 | James Woolsey |
Americans will have to compromise some cherished liberties to protect the nation against acts of terrorism, said former Central Intelligence Agency director James Woolsey LAW '68 in a Feb. 13 talk on campus.
But even with such trade-offs, there will be no peace or security from terrorist threats "until we change the face of the Middle East" by helping to bring democracy to that region of the world, Woolsey said. His talk, held in Sheffield-Sterling-Strathcona Hall, was the inaugural event for the Yale College Students for Democracy.
Woolsey, who served as CIA director from 1993 to 1995 under President Bill Clinton, called the United States' current fight against terrorism World War IV (saying the Cold War represented World War III) and asserted that the challenges Americans face in this war are not unlike those they confronted in previous world wars.
He noted that three times in American history the federal government has "substantially encroached" on its citizens' civil liberties: during the Civil War, when it suspended habeas corpus; during World War I, when it enacted "very draconian legislation"; and again during World War II, when it "imprisoned Japanese Americans in concentration camps."
The latter was "the single biggest infringement on the civil liberties of Americans by the federal government in the 20th century," commented Woolsey.
These encroachments on American freedoms occur "when this country gets scared because something terrible has happened," Woolsey stated. He noted that approval of Japanese internment was made by "probably the three greatest liberals in 20th-century America" -- Franklin D. Roosevelt, former Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren (then California attorney general and gubernatorial candidate in that state) and former Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black.
"During good and easy times, like the 1990s, values that we espouse ... like liberty and security, often don't seem to conflict very much," the former CIA director told his audience. "But when you are at war and some portion of the war is being conducted by terrorist cells, including cells of American citizens, it's a different situation. Liberty and security can conflict, and you have to make hard choices." These choices, he predicted, are "going to come year after year after year" as the United States attempts to stamp out organized terrorist groups.
Woolsey, who also served as undersecretary of the Navy under President Jimmy Carter and as a diplomat and arms negotiator under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, said three Middle Eastern groups have been at war with the United States for a combined total of 25 years: the Islamist Shi'ites of Iran; the "fascist" governments of Iraq and Syria, among other countries; and the Islamist Sunnis, part of a religious movement that emerged in Saudi Arabia and which al-Qaeda represents.
The first group has been at war with the United States since the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979; the second since 1991 following Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait; and the latter since the mid-1990s, when it began launching terrorist attacks in different parts of the world aimed at "the foreign enemy," including Jews and Americans, Woolsey said.
"Why didn't we notice [that the United States was a principal target of terror] until Sept. 11?" asked Woolsey.
"I suppose you have to chalk it up in part to the American capacity for naivete," he said. "During the 1980s we still had a heavy focus on the Cold War with the Soviets and regarded Iran as a problem --- not one we were focused on." With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the perception was that the United States had won the Cold War and had entered a period of peace, he added.
Woolsey said the reason why the three Middle Eastern groups are at war with the United States was best expressed to him by a Washington, D.C. cab driver, who remarked, "These people don't hate us for what we've done wrong. They hate us for what we've done right."
From the point of view of those who planned the Sept. 11 terrorist attack, said Woolsey, the United States was not likely to respond in a way that threatened their existence. He noted that during the Iranian hostage crisis, the U.S. "tied yellow ribbons around trees and launched an ineffective rescue operation," and that when the American embassy was bombed in Beirut in 1983, killing hundreds of Americans, the United States left Lebanon. When Saddam Hussein attempted to kill former President Bush in Kuwait in 1993, President Clinton's response was to fire "a couple dozen cruise missiles into an empty building ... in the middle of the night in Bagdad," he added.
Thus, he said, terrorists viewed the United States much the way the Japanese did when it attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941: as a "rich, feckless spoiled country" that was not likely to launch a counterattack.
"You have to admit, given the history of the last four centuries at least, [the Sept. 11 terrorists] had some reasonable basis for making the judgment about what we would do," Woolsey stated.
With America's vast gas, electricity, cable, financial and food production and delivery networks -- all of which were designed "with an eye toward openness and ease of access without a single thought to terrorism" -- it will be difficult to protect the country against acts of terror, Woolsey maintained.
"All of these networks have to be looked at ... from the point of view of their resilience and what we have to do to give them resilience," he told his audience. "It's going to be hard, it's going to be expensive, and we're going to be involved with it for maybe a few years, maybe decades," he said.
The most disturbing aspect of the American infrastructure, he added, is the nation's "insane reliance" on oil.
"It was a bad idea before Sept. 11, [and after] Sept. 11, it was about as bad as it can get. ... We're relying on ... pathological predators and vulnerable autocracies," Woolsey said, referring to the oil-producing states of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Sudan. All of these, he added, "are working on weapons of mass destruction and, in one way or another, are working for terror."
"This is not what we want," he asserted. "There are a number of steps we need to undertake to change that reliance."
Woolsey was generally supportive of the Bush administration's approach to Iraq and said that the United States "should play a waiting game" with Iran -- a country in the midst of change as a new generation rebels against the theocratic ruling regime that came to power during the revolution there in the early 1980s.
"What we should do is provide moral support" to Iran, contended Woolsey, saying the United States should take a leadership role in helping move the world toward democracy. He noted that before World War I, there were only about a dozen democracies in the world, whereas today, there are 121. In contrast, in the Arab world, not one of the 22 states in the Arab League are democracies, he pointed out.
Nevertheless, said Woolsey, there is no reason why Arab countries cannot move toward democracy. He pointed to other Muslim nations, including Bangladesh, which have embraced democratic ideals.
"There's only one word for anyone who tells you that Arabs will not be able to have a democracy and that word is 'racist,'" said the former CIA director.
-- By Susan Gonzalez
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