So long as, he insisted, we do not do something stupid.
Threat No. 5: Saudi Arabia
The Saudis have been key suppliers of oil to the West for the better part of a century, and the royal family has generally been close to officials in Washington, hoping to maintain the stability of their regime and keep the petrodollars from the U.S. flowing. But Saudi Arabia is also:
• the home of Mecca and Medina
• the birthplace of Muhammad, the founder of Islam
• the place where the Qur’an was written
• the birthplace of Osama bin Laden
• the birthplace of fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers, responsible for the deaths of nearly three thousand Americans
• the site of the Khobar Towers bombing in 1996 that killed nineteen Americans and wounded 372 others
• the source of enormous transfers of wealth to terrorist organizations such as al Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah
Goss argued that ultimately we are going to have to deal with the Saudis, one way or the other.373
“Even though Iraq is historically a vital spot, I do not think it is necessarily the central or last battleground of the struggle between Radicals and Reformers,” he told me. “My candidate for where the major battle may well occur between Radicals and Reformers in Islam is not far from where it all started back in 600 AD—Saudi Arabia. If you are going to settle questions of what is true Islam, you need to go to the wellspring. I am not optimistic that a peaceful solution can be found. Wealth and Wahhabism flow from Saudi Arabia as do countless ‘homicide bombers’ into epicenter hotspots. The regime’s arrangement with the fanatical clerics as well as its ‘family matter’ approach to captured terrorists suggests a very hard landing when the post-octogenarians come back to earth.”
Threat No. 6: Hamas and Hezbollah
Do not forget about the twin sisters of Radicalism, both of which are backed by Iran and seeking to annihilate Israel with some sort of cataclysmic event, Goss urged. He warned specifically of “daily fuse-lighting events in Gaza” by the Sunni Radicals of Hamas that could trigger an Israeli invasion and possible reassertion of control over Gaza. He also warned of “a big blast” by the Shia Radicals of Hezbollah that could “further inflame the fanatics” against “any tolerance of Israel” by the government of Lebanon or “any moderate policies at all” in Beirut. A violent seizure of the Lebanese government by Hezbollah or an effective takeover via rigged elections are very real possibilities.
Threat No. 7: Energy Security
“Oil cannot be ignored when talking about security,” Goss told me, rounding out his list of top threats to watch in the coming months and years. “Yes, there is plenty of oil for the foreseeable needs of the near future, but much of it seems to be in the wrong places or in unreliable hands. Conserving on air-conditioning or heating oil voluntarily—or cutting back because of high prices at the pump—are not the issues. Production in troubled areas and distribution via vulnerable channels raise issues of availability, price notwithstanding.”
The big question, he said, was this: “How far forward will any nation with military power lean to ensure delivery of energy to sustain quality of life and/or political viability at home?”
Goss was not offering policy prescriptions of how, exactly, the U.S. or any other country should maximize energy security for the next generation. He was simply noting that our enemies are using oil as a weapon against us.
Two weeks after our interview, Michael McConnell, the U.S. director of national intelligence, made the same point before Congress. “OPEC countries earned an estimated $690 billion from oil exports last year, nearly three times the revenues earned in 2003,” McConnell noted. “The increased revenues also have enabled producers like Iran, Venezuela, Sudan, and Russia to garner enhanced political, economic, and even military advantages and complicated multilateral efforts to address problems such as the tragedy in Darfur and Iran’s nuclear program.”374
Few Americans realize that the leaders of al Qaeda and Iran have explicitly been pursuing a policy of economic jihad against the United States:
“If their economy is destroyed, they will be busy with their own affairs rather than enslaving the weak peoples. It is very important to concentrate on hitting the U.S. economy through all possible means.”—Osama bin Laden, December 2001375
“We will also aim to continue, by the permission of Allah, the destruction of the American economy.”—Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, September 2002376
“Alongside the mujahadeen in Afghanistan, we bled Russia for ten years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat. . . . We are continuing this policy to bleed America to the point of bankruptcy. . . . Al Qaeda spent $500,000 on [the 9/11 attacks], while the incident and its aftermath have cost America more than half a trillion dollars. This meant that, by the Grace of God, every dollar al Qaeda spent cost America a million dollars and a huge number of jobs. . . . [T]his demonstrates the success of the bleed-until-bankruptcy plan.”—Osama bin Laden, October 2004377
“No politician can be found in the United States who is capable of saving the U.S. economy from this move toward the valley of downfall.”—Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, April 2008378
“These days, [although] no incident has as yet occurred, oil prices have risen from $12 to $120 a barrel. Now try to calculate how high [the price] of this essential commodity will rise if the enemy acts in a foolhardy manner.”—Mohammad Ja’far Assadi, commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, August 2008379
As Commander Assadi noted, this policy of economic jihad against the U.S. and the West has been working, especially when it comes to driving up the price of oil and thus forcing Westerners to transfer their wealth to states controlled by the Radicals. Consider the following trend lines:380
• 1973: Oil was less than $5 a barrel when the Arab oil embargo against the West began. Gas was just 39 cents a gallon.
