AT THE DECATUR House, Woolsey picked up the thread of that analysis — the new anti-terror war as Cold War redux — within minutes of taking the podium. " We are in a long war, " he argued, " with a lot of parallels with the Cold War. " It is a war of ideas, he continued, " and we have to win it ideologically. "

The Arab world is swimming with ready-made internal dissidents, Woolsey observed. We just need the time to win them over. The Cold War, he noted, was won in part " by convincing the Lech Walesas and Václav Havels and Andrei Sakharovs and the Solidaritys that we were right. " In those years, he reminded the audience, " socialism " — set up as the ideological opposite of " capitalism " — actually encompassed a wide spectrum of beliefs. " A lot of people called themselves socialists, " he observed. " Helmut Schmidt. George Orwell. All the way to the Khmer Rouge. What we wanted was more Helmut Schmidts and George Orwells.... The Khmer Rouge was isolated. "

Woolsey saw a neat parallel between the old war and the new. Just like the communist world, the Muslim world has within it a large and diverse bandwidth of fanatic intensity, from " Shia to Sunni to blatant dictators like [Libyan leader Muammar] Qaddafi and [Syrian president] Bashar Assad. " He called for the US to " move to isolate, in their fanaticism, the Islamists. "

Of course, all that sounds reasonable. But what could be scary about Woolsey’s talk was the almost glib way he dismissed the problems confronting the US, and the differing cultures with which it must deal, as it fights terror. Woolsey tends to demonize rather than humanize — and to scare the listener rather than to stare down our adversaries. In one interesting riff, the former CIA director called Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabis " an extremely hateful sect " and compared them to the Spanish Inquisition. Both the Wahhabis and the Inquisition married church and state to practice cruel religious intolerance, he opined. Then Woolsey mentioned what he sees as the scary twist: the Wahhabis amount to an Inquisition funded by oil money. " Move Torquemada and that Spain and put an oil field under them, " Woolsey quipped, and you’d have the Wahhabis.

The " fantastic wealth " bankrolling Islamist extremism is, in Woolsey’s view, what makes the threat it poses so great and the war against it so potentially long. " There’s a different cast on this one than on the Cold War, " he argued. " We’re going to be fighting this one a long time We’re facing the wealth of the Gulf and its support of terrorism. " It’s a Middle East that’s filled, he added, " with pathological predators and vulnerable autocracies. "

Nonetheless, Woolsey’s rhetoric about World War IV offers hope and glory to counterbalance the fear and loathing. He asked listeners to cast back to 1917, when the world possessed only a handful of democracies. " It was a world of empires and colonies and dictatorships, " he said. Today, on the other hand, the world has more than 120 democracies. " It’s a huge challenge, but not impossible, " he argued, to create more democracies in the Middle East. And more than that, it is absolutely necessary for our own survival. " We will not win, " Woolsey warned, " unless we change the face of the Middle East. "

In the May 2003 edition of the Washington Monthly, Joshua Micah Marshall offers a thoughtful review of Paul Berman’s latest book, Terrorism and Liberalism (W.W. Norton). Though Marshall speaks of Berman’s attempt to link historical elements of Islamic and terrorist thought, one particular section of his analysis applies to Woolsey’s arguments as well:

Though this is a serious book, it is shot through with an equally serious flaw: the desire to inflate the threat of Islamist violence — and particularly its intellectual stakes — to levels beyond what they merit and to force them into a template of an earlier era, for which Berman has an evident and understandable nostalgia. Over the course of the book, the disjointedness between what the radical Islamist menace is and what Berman wants to make it ranges from merely apparent to downright painful, and ends up obscuring as much as it clarifies. And, unfortunately, the obscuring elements may be the more important ones. Given the role intellectuals are playing in this war, these are mistakes that could have dire real-world costs.

There is no doubt that rhetoric of perpetual threat and perpetual war can pluck deep chords in the American psyche. But is it the threat real? And will the wars be as relatively quick as the two US-led forays into Iraq have been? We’re still waiting to hear those questions answered by those who favor peace and diplomacy over weaponry. Meanwhile, the flights of fear and fancy offered by Woolsey are taking firm root in their absence.