CHAPTER 2
The Long War of the 21st Century
*
R. James Woolsey
Eliot Cohen is the distinguished professor at Johns Hopkins School
for Advanced International Studies. He argues that we are in World War
IV. The Cold War was World War III. I think Eliot’s formulation fits the
circumstances much better than describing this as a war on terrorism.
Let me say a few words about who our enemy is in World War IV,
why they’re at war with us, why we are now at war with them, and how
we have to think about fighting it both at home and abroad.
Who is the enemy? There are at least three movements, all coming
out of the Middle East, who have been at war with us for years. The first
is the Islamist movement of Shi’a Muslims led by the ruling clerics, the
Mullahs of Iran who seized our embassy personnel in Tehran in 1979.
They are a minority of the Iranian Shi’ite clerics but they constitute the
ruling force in Iran; they back Hezbollah, and they have been at war with
us for nearly a quarter of a century. They blew up our embassy and our
Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983.
The second group is the fascists. I use that word literally, not as an
expletive. The Ba’athist parties of Iraq and Syria are essentially fascist
parties, modeled after the fascism parties of the ’30s. They’re totalitarian
and they are anti-Semitic.
Saddam and the Ba’athists in Iraq have been at war with us for over a
decade. For them, the Gulf War never stopped. To underscore the point,
Saddam tried to assassinate former President George Bush in 1993 in
*
This chapter is a White Paper of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and was
also the topic of a similar presentation at the USAF Counterproliferation Center’s annual
conference, May 2002. Re-printed by permission of the author, the former CIA Director, who
is also a Distinguished Senior Adviser of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
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