• 1979: Oil was $13 a barrel when the Iranian Revolution began. Gas was 90 cents a gallon.
• 1981: Oil was $37 a barrel when the Iran-Iraq War was fully under way. Gas was $1.38 a gallon.
• 1988: Oil dropped to $15 a barrel as the Iran-Iraq War ended. Gas was 95 cents a gallon.
• 1998: Oil dropped to only $10 a barrel in the aftermath of the first Gulf War, a peace treaty between Israel and Jordan, and a moderate regime in power in Iran under President Mohammad Khatami. Gas was $1.06 a gallon.
• 2000: Oil rose to $30 a barrel after al Qaeda attacks against U.S. embassies in Africa and against the USS Cole, the collapse of the Arab-Israeli peace talks at Camp David, and the explosion of the second intifada, along with growing demand from China and India. Gas was $1.51 a gallon.
• June 2008: Oil rose to a record high of $135 a barrel after the 9/11 attacks; the war in Afghanistan; the war in Iraq; the insurgency in Iraq; repeated al Qaeda terrorist attacks throughout the world; the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; Iran’s threats to wipe Israel off the map; the Hezbollah war against Israel; growing talk of a possible preemptive strike by the U.S. or Israel against Iran; and Iranian threats to destroy oil tankers and U.S. naval ships passing through the Straits of Hormuz, the strategically vital chokepoint between the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf, through which some 17 million barrels of oil are transported each and every day. Gas was $4 a gallon.381
While global oil and gas prices will continue to go up and down in the years ahead for a variety of reasons, some geopolitical and some related to supply and demand, a critical question has to be asked: what is the United States doing to protect our energy security, wean ourselves off Middle Eastern oil, and insulate our economy from the strategies of the Radicals who hope to bleed us dry?
So far, very little.
We should, however, be doing everything we can to become more energy efficient and find alternative energy sources.
We should also be drilling for more oil in our country.
Incredibly, since the Iranian Revolution, U.S. cru
de oil production has fallen 37 percent. In 1979, U.S. domestic crude oil production was 8.552 million barrels per day. By 2006, we were down to 5.136 million barrels per day.382 In 1982, the U.S. actually imposed a federal ban on drilling for oil on the Outer Continental Shelf. But prices, technology, and geopolitical conditions have changed drastically since then.383
It is time to drill. According to the U.S. Department of the Interior, “assuming existing technology, there are approximately 112 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil onshore and in State waters.”384 That’s right—the U.S. has at least 112 billion barrels of proven oil reserves right here at home.
To put that in perspective, we have nearly half the reserves that Saudi Arabia has (267 billion barrels), and nearly as much as Iran itself has (136 billion barrels). As Investor’s Business Daily noted in an editorial published while I was writing this book, 112 billion barrels of oil is enough oil “to power 60 million cars for 60 years,” and “that’s not counting the trillion barrels locked up in shale rock—three times the total oil reserves of Saudi Arabia.”385
Why are we not doing everything we possibly can to drill for our own oil, in our own country, and build the necessary facilities to refine American oil, employing American workers to do the job? Such steps would move us in the right direction to bless our own people, safeguard our economy, and stop transferring hundreds of billions of dollars to countries owned or controlled by Islamic Radicals.
Chapter Fourteen
“Islam Is the Answer, but Jihad Is Not the Way”
Who are the Reformers, and what do they want?
“Aren’t there any Muslims out there who think the Radicals are crazy and are willing to fight back against the jihadists?” I am often asked. “Where are the Muslim leaders who are promoting freedom and opportunity and trying to create and expand democracy, as difficult as that may be in the modern Middle East?”
It is sad that such questions need to be asked so long after the 9/11 attacks. But the mainstream media has, frankly, done a terrible job examining the internal tensions and enormous diversity of beliefs and practices within the Muslim world.
So here are the answers: “Yes, absolutely,” and “They’re out there, but they don’t get nearly enough attention or respect.”
My wife, Lynn, and I have met many Muslims who vehemently oppose the Radicals and seek only peace and prosperity for their people and the community of nations. We have befriended such Muslims. We have had them to our home for dinner. We have traveled around the world to have dinner in their homes. We have interviewed them at length, and though we do not agree with them theologically, we have grown to love and admire them in many ways. Indeed, they are a tremendously welcome breath of fresh air in a region being suffocated by the Radicals, and they deserve not only to be acknowledged by the free people of the West but to be appreciated, encouraged, and supported, for in many ways they represent our front line of defense in stopping the worst-case scenarios being planned by the Radicals.
