He is currently a trustee at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, advisor of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, founding member of the Set America Free Coalition, and vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton for Global Strategic Security.
MDE:
| In 2000, you spoke before the Congress on terrorism. You gave an almost apocalyptic message concerning the growing design of the terrorists to kill the maximum number of people. Is this precisely what is on the agenda with Iran’s obsession?
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Mr. Woolsey:
| I think so. Around then we were reporting on our National Terrorism Commission Report. It may have been in that context. We had some twenty-five recommendations, some of which would have helped catch some of the 9/11 terrorists. They were completely ignored in the House of Representatives, completely ignored by the administration, and completely ignored in the Senate except for Senator Jon Kyl, who put in a bill to try to implement them and it went nowhere.
So that testimony was almost certainly in that context. And yes, I think 9/11—which came afterward—fits that model. And certainly some of the crazier things that Ahmadinejad has said would fit the model even more.
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MDE:
| Since 1979, an Islamic revolution has been going on, with America being in the crosshairs. And it appears that America has maintained silence. Fundamentally, at this present moment, we’re not seeing a whole lot of response to Iran. Is this in fact the case, or does the United States have a plan, a robust plan, to deal—to confront Iran in light of its threats?
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Mr. Woolsey:
| I haven’t seen any evidence of any robust plan. And although the Islamic revolution is over a quarter of a century old, we have only really seen it in recent years, since it was disclosed by one of the émigré opposition groups, that Iran has a substantial nuclear program. So it’s been over the course of the last four years, I think, that people in the United States have concentrated on and focused on Iran in a way that they really had not before.
Now certainly we have had serious attacks on the United States by Iran. Almost everybody who has looked at it says Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia was an Iranian-sponsored terrorist attack. And in 1983, our embassy and our marine barracks were blown up by Hezbollah, almost certainly at Iran’s guidance. So it’s not as if we have had no Americans die as a result of Iranian action.
But generally speaking, the administrations from Jimmy Carter through the first nine months of George W. Bush have treated terrorism as a law enforcement problem. They figured that if you could go catch some of the terrorists and put them in jail, then that would deter the others. Now, I think, there’s not much to that at all. Certainly some types of law enforcement actions are useful if you can use it to stop terrorist attacks.
But terrorists aren’t deterred by some of their number being arrested and imprisoned. These aren’t burglars or white-collar criminals. They’re fanatics. So I think that although there have probably been some steps undertaken in the last two or three or four years to take Iranian and Iranian-backed terrorism far more seriously than was the case before the nuclear program of Iran’s was discovered, it’s still probably not a very robust one.
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MDE:
| When Iran makes the threats that they’ve made such as “a world without Zionism or the West,” or threatening to exterminate the State of Israel—all these constant, irrational threats—are these threats just rhetoric or should they be taken serious?
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Mr. Woolsey:
| They should be taken seriously. The people who have the mentality that they’re just rhetoric are the same types of people who, sixty to seventy years ago, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, said that Hitler’s
Mein Kampf
was just rhetoric. Hitler laid out his program very clearly to establish a one-thousand-year Reich, and exterminate the Jews, and on and on in
Mein Kampf
.
With these crazy, highly ideological, totalitarian movements, whether they’re religiously rooted like Ahmadinejad and those around him in Iran or secular like Communism or Nazism, one’s best guide often to what they will really do if they get power is their statements that they issue in line with their ideology in order to rally their troops and to get them enthusiastic. It would be very foolish and really quite naïve, I think, for people to say that Ahmadinejad is just blowing smoke about wanting to destroy Israel, for example. I think he would certainly do it if he could.
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MDE:
| Ahmadinejad gave a speech at the United Nations in which he talked about a messianic figure coming on the scene—his belief that he was on some divine religious mission. How strongly do his religious beliefs play into his apocalyptic desires?
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Mr. Woolsey:
| I think his religious beliefs are at the heart of his fanaticism. He is a religious fanatic. He is not a Communist or a Nazi who also happens to be a religious man. He’s a religious fanatic in a Shiite Muslim world in somewhat the same way as, say, Torquemada, who was running the Spanish Inquisition in the Christian world five centuries or so ago.
I think that Ahmadinejad believes that the Twelfth Imam, the Hidden Imam, the Mahdi, went into occlusion, as he would put it—disappeared in the eighth century—and is waiting to come back. And he believes that, I think, along with a lot of others. Not all Shia, but many Shia, who hold that belief are people for whom it does not produce a crazed view. They believe it very much the way Jews believe the Messiah will come or Christians believe Christ will return. It’s not something that drives them to crazy behavior in daily undertakings.
But in Ahmadinejad’s case, he goes off every week or two to sort of commune with the Hidden Imam and get his instructions, from his point of view. His mentor is an ayatollah named Mesbah Yazdi, who runs a school in Qom, in the holy city in Iran. The reason Mesbah Yazdi was exiled there in 1979 by the Ayatollah Khomeini was because Khomeini thought he was too radical. So Ahmadinejad’s mentor was too radical for Khomeini.
The beliefs that surround their worldview have to do with working hard to get a lot of people killed as quickly as possible. So the prize of pain will summon the Mahdi. And then they also believe once the Mahdi comes, the world will only exist for a brief period of time. So Ahmadinejad is effectively on a campaign to see if he can’t get the world to end. That’s why I somewhat tongue in cheek say that Al Qaeda and the Wahabists of Saudi Arabia are the moderates of the Islamists in the Middle East because they just want a worldwide caliphate in which we all are demi and subordinate citizens, and our wives and daughters have to dress in burqas, and so forth. But they at least want—are willing to have—people live, whereas Ahmadinejad is, I think, on the other side of that divide.
