by mike Evans
MDE:
How important is moral clarity in winning the war on terrorism?
Mr. Woolsey:
I think it’s quite important. We shouldn’t get ourselves all seized up in self-doubt. These people hate us for what we are. As a cab driver in Washington DC said to me one time—I was following President Clinton’s speech a few years ago about the things that we had done wrong in dealing with the Middle East—he said, “These people don’t hate us for what we’ve done wrong. They hate us for what we do right.”
And he’s exactly right. They hate us for making it possible for women to have a decent life instead of being subservient, as they are in their cultures. They hate us for freedom of speech. They hate us for freedom of religion. They hate everything about the good parts of America.
And a lot of people would say, “Well, they wouldn’t hate us if we hadn’t supported Israel.” But I don’t see what Israel could do more than it’s done in trying to make peace with the Palestinians. And certainly, their principal reason for hating us—attacking us—was not the Iraq war. Al Qaeda attacked us not only on 9/11, but also the Cole and East African embassies and a facility in Saudi Arabia long before the thought ever crossed George W. Bush’s mind to move into Iraq.
And the Israelis and Palestinians weren’t really even on bin Laden’s original list. His first—well, I said the main problem is that the Americans are in Saudi Arabia. Well, after a year or so, for other reasons, we got out of Saudi Arabia, so that went away. But that didn’t keep him from going on with his attacks or moving other things up the list. What bin Laden wants, I think what the Wahabites want, and certainly Ahmadinejad, is they want us out of the Middle East so they can dominate one or another of them in different ways as much as possible. And then ultimately, they want to get rid of us….
MDE:
America—does it have the will, if all diplomatic measures fail, does it have the will to have a preemptive strike upon Iran?
Mr. Woolsey:
Oh, I don’t think a preemptive strike alone is going to get the job done of taking out either Iran’s nuclear program or the instruments of power of the state. I think it would have to be an air campaign. This is not like 1981 when the Israelis attacked the Osirak reactor. They took out one reactor and they stopped the Iraqi nuclear program for years.
In moving against Iran, we would perhaps not have to go in on the ground, but I think we would have to have a sustained air campaign against their air defenses, their nuclear weapons program, the instruments of power of the state such as the Revolutionary Guard, and on and on. We can’t just drop one set of bombs and think we’re going to accomplish anything.
I hope it doesn’t come to that. I hope we could bring about a regime change with lots of other types of pressure of the sort we’ve discussed. But if it does come to that, we shouldn’t think we can just launch a strike and get anything particularly useful done.
MDE:
Can the State of Israel—if Israel reaches the point where they feel like they have no other options—are they capable of doing the job?
Mr. Woolsey:
It’s much harder for them because if I’m right, and it requires an air campaign rather than just a strike, they are going to need a lot more tankers and air surveillance, and a lot more assets than they have. They’re a superb air force, but they’re a relatively small one. And Iran is a lot further away from them than Iraq. So fueling their aircraft and getting ordinates on target—one doesn’t want to say they couldn’t do it. The Israelis are remarkably effective soldiers and airmen. But it would be really a very difficult operation if they were trying to win a sustained air campaign.
MDE:
You hear over and over from Iran that they believe that America isn’t going to do a thing.
Mr. Woolsey:
Well, the Iranians have more reason than that to doubt our will. They seized our hostages in ’79, and we had an ineffective rescue operation. And then we tied yellow ribbons around trees. In ’83, through Hezbollah, they blew up our embassy and our marine barracks in Lebanon, and we left. The ’80s, for various Iranian and terrorist attacks, we basically sent lawyers. We treated it as a matter of law enforcement. We prosecuted a few of them. President Reagan did attack Libya that one time.
Then in ’91, President Bush, the forty-first president, had half a million troops in Iraq. We’d encouraged the Kurds and Shiites to rebel against Saddam. They were succeeding in fifteen of Iraq’s eighteen provinces. And we stopped and stood aside and effectively invited Saddam to move against them and watched while they were massacred. And then we left—but not completely. We had an air-protected area in the north.
In ’93, Saddam tries to kill former President Bush in Kuwait with a bomb. And President Clinton launches two-dozen cruise missiles against an Iraqi intelligence headquarters in the middle of the night so it would be empty, and has his secretary of state explain that we did it in the middle of the night so there wouldn’t be anyone there. And I don’t know what we had against Iraqi cleaning women and night watchmen, but I would not have called that an effective response.
In ’93, we had Black Hawk Down in Mogadishu, and we left. And then the ’90s, with a reserve facility in Saudi Arabia and the East African embassies and Khobar Towers and the Cole. And up until 9/11, we basically did what we did in the ’80s. We ran this as a law enforcement operation and tried to catch a few terrorists and put them in prison, which doesn’t have much effect at all on religious fanatics who’d really just as soon either go to prison or die—best of all, die.
