Chaos in Saudi Arabia

There’s fear and loathing in Saudi Arabia today.

The kingdom had hoped asking U.S. troops to leave would be enough to buy goodwill with in-country al-Qaida sympathizers – of whom there are many.

Al-Qaida provided its response this week in the form of four nearly simultaneous bombings.

The message to the ruling family is simple: Asking the Americans to leave now is too little, too late. Al-Qaida is at war with Saudi Arabia as well as the West.

Now Saudi Arabia finds itself in a predicament. Does it still want U.S. forces to leave? Will the exodus of the American military leave the kingdom more vulnerable to terrorists and other Islamic extremists even more radical in their interpretation of the Quran than the Saudis? Is it too late for Riyadh to change its mind about the presence of the U.S. military?

And there are tough questions for American policymakers to consider as well. While Saudi Arabia is run by one of the most repressive regimes on the face of the earth, can Washington tolerate an overthrow of the government that would leave in place a regime friendlier to al-Qaida? Will the U.S. speed up departure of its troops and risk the appearance of running from terror attacks as it did in Lebanon in 1983? Must the U.S. begin contemplating using its massive military force in the region now to root out the presence of al-Qaida agents in Saudi Arabia – perhaps even against the will of Riyadh?

On the very day of the terror strike in Saudi Arabia that killed so many Americans, WorldNetDaily published as its top story a warning from former Central Intelligence Director James Woolsey. Woolsey says the U.S. is already fighting World War IV and the enemies are the Shiite fanatics who rule Iran and control Hezbollah, the Islamo-fascists who rule Syria and previously controlled Iraq and the Wahhabi brand of Sunni Islamists who get their inspiration and funding from Saudi Arabia.

We witnessed the work of the latter this week in those car-bombings in Riyadh.

In remarks published by Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin, Woolsey adds that while all three of these enemies hate each other and occasionally kill each other in wars and smaller skirmishes, they are fully capable of uniting against a common enemy and have – in this case, the United States of America.

While the battle in Iraq has seriously weakened the Islamo-fascist leg of this evil axis, World War IV – the Cold War being the third – is far from won, he suggests.

This war did not begin Sept. 11, he says. That was merely the date on which the United States discovered, much to its shock, that these three powerful and dangerous elements had been at war with the United States for some time.

All three members of this axis had attacked the United States repeatedly in different ways since at least 1979. The attacks became increasingly more dramatic because the enemy concluded, based on deductive reasoning, that the U.S. was a paper tiger – unwilling to fight, or, at least, fight to win. They concluded the U.S. just didn’t have the stomach for it, the former CIA director says.

“In 1979, they took out hostages and we tied yellow ribbons around trees and launched an ineffective effort, crashing helicopters in the desert, to rescue them,” explains Woolsey. “In 1983, they blew up our embassy and our Marine barracks in Beirut. What did we do? We left. Throughout much of the 1980s, various terrorist acts were committed against us. We would occasionally arrest a few small fry. There was one honorable exception – President Reagan’s strike against Tripoli. But, generally speaking, we prosecuted individuals when we could – essentially we litigated – in response to the terrorist acts of the ’80s.”

The force finally used against al-Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq was a stark contrast to the U.S. policies of the past. Woolsey believes they represented a real surprise to those who calculated that the U.S. was a paper tiger.

The risk now, he suggests, is that we pack up and go home and pretend the war is over. It is not.

Iraq has been dealt with, but the other partner in the Islamo-fascist camp, Syria, remains a threat. Iran has many problems at home. The U.S. must make those problems worse – largely through propaganda and support of the dissident student groups and jailed clerics who oppose the mullah regime.

“The third group, the Islamist Sunni, al-Qaida and the like-thinkers, are in many ways going to be the hardest to deal with,” Woolsey says. “They are fueled by oil money from the Gulf, Saudi Arabia principally. They are wealthy in and of themselves. They are present in some 60 countries and they loathe us, like the Wahhabis, who are their first cousins. They are fanatically anti-Western, anti-modern, anti-Christian, anti-Jewish and anti-most-Muslims.”

Woolsey projects this fourth world war is going to last decades, not years. But he is confident that we will win.

“We have to convince the good people of the Middle East that we are on their side, as we convinced Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel and Andrei Sakharov that we were on their side,” he says. “This will take time. It will be difficult.”

The message the U.S. and its allies have to send to the autocrats of the Middle East is this, he says: “We want you to realize that now, for the fourth time in 100 years, this country is on the march. And we are on the side of those whom you most fear – your own people.”

And that, Woolsey says, is the recipe for winning World War IV.

I agree. It’s not time to cut and run. But it’s time to recognize that terrorism cannot be dealt with through negotiation, through reason, through compromise, through half-way measures, through retreat. It can only be dealt with through force.

We should remember that when we face attacks from al-Qaida. We should remember that when others face attacks from their allies in this global conflict.

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