James Woolsey, former Director of Central Intelligence, speaks some tough truths to the UK-based Royal Institute of International Affairs, as published in The Observer. Seems to me that Woolsey would make a good replacement for George Tenet, if he could be talked back from retirement. Woolsey has no illusions about this war.
America and the western world are at war with 'fascist' Middle East governments and totalitarian Islamists. The freedoms we stand for are loathed and our vulnerable systems under attack. Liberty and security will be in conflict as we line up behind the new march of democracy. This is about the war we are in, whom it is with, how we have to fight it inside our own countries and how we have to fight it abroad. The war is, essentially, similar to the Cold War. This is the origin of the phrase World War IV, which Professor Eliot Cohen came up with in America shortly after September 11 2001, to characterise the parallels between this war and what he called World War III - the Cold War.Those parallels are: that it will last a very long time - decades; that it will sporadically involve the use of military force, as did the Cold War in Korea for example; but that an important component would be ideological. I would add that, just as we eventually won the Cold War - and when I say 'we' here, I always mean Britain, the United States, the democracies, our allies - it was in no small measure because, while containing the Soviet Union and its allies militarily and with nuclear deterrence, we undermined their ideology.
We and you are cordially loathed for freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, open economies, equal - or almost equal - treatment of women, and so on. It is not what we have done wrong that is creating the problem; it is what we do right.
If that is true, then this is not a war that will end with an Al Qaeda Gorbachev; it will not end with an arms control agreement. It is a war to the death, like the war with the Nazis, and we should understand that it will have to be fought that way.
via The Observer.
Kudos to Tim Blair for the tip.
Posted by Alan at July 22, 2003 09:43 PM