So if the Iranians or, for that matter, the Baathists in Iraq, look back at the history of the last quarter-of-a-century-plus, I think that it’s understandable how they got themselves into the mode of thinking that we’re paper tigers. The most dangerous thing in the world in dealing with these religious fanatic totalitarians is to talk big and then not follow through. Teddy Roosevelt had it right: “Speak softly and carry a big stick.”
MDE:
Are we winning the war on terrorism? And if we’re not winning it, what can we do to win it?
Mr. Woolsey:
John Lehman had an excellent piece recently in the Washington Post analyzing this question.2 And I would say there are some huge gaps. We’ve done well with some aspects of law enforcement and working with our immigrant communities here in the U.S., but I don’t think the reorganizations of intelligence or the FBI have done much to help us so far.
We achieved brilliant initial victories in both Afghanistan and Iraq with a minimum of military force, and then we didn’t plan in either case adequately for the long haul. And we’re having difficulties in Afghanistan and big difficulties in Iraq because of that: insufficient military police, insufficient nation-building, insufficient money for immediate projects to improve the water and sewage and electricity, and so forth.
And in this country, as the Lehman article points out, about 80 percent of the mosques and religious institutes are funded by the Saudis. They’re Wahabists, essentially. Certainly that’s not true of 80 percent of American Muslims. But the institutions are funded by the Wahabites, and they are fanatics.
So we’ve got a problem. We’ve got a serious problem. We have problems in our prisons. We’ve got problems with some of our Muslim chaplains in the armed forces. We have not figured out that we can’t open the gates to the Wahabites and let them structure—either through the organizations they fund or their mosques or anything else—let them structure in the West what it means to be Muslim. This would be like turning over Christianity to Torquemada.
We have got to find some way to work with the hundreds of millions of good and decent Muslims in the world who don’t want to be terrorists, don’t even like terrorists—Sufis and others—and figure out a way to make common cause with them so they can’t be frightened into silence the way the Wahabites and their allies—people like Al Qaeda—are. Now Wahabites and Al Qaeda hate each other. They kill each other. They’re sort of like the Trotskyites and
the Stalinists in the ’20s and ’30s. But their underlying views are effectively the same. They’re essentially genocidal with respect to Shiites, Jews, homosexuals, and apostates, and terribly repressive of everybody else, including, in particular, women.
MDE:
Many describe this as a potential World War. Some call it World War III or IV. Is this, in essence, a World War? And what do these individuals have in common?
Mr. Woolsey:
Well, I borrowed a term from my friend Elliot Abrams, who wrote a piece right after 9/11 calling this war World War IV, saying that essentially World War III was the Cold War and this had some things in common with the Cold War. It was going to be very long, the ideological elements, and so forth. But I stopped talking about World War because when people hear World War, they tend to think of World War I and II—and they tend to think of Gallipoli, or Iwo Jima, or something that’s quick and very, very violent. Newt Gingrich is now back pushing World War III.
There’s no really great term to define this. A Global War on Terror, or Terrorism, is really, I think, a bad phrase. We didn’t call World War II in the Pacific a Global War on Kamikazes. Terrorism is a tactic—it’s a terrible tactic—but it’s a tactic. We’ve got much bigger problems than terrorism. And I think we, in using a phrase like “Islamic Fascist,” or “Islamic Fascists,” I think the president was coming closer to an accurate description of what we’re fighting. Like I say, I prefer “Islamic Nazis.”
And what do they have in common? Ahmadinejad and Mesbah Yazdi on the one hand—on the Shiite side—and Wahabites and Al Qaeda on the other? What they have in common is a passionate belief that they are the instruments of Allah’s will; that infidels deserve at best to be put into a subservient position and in many cases killed; that there is no reasonable justification at all. Wahabist fatwas are very clear about this in even working with, or dealing with, infidels at all—that in Ahmadinejad’s and Mesbah Yazdi’s case, they are working to get the Mahdi to return so they can hopefully, from their point of view, get the world to end as quickly as possible.
From the Wahabists’ and Al Qaeda’s point of view, they want to get the United States and all Western entities, including Israel, as they would see it, out of the Middle East. And then after they establish a caliphate—a union of mosque and state, a totalitarian structure, essentially a theocracy—to govern the Arab world, then the Muslim world, then the part of the world like Spain that was once Muslim but isn’t anymore, and then finally the whole world. That’s the way things should go from their point of view. So I’d say what they have in common is that they’re theocratic, totalitarian, and anti-Semitic genocidal fanatics.
Appendix E
EXCERPTS FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH
RETIRED ARMY GENERAL HUGH SHELTON
Gen. Hugh Shelton spent thirty-seven years in the infantry, serving two combat tours in Vietnam—the first with the Fifth Special Forces Group, the second with the 173rd Airborne Brigade. He also commanded the Third Battalion, Sixtieth Infantry, in the Ninth Infantry Division at Fort Lewis, Washington; served as the Ninth Infantry Division’s chief of staff for operations; commanded the First Brigade of the Eighty-second Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina; and was the chief of staff of the Tenth Mountain Division at Fort Drum, New York.