Let there be no doubt, then, that throughout North America, Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, there is an enormous and growing number of devout Muslims who read the Qur’an, pray to Allah, worship in mosques, respect Islamic culture, raise their children to follow Islamic tradition . . . and are moderates, not extremists.
Like the Radicals, moderate Muslims feel the Islamic world faces enormously serious and challenging social and economic problems. Like the Radicals, many of them feel dismay that for so long during the twentieth century and right up to the present, so many Islamic societies failed to substantially improve the quality of life for 1.3 billion Muslims on the planet, much less for the minority groups that live in Muslim-majority countries. Like the Radicals, they are largely dissatisfied with the political stagnation in the Middle East, even as they are deeply concerned about the deleterious effect of Western culture (movies, music, television, the Internet, pornography, etc.) on their children and grandchildren.
But unlike the Radicals, they are adamant that violence is not an appropriate avenue for political discourse for social change. Unlike the Radicals, they do not believe in imposing their view of Islam on anyone else. Unlike the Radicals, they do not see the West as a mortal enemy, whatever our faults. They do not seek the end of the world or a clash of civilizations. To the contrary, if you were to talk with them, they would tell you, as they have told Lynn and me, “Yes, Islam is the answer, but jihad is not the way.”
Such devout Muslims represent a huge portion of the group I call “the Reformers.”
And they are not alone. There also exists a large and growing number of Reformers who, while agreeing wholeheartedly that violent jihad is not the way, would not go so far as to say that Islam is the answer. They were raised as Muslims. They are respectful of traditional Muslims. But they themselves are not that religious. They have not abandoned Islam, per se, or converted to another religion. But they are primarily secular in their approach to political and social change. This group of Reformers would be more comfortable saying that Islam is an answer, but only one of many.
Together, these two strands make up the movement for reform in the Islamic world and seek a revolution that is no less dramatic than the Radicals’ but that is far better for Muslims and for the rest of the world.
The Followers of Jefferson
What is so fascinating and compelling to me about this movement of Reformers is that while they see the world through the lens of the Qur’an—whether for religious reasons or merely cultural ones—they tend to simultaneously agree with Thomas Jefferson, who wrote in America’s Declaration of Independence that all people have been “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” They argue, therefore, that the key to unleashing the true promise and potential of the people of their region is to provide Muslim men, women, and children with more freedom, more openness, more protection of human and civil rights, and more opportunities to participate in representative government—up to and including the creation of fully functional political democracies—whenever and wherever they can. Why? Because like Jefferson, they believe that these are God-given rights and that governments are created to protect them, not dispense with them or deny them at will. What’s more, they believe in protecting the human and civil rights of ethnic, religious, and political minorities within their countries, again because they believe that God created all men with these unalienable rights and that because God celebrates differences and diversity, so should Muslim governments and societies.
In his first presidential inaugural address in 1801, Jefferson—one of the most highly respected and influential voices during the American Revolution—laid out fifteen principles of representational government, what would become known in time as “Jeffersonian democracy.” Among these principles:
“Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political”
“Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none”
“A jealous care of the right of election by the people”
“Absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority”
“The supremacy of the civil over the military authority”
“The diffusion of information and arraignment of all abuses at the bar of the public reason”
“Freedom of religion”
“Freedom of the press”
“Freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus, and trial by juries impartially selected”386
“These principles,” Jefferson noted, “form the bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation. The wisdom of our sages and blood of our heroes have been devoted to their attainment. They should be the creed of our political faith, the text of civic instruction, the touchstone by which to try the services of those we trust; and should we wander from them in moments of error or of alarm,
let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty, and safety.”
Jefferson believed his country was “the world’s best hope” for the spread of freedom and human dignity, and he openly and unashamedly appealed to the Almighty, “that Infinite Power which rules the destinies of the universe,” for wisdom that the councils of government might do “what is best” for the people.387
In the same spirit, and sometimes using the same language, the Reformers are trying to lead their own revolution in the Muslim world, a revolution based on principles of freedom and opportunity, not fascism and oppression.
Building a Movement
While not all Reformers are full-blown “Jeffersonian democrats,” a growing number of Muslim leaders are seeking to follow Jefferson’s teachings and example in their own way, at their own pace, however haltingly and imperfectly.
Not all Reformers are willing to admit publicly that they are disciples of Jefferson. Some understandably fear they would be accused by their domestic critics—and especially by the Radicals—of trying to impose an “American model” on their citizens. Others, perhaps, are not even fully cognizant that the universal principles they are advocating and attempting to implement were articulated by America’s third chief executive. But whether they admit to it or not, the most important and impressive of the Reformers are, in fact, followers of Thomas Jefferson.
And they are not simply teaching or talking about the power of representative government; they are actually gaining real political power and wielding game-changing influence in critical countries in the Middle East. In the process, they are representing and encouraging a vast and growing movement of Muslims who want to expand freedom and democracy throughout the region.
Inside the Revolution Page 24