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MDE:
| As nuclear plants, how serious would a nuclear Iran be to the Middle East and to the world?
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Mr. Woolsey:
| Well, it would be very serious, as serious as anything I can imagine. Precisely because of his crazed, ideological, totalitarian, fanatic, and anti-Semitic genocidal views. If this were a country with a set of beliefs that one could deal with the way we dealt with the Soviets, that would be different. We contained the Soviets for close to fifty years and deterred them for close to fifty years from using their nuclear weapons, and even from attacking conventionally in Europe.
And the reason we were able to do that is that the Soviet ideology was effectively dead by the 1950s. By the time of Khrushchev’s speech before the Twenty-second Party Congress in 1956, laying out all of Stalin’s crimes, there weren’t very many believing Communists as part of the Soviet system. They were cynics. These were an establishment, the nomenclature. They didn’t want to die. They wanted to keep their dachas and their limousines. So they could be deterred.
And also, one could negotiate with them. I did it five times. I used to, when we got into a real jam in the negotiations in Vienna in the late ’80s, I’d take my Soviet counterpart, the Soviet ambassador, out to dinner and buy him a nice bottle of Chablis and lobster thermidor, and we’d start telling Russian and American jokes, which are very similar and have a similar sense of irony—very funny. And we’d kind of laugh it up for a while and then we’d talk about some of the things that were dividing us and we would cut a bit of a deal. Maybe not everything, but we fixed this problem and that problem.
Could you imagine doing something like that with a representative of Ahmadinejad? It’s, I think, beyond belief, really.
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MDE:
| On
60 Minutes
, the statement was asked about fifty-four thousand suicide bombers and martyrs that would be sent into the United States. And he agreed that that was highly possible. Is there any concern about the possibility of that type of thing happening in the United States, either directly through Iran or through their proxies?
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Mr. Woolsey:
| I think it’s unlikely that we in the U.S. would see a series of individual suicide bombers of the sort that came into Israel, say from the West Bank before the barrier was put up by the Israelis. Partially it’s because our law enforcement is very good. Partially it’s because immigrant groups, including Lebanese Shia, of whom there are a fair number, especially in Michigan, are loyal Americans. And they’re integrated into American society. Not absolutely everybody, but most.
We’ve had good tips from Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, with respect to terrorist groups, whether in Florida, or in New York, or wherever. We don’t have the same kind of situation that exists even in Britain, much less in some place like France, with our immigrant groups. So I think it would be difficult for any sustained terrorist set of actions—suicide bombers blowing themselves up in shopping centers—because I don’t think they really have a base of operations.
But for a single attack like 9/11 in which people are infiltrated in and then kill themselves while doing something devastating, that’s certainly possible. And we may be in a situation where we have to, as horrible as it sounds, look for children. Hezbollah has trained up something like two thousand ten-to fifteen-year-old children—boys—as suicide bombers. And Hezbollah basically does what Iran tells it to do.
So this is a very serious situation. But I don’t think it’s serious in the same way or with regard to the same type of threat that we’ve seen, say, in Israel. I think when Iran or Hezbollah or some combination chooses to attack in this country, they’ll try to make their first effort devastating.
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MDE:
| What does the United States need to do to hold Iran accountable so they do not go nuclear?
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Mr. Woolsey:
| Well, I think it’s been the case for some time, and we put this on our Web site at the Committee on the Present Danger that former secretary of state George Schultz and I cochaired many, many months ago. I think we needed a long time ago to bring a lot more pressure to bear on Iran than we have. I think there was no real chance after the year from the spring of ’97 to the spring of ’98 to see an expansion of the role and influence of Iranian reformers under President Khatami’s protection, in a sense.
By the spring of ’98, the mullahs were back fully in charge. They were killing the students. They were killing the brave newspaper editors and the brave reformers. So I don’t really think there’s been much of a chance since the spring of ’98. But there was a window of time there, I think, perhaps from May or so of ’97 to May or so of ’98 in which it was plausible to believe that we might find some way to work something out with Khatami and the reformers who were around him.
Since ’98 I don’t think that’s been the case, and it certainly hasn’t been the case since Ahmadinejad has become president. So as soon as that happened, if not before, but at least as soon as that happened, we should have been moving to do everything we could multilaterally, unilaterally, however, to stop travel with senior Iranian officials, to tie up their personal finances in the Iranian government’s finances, to sharply increase our broadcasting into Iran. And I think before now, but certainly by around now, we ought to have been working with the countries that export gasoline and refined petroleum products into Iran, because Iran doesn’t have nearly enough refineries to refine its own petroleum. So it imports 40 percent or more of its gasoline and diesel fuel.
And that gives us an opportunity to find some way to work with India or some of the other countries that ship refined petroleum products to Iran. And given now their clear violation of the mandate to stop the reprocessing of nuclear fuel, I think we might well be able to get some of these countries to agree with us that, “OK, we’ll buy your refined gasoline. We think it’s pretty reasonable for you to break this long-term contract with Iran given what they’re doing to stability in the Middle East by their nuclear weapons program.” It’s certainly at least worth a try.
It would be much better, since some of these countries are friends of the United States, like India, to try to do this as a business deal rather than as a blockade of imports for them. But I think that would be much more effective than trying to block their exports of oil, which the world rather needs in order to keep oil below one hundred dollars a barrel.
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MDE:
| Islamic Fascists. It’s a new word for President Bush. We just heard it recently. There seems to be almost a conflict in moralities in Americans and what we’re looking at regarding the war on terrorism—it’s almost being defined as our involvement in Iraq. What precisely is the war on terrorism, and what precisely is Islamic Fascism?
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