Selected for promotion for brigadier general in 1988, Gen. Shelton served two years in the operations directorate of the Joint Staff. In 1989, he began a two-year assignment as the assistant division commander for operations of the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, during which he participated in the liberation of Kuwait during Operation Desert Shield/Storm. After the Gulf War, Gen. Shelton was promoted to major general and assumed command of the Eighty-second Airborne Division, Fort Bragg, North Carolina. In 1993, he was promoted to lieutenant general and assumed command of the Eighteenth Airborne Corps. In 1994, during his tenure as Corps commander, Gen. Shelton led the United States Joint Task Force that restored democracy in Haiti. In March 1996, he was promoted to general and became commander in chief of the U.S. Special Operations Command.
From 1997 until 2001, he also served as the chairman to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
MDE:
Do you feel like we have an effective plan to win the war?
Gen. Shelton:
I think we’ve got a good plan. Could it be better? Yes, it could be. I do not think that right now we are using as effectively as we could all the tools in our kitbag, so to speak, to go after the terrorists. We’re using the political tools. We’re using the diplomatic tools to a degree. We certainly are using the military big-time right now. But when you look at the economic and, in particular, the informational tools, there’s room for improvement—considerable room.
This is a war of ideas that we’re in today. It’s an ideological war as much as it is a shooting war—and I don’t think our program is that effective and that we can do it alone. It would require an informational war that is carried out in concert with our friends and allies around the globe. We do a lot of good around the world, but yet what, for the most part, gets attention in a lot of these third world countries, so to speak, undeveloped nations, are the bad things that are presented to them by the radicals and by the fundamentalists. So we really need a more effective campaign to show them the good things that are coming about as a result of not only America’s efforts but also our friends and allies that are in this war with us.
MDE:
There are some that have said that we have begun to move away to some degree from our position of not negotiating with terrorists. Do you feel like in our relationship with Iran, the way that it’s developing, that any of that has happened?
Gen. Shelton:
For sure. I am quite concerned that we seem to want it both ways with Iran. We have elements in Washington, as an example, who are convinced, I believe, that we need to handle them with kid gloves because there’s such a large number of the Iranian people that really like the United States and would like to see the regime that’s in power—the more fundamental or more radical regimes. But those are the people with guns and those are the people that are ruling the nation-state of Iran right now, and I do believe we’ve handled them with kid gloves.
For example, direct traces by the FBI to the Khobar Towers incident that killed and wounded hundreds of U.S. airmen—they’ve yet to pay a price for it. They should have. There’s a linkage, I believe, to just about every terrorist activity that’s gone on that can be—that you can show—goes back to Iran and their support—or their direct involvement, one of the two—with those efforts agains America and against our friends and allies.
MDE:
In light of everything, where is the outrage? With the knowledge of how Iran has been tied to so many activities, terrorist activities, where is the outrage? Why are we opening doors in allowing Iranian leaders to come over and to speak at the UN, and to speak at Harvard, as Khatami did this last weekend?
Gen. Shelton:
Well, of course, when you talk about the UN, you’re talking about all the nations that are members having a right to come to America and to visit the UN and participate in UN activities. And then you find more liberal universities in America that would invite the president of Iran to come over and make speeches at their university, et cetera, and I wouldn’t say that that’s all bad.
I’m not opposed to freedom of speech and opposing opinions, but what I am more concerned about is turning a blind eye as a government to the movements that are going on and the support of terrorism that is coming out of Iran in almost every aspect—almost every aspect—of violence that has been directed against the U.S. in recent times.
I mean, if you look back at Bosnia and Kosovo and you look at the Khobar Towers and Afghanistan, Iraq—there are ties into Iran that can’t be denied, and we shouldn’t let them off the hook. They are supporting terrorism to a large degree, and yet because we have a military that is committed very heavily right now, we seem to want to jus
t kind of turn the other way, and so they get away with it.
MDE:
One could argue that the threats that Osama bin Laden made, which were happening long before 9/11, were maybe not taken as seriously as they should have been. How might you compare the threats of Osama bin Laden with that of the Iranian president, and how seriously should we be taking this?
Gen. Shelton:
I think you have to take any threat that is made against America and against America’s citizens or against our friends and allies around the world—I think you’ve got to take them all serious. I think you treat them both the same and you deal with both of them the same. Now I would tell you that, you know, before 9/11, there was a considerable effort made to go after Osama bin Laden, to capture or kill—and I emphasize the word kill—this individual because of the ills that he had already perpetrated against America and against our men and women and against our warships, et cetera.
But in the same breath, I’d have to tell you the guy’s pretty good at avoiding them. He does all the right things. He knows how to survive. He’s a survivor, and it’s because he does what he has to do in order to survive. The result of that is he’s not nearly as effective as he would have been, but still, our efforts have to be, I think, to continue to go after him and all of his lieutenants—to more or less chop the head off of the snake and that outfit. Al Qaeda is a snake.