By contrast, Woolsey says he's "impressed" with Jordan's King Abdullah. "He's about as good as you could possibly do for a potential partner in an Arab state. He's got some real constraints on him because the majority of his popula-tion are Palestinian, but his instincts are reasonable."
IN THE argument about whether the US security services should have been better prepared for bin Laden's attack, Woolsey comes to the CIA's defense.
"Given the operational security that this September 11 thing was under, very few people knew about it, it would have been very hard to penetrate it. Our best shot was probably having broken into his satellite telephone communications, which I don't think he thought we were reading, and then in '98 that some-how came out and of course he stopped using it."
Woolsey does think, however, that his successor, John Deutch, did make life more difficult for the CIA. "We placed too many restrictions on human intelligence in the United States. We went for nearly six years with these stupid guidelines that my successor issued that made it more difficult to recruit spies if they had some violence in their background." For the CIA, he points out, "and I imagine it's true for the Mossad, we get a lot of people trapped inside bad governments who are willing to work for us. Probably two-thirds of the Russian agents that Ames got killed were essentially patriotic Russians who weren't in it for money, but just hated Communism.
"But inside terrorist organizations or criminal organizations, that's not true. There's nobody in al-Qaida who doesn't want to be a terrorist. So it's kind of crazy have to go through some extra hoops to recruit somebody if they have some violence in their background... That's like telling the FBI they should penetrate the Mafia but be real careful and try not to recruit anybody who's an actual crook. It's crazy."
In the espionage world, "an awful lot of what's useful is a combinationof human intelligence and technical intelligence. If you're spying on a drug cartel, probably the best person to recruit would be the systems administrator for the drug cartel's banks computer system. When we've done a lot of stuff on prolif-eration, finding particular times when individual ships were leaving port and so forth... it's often a com-bination of human intelligence and either reconnaissance or signals intelligence."
ACCORDING TO Woolsey, Israel and the US are hated"because we are free. We are hated by the Islamists – I prefer the totalitarian sounding formula-tion rather than the religious one, so I say Islamist rather than Islamic fundamentalism – because we believe in the free-dom of speech, freedom of the press, the education of women and openness, and everything that makes life worth living in modern Israeli and American society." He traces the roots of al-Qaida to both the Wahabi branch of Islam, exported by Saudi Arabia, and the influence of the ideology of the 1930s and '40s Moslem Brotherhood.
"I think the Saudi establishment gets itself a pass from the Wahabis by helping the Wahabis set up madrasses in Pakistan, mosques in the United States, and I think that's part of the problem. The Saudi establishment is part of the problem because they've been exporting this extremely angry form of Islam, which" he is clear to point out,"itself is not terrorist...
"Al-Qaida bears about the same relationship to mainline Moslem believers as Torquemada bears to Jesus. There's no Sermon on the Mount in Torquemada...
"I would add there is the same kind of relation the guy who assassinated [prime minister Yitzhak] Rabin bears to the Judaism I know in the States. All the religions in one way or anoth-er can come up with nutcases, a fairly large number of nutcases." Woolsey notes that a few years ago, one could already see the signs of Islamism in the United States.
"Those who were active in American churches and syna-gogues began to perceive it when these churches and synagogues would go to local mosques to put together fundraising events for Bosnian Moslems and for the Moslems of Kosovar, and would be told that the mosques in the United States, because a number are Wahabi, could not cooperate with infidels such as you and me, even in order to help fellow Moslems. That struck many Americans as being not the Islam they thought was dominant."
Now that the identity of the enemy is known, Woolsey says America has to prepare itself for "a very long and bloody war, includ-ing on the American home front."
Moreover, unlike 1991 and the end of the Gulf War which left Saddam still in power, "the keything is that we cannot abandon the cause of democracy in the Mideast... We tried realpolitik with dictators and it got us September 11 and it got us the second intifada here."
