The World Today - Al-Qaeda conflict described as World War IV
Pastor Dale Morgan
The World Today - Al-Qaeda conflict described as World War IV*
The World Today - Tuesday, 12 September , 2006 12:18:00
Reporter: Paolo Black
ELEANOR HALL: A former CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) director and
chief adviser to New York's Terrorism Preparedness Taskforce has
described the conflict against al-Qaeda as the "fourth world war", and
he predicts it will go on for decades.
James Woolsey was director of the CIA under President Clinton and was an
arms control negotiator under presidents Reagan and Bush Senior.
He's critical of US administrations from Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton
for failing to tackle Islamic terrorism more robustly.
James Woolsey has been speaking to Paolo Black.
JAMES WOOLSEY: I think that war will go on for decades, like the Cold
War, hopefully just a few decades instead of many decades.
But I don't think it's just a war on terrorism, I think it's a war on
Islamist fanaticism or fascism, if you prefer, and it won't really be
over until the future of the Middle East is clearly tending in one
direction or another, either toward chaos and dictatorship, or in the
direction that we hope Afghanistan and Iraq can move, toward decent
societies, the beginnings of rule of law and some degree of democracy.
PAOLO BLACK: Interviewed on Fox news this last July 17, you said "I
think we ought to execute some air strikes against Syria, against the
instruments of power of that state, against the airport, which is the
place where weapons shuttle through from Iran to Hezbollah and Hamas. I
think both Syria and Iran think we're cowards".
JAMES WOOLSEY: I think they think we're cowards because in '79 we tied
yellow ribbons around the trees when they took our hostages. In '82,
'83, when our embassy and marine barracks were blown up in Beirut we
left. It goes on, and in the rest of the '90s we didn't respond to a
number of the al-Qaeda attacks.
It was not until after 9/11 that we did anything, and I think that they
got the impression, just as bin Laden has explicitly stated, Americans
won't fight, you can keep doing anything you want to them.
And I think that Syria has been a major offender in its support for
Hezbollah, in its efforts to undermine decent, largely democratic
government in Lebanon, and I think it would've been a good idea to have
stopped the Syrians from pumping weapons through their country to Hezbollah.
PAOLO BLACK: The Path to 9/11, the ABC semi-documentary series, which
began on Australian television last night, blames Clinton, the former
secretary of state Madeline Albright and other senior aides for not
adequately pursuing bin Laden, leaving him free to plan the attacks.
What are your thoughts on that?
JAMES WOOLSEY: I think, going all the way back to the Carter era, and
including during the Reagan and first Bush era, the United States
altogether regarded Islamist terrorism as almost exclusively a law
enforcement problem, and some of those failures to go after bin Laden in
the late '90s were because the Justice Department or the FBI (Federal
Bureau of Investigations) would say well, we don't have enough evidence
to get him extradited if we capture him and so-forth.
They looked on it as an individual-by-individual law enforcement problem
and that's not really what it is or was. It's far more like a war, but
an ideologically motivated one, and we have been the focus of it, at
least in part, since 1979, when our hostages were seized in Tehran, our
embassy personnel by Khomeini's new regime. And we had a lot of
terrorist attacks in the '80s and '90s, and we continued to treat it as
a law enforcement problem. But it wasn't just the Clinton
administration. I think that continued from really Carter through early
Bush.
PAOLO BLACK: Your perceptions five years on, are we safer or less safe?
JAMES WOOLSEY: It depends on whether you assume that by just sitting
here we would have not been hit again. I think that because of the
history I described we were looked at as paper tigers by the Islamists,
both from the Shi'ite side, like Ahmadinejad, and from the Sunni side,
like bin Laden and the Wahhabi.
And so I think there was no real option for us, except to begin this
long effort to try to bring a different form of government in society to
the Middle East, a huge and long-term undertaking, but I don't think we
had any choice.
You can speculate that if we'd just sat here that al-Qaeda would've left
us alone for a while, but I think it would've only been for a while.
ELEANOR HALL: And that's James Woolsey the director of the CIA under
President Clinton. He was speaking there to NewsRadio's Paolo Black.