Woolsey: Expect long war on terror

When James Woolsey took the microphone at The Breakers Friday night, he told the 400-plus guests that he was honored to be asked to speak.

"Then again, I was a Washington lawyer for 22 years and I was director of the CIA under Bill Clinton. I'm actually honored to be invited to any polite gathering anywhere."

Woolsey, who served in two Democratic and two Republican administrations, was the guest speaker at the annual meeting of the Philanthropy Roundtable.

His topic was the war on terrorism, which he called "the long war of the 21st century."

"Some refer to it as World War Four," he said. "The Cold War was World War Three. And there are some similarities to the Cold War, which lasted for decades with some fighting, but not all the time."

The war on terrorism, he said, "will last for decades. For the younger people in the room, it will be to your generation what the Cold War was to mine. It will probably last the rest of your life."

"We are facing three totalitarian enemies in the Mideast. The first is the fascist Baathists of Iraq and Syria. I don't use the term fascist loosely. The Baathists used the fascists as a model."

It is the Baathists the United States is fighting in Fallujah. "But calling them insurgents gives them too much credit," Woolsey said. "They call themselves the Party of Return, intent on bringing fascism back to Iraq and Syria. Their ideology really is dead. It's nothing more than an excuse for power.

"And although we'll be fighting them for some time to come, I don't think the Baathists have the legs of our other two enemies, both of which are Islamist."

The Shiites are personified by "Khameini and the clerics who rule Iran," Woolsey said. "They are massively unpopular with young Iranians — and half the population of Iraq is under the age of 19 — women, and even his own clerics. That's because the kind of theocracy we see in Iran today is foreign to many Iranians, who are accustomed to a separation of mosque and state.

"Nevertheless, [the theocrats] are powerful. They will soon have a nuclear weapon, and we'll be fighting them for a while, as well."

The third enemy "is Sunni Islamist groups like Al-Qaeda. We'll be fighting them for a long, long time. Their ideology is not dead. They seek to establish a caliphate state, then to export it to the world that used to be Moslem — places like Spain — and then to the rest of the world.

"It sounds crazy, but it's no more crazy than the idea of communism or the Thousand-Year Reich."

"Much of the funding for them comes from extremely wealthy people, especially from Saudi Arabia."

That, combined with their religious zealotry, makes for a dangerous combination, he said.

"Think of them this way. Think of Spain during the time of the Inquisition, move it into the 21st century and put one-third of the world's oil supply underneath it. Torquemada would be a very powerful man, and everyone would try to emulate him."

"Until the '70s, the Wahabis were an extreme sect, associated with the House of Saud but mostly stuck out in the desert. When the Saudi royal family became very rich in the '70s, they also became very frightened," Woolsey said. "There was a theocracy in Iran, and the Great Mosque in Mecca had been seized by Islamists. Since then, the Saudi royal family has effectively had a deal with the Wahabis — 'here's all the money you want to set up mosques in the U.S., just leave us alone. Don't disturb our wild parties in Marbella; don't even mention them.' The Wahabis have received $70 [billion] to $75 billion of Saudi money over the last 25 years.

yes, but it is because we cannot allow a disruption of the flow of oil or the world economy will CRASH.
Do you think it would be worse if oil were replaced by another technology? There would be no resource for many of these "Third World" pretenders to prance across the world stage acting as if there were truly relevant.
Then economics truly WOULD BE the engine for terrorism as contemporary, beanie-coptered global suggest rather than fanatic religious ideology that we know it to be. Nature abhors a vacuum, imagine the post-emigration suckback when the mass of exodus of those of means or intelligence leave those jerkwater nations.
I hate rationalizing extortion.

Must it last a long time? It seems as if we're fighting it Vietnam-style, if so. To whose advantage is that?

If anything this war is NOT being fought "Vietnam style." Right after 911, our President didn't launch a couple of cruise missiles and declare "JUSTICE had been served" like the RATS would have done. Nope. He got the intel, made coordinations and mounted a SpecOps war using indigenous forces in the primary role of insurgent, just as Special Forces describes it's primary mission. Within 100 days of OCT 12th 2001, a task force of 100 operators and USAF assets and so called (derisively by the RATS) "War Lords" had killed over thirty thousand AQ and Taliban.

We pursued the enemy all over Afghanistan, into Pakistan and across the globe. We mounted small incisive operations into the Philippines (Islamic strongholds) with local governmental approval and assistance. No half measures, no 'Nam-like behavior. Wherever we mounted an operation with SpecOps, terrorists died. Lots of terrorists died.

It takes a long time, perhaps a generation for several reasons:

First, the sheer distances involved. These aren't nation states we fight alone (although that too must be done), but rather cells of disparate organizations across the globe.

Second, the nations that must be dealt with will be handled exactly as we have done in Iraq, but we'll get better at it as we gain experience in dealing with the populace and the religion as it infuses itself with government. The radical imams must be separated from the infrastructure of government, forever if we are to succeed in the long term. Islam need not be wiped out to the last man woman and child (I hope). Which brings us to point three.

Third, as we carry out these operations against terror cells and successfully kill them, they leave behind grieving families, who then swear revenge on the infidels (USA and allies). That means as soon as we kill an adult terrorist, the Jihadi infrastructure instantly begins sculpting the next terrorist in the form of that person's kids who will be reared in the visceral hatred of perceived oppression, especially religious oppression. Unless we can break this cycle at the level of culture and religion; this war on terror is liable to last several generations.

We must stay the course. No matter which party controls the government. We must not falter and we must not fail. The alternative is slavery or extinction.

"yes, but it is because we cannot allow a disruption of the flow of oil or the world economy will CRASH." Yeah, I think that's the problem. Dealing with Saudi Arabia in particular is sticky because an open attack on them risks cutting our own economic throats in the process, which would play into the hands of our other enemies (China, Russia, EU, who would like nothing better than to cut off our oil supply). We need a strategy on the economic front, too, IMO. I think Bush's attempt to move away from dependence on foreign oil is the right idea (Drilling in ANWR tops Bush agenda), but of course the environmentalist front groups (read: Communists) and their allies in Congress have been blocking him on ANWR.

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