Ex-CIA chief says U.S. fighting World War IV; Woolsey sees 3 enemies.

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Ex-CIA chief says U.S. fighting World War IV; Woolsey sees 3 enemies.

The U.S. is already fighting World War IV, says former Central Intelligence Agency Director James Woolsey, and the enemies are the Shiite fanatics who rule Iran and control Hezbollah, the Islamo-fascists who rule Syria and previously controlled Iraq and the Wahhabi brand of Sunni Islamists who get their inspiration and funding from Saudi Arabia.

In remarks published by Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin, Woolsey adds that while all three of these enemies hate each other and occasionally kill each other in wars and smaller skirmishes, they are fully capable of uniting against a common enemy and have – in this case, the United States of America.

While the battle in Iraq has seriously weakened the Islamo-fascist leg of this evil axis, the World War IV – the Cold War being the third – is far from won, he suggests.

This war did not begin Sept. 11, he says. That was merely the date on which the United States discovered, much to its shock, that these three powerful and dangerous elements had been at war with the United States for some time.

All three members of this axis had attacked the United States repeatedly in different ways since at least 1979. The attacks became increasingly more dramatic because the enemy concluded, based on deductive reasoning, that the U.S. was a paper tiger – unwilling to fight, or, at least, fight to win. They concluded the U.S. just didn't have the stomach for it, the former CIA director says.

"In 1979, they took out hostages and we tied yellow ribbons around trees and launched an ineffective effort, crashing helicopters in the desert, to rescue them," explains Woolsey. "In 1983, they blew up our embassy and our Marine barracks in Beirut. What did we do? We left. Throughout much of the 1980s, various terrorist acts were committed against us. We would occasionally arrest a few small fry. There was one honorable exception - President Reagan's strike against Tripoli. But, generally speaking, we prosecuted individuals when we could - essentially we litigated – in response to the terrorist acts of the '80s."

He points out that Saddam Hussein tried to assassinate former President Bush in Kuwait. President Clinton's response was to lob some cruise missiles into an empty building in Baghdad. When helicopters were shot down in Mogadishu in 1993, U.S. forces made a quick exit again.

The 1990s, mostly during the Clinton administration years, the U.S. continued to overlook terrorist attacks on its interests - sometimes even covering them up rather than dealing with the forces responsible.

The force finally used against al-Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq was a stark contrast to the U.S. policies of the past. Woolsey believes they represented a real surprise to those who calculated that the U.S. was a paper tiger.

The risk now, he suggests, is that we pack up and go home and pretend the war is over. It is not.

Iraq has been dealt with, but the other partner in the Islamo-fascist camp, Syria, remains a threat. Iran has many problems at home. The U.S. must make those problems worse – largely through propaganda and support of the dissident student groups and jailed clerics who oppose the mullah regime.

"The third group, the Islamist Sunni, al-Qaida and the like-thinkers, are in many ways going to be the hardest to deal with," Woolsey says. "They are fueled by oil money from the Gulf, Saudi Arabia principally. They are wealthy in and of themselves. They are present in some 60 countries and they loathe us, like the Wahhabis, who are their first cousins. They are fanatically anti-Western, anti-modern, anti-Christian, anti-Jewish and anti-most-Muslims."

Woolsey projects this fourth world war is going to last decades, not years. But he is confident that we will win.

"We have to convince the good people of the Middle East that we are on their side, as we convinced Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel and Andrei Sakharov that we were on their side," he says. "This will take time. It will be difficult."

The message the U.S. and its allies have to send to the autocrats of the Middle East is this, he says: "We want you to realize that now, for the fourth time in 100 years, this country is on the march. And we are on the side of those whom you most fear - your own people."

And that, Woolsey says, is the recipe for winning World War IV.

 

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The attacks became increasingly more dramatic because the enemy concluded, based on deductive reasoning, that the U.S. was a paper tiger

I remember sitting in a hotel lounge in Bahrain in Dec 1991. Me and a few other guys from my platoon were sitting there, having a beer and, being like most young infantryman, not talking about plans (we didn't know anything yet anyway), but talking about how we was "gonna kick some ass". Some guy sitting at a table next to us came over and said, "you Americans are nothing but a paper-tiger. You are going to die."

Needless to say, we just looked at him in shock as he walked off.

That statement in this article just reminded me of that moment.