Democracies, he points out, rarely fight one another. "For democracies, war is the last resort. It's the first resort for dic-tators who need foreign enemies." While accepting the democratization of the Middle East is a "tall order," Woolsey is convinced that in post-September 11,"America is back, and it's back with a spirit that the world has not seen since 1945."
I am so sick of hearing this. Everyone underestimates the power of the USA. We took Afghanistan withour a fight and we took Irac in 91 with no problem at all. The same will happen this time around and the only American bloodshed will be by friendly fire as history has sadly shown us in the recent past. Iraq will not give us a fight and there will be no more domestic attacks.
It's interesting. He gives a logical argument that the anthrax attacks were connected with 9/11. But then he makes the leap of bringing Iraq in, without providing any specific justification.
We know about the meeting between Atta and an Iraqi agent that is said to have occurred in Prague. But is there anything else that specifically links Iraq to the anthrax attacks? (It doesn't have to be definitive. In contrast, there is plenty of evidence linking the anthrax attacks to the 9/11 terrorists, although it's all circumstantial and not definitive.)
See this is a problem. On one hand, everyone wants to believe you are right and to ignore the evidence that is inconsistent with your view. However consider this: You did not impact the enemy very much by taking Afghanistan. You denied him the use of Afghanistan as a sanctuary base from which to launch further attacks. However in fact most of the leadership and most of his core army have escaped (we want to believe they are simply not accounted for dead at this point however Washington knows better). The fact that you don't know where he is keeps you from doing anything about the fact that he is plotting his next attack on North America and demonstrates that he has identified a replacement sanctuary about which you can do nothing.
The fact that you and the politically correct Liberals want to believe there won't be a next attack in North America keeps the rest of us from taking effective action to prevent one--when we find out you are wrong, many of us are dead or seriously hurt.
It is reasonable to believe that we in fact interrupted a second domestic attack in October by incarcerating a number of enemy profile individuals. However the problem is we did not know and do not know now which individuals who were incarcerated were involved in the October attack and so due to Liberal interference with this action, most of these individuals are now back on the street planning the next attack. What do we think is going to stop them other than wishful thinking?
People keep talking as if weaponized anthrax were something that grows on trees. It doesn't.
I would rather think positively and say that there wont be another attack on the USA. This does not mean that I am not aware of my surroundings and am closing my eyes to the problem at hand. Please do not confuse the two. I am sure a lot of people stay up endless nights wondering what US city will be attacked next. I am not one of them The reason I stated that there wont be another attack on US soil is because I think as Americans we are better prepared and more aware, not because I dont think those A-holes will try again.
Yesterday's failed attack on the flight from Paris to Miami is proof of that.
The links are in the right hand column. The speech by Menachem Begin (link in same column)is worth a listen if you have a spare half hour. MB went up a few notches in my estimation of him after hearing it.
A-G, I haven't forgotten the Bayt David Inscription matter. Unfortunately the main source I'm relying upon is George Athos whose site is down ATM. His PhD dissertation is devoted to just that question.
That's absolutely right.
Agreed. But the anthrax could have been stolen from the U.S., or from Russia (which I guess is not considered a hostile country right now), or even from Iraq. Or maybe one of the other ex-Soviet republics kept some anthrax.
And what about China? I haven't read much about the Chinese biowarfare program, but I'd be very surprised if they didn't have anthrax.
Pakistan (or Islamic fundamentalists in Pakistan) would be another place to look. They developed nuclear weapons, and we recently found out that their nuclear scientists have taken an interest in anthrax.
Look at how many countries were able to develop a clandestine nuclear weapons program. A secret anthrax program would be much easier to hide.
None of this suggests that the 9/11 terrorists weren't involved. They almost certainly were. But, as Woolsey says, this isn't an either-or proposition. In fact, there may be a very loose amorphous coalition of nations and terrorist groups opposing us, sort of a Doppelganger to the loose amorphous coalition that we have formed on our side.
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