WASHINGTON, DC — It’s one of those perfect spring evenings that often graces the nation’s capital in late April. The day’s bright sunshine has dimmed to twilight, and the air is cooling to a sweet and clear nectar. But under a big white tent in the Decatur House — a historic dwelling from Washington’s earliest days, located just a stone’s throw from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue — a few dozen of us have forsaken an al fresco dinner to listen to talk about war at a reception organized by the Jamestown Foundation.

Waiters bring drinks around as we listen to Jamestown Foundation president Barbara Abbott talk about how the group, founded in 1984 to analyze Soviet-era threats and provide a conduit for Soviet defectors, is now shifting its ideological and strategic assets to the war on terrorism. We listen as bluff and gregarious Evgueni Novikov — a 1988 Soviet defector and the newly appointed director of Jamestown’s International Terrorism Program — gives his analysis: that oil money offers a chance for terrorists to " challenge American power. "

But mostly we’ve come to hear James Woolsey — director of the Central Intelligence Agency during the Clinton administration and one of the most powerful advocates of war with Iraq — gaze into the crystal ball and tell us what’s next. Woolsey is vice-chair of Jamestown’s board of directors, and the foundation’s shift from Cold War to new war aligns perfectly with his own recent comments. He received gobs of recent media attention, including an April 20 appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, when reports about a speech he gave at a GOP-student-organized " teach-in " at UCLA on April 2 appeared on TV networks and newspapers worldwide.

In that speech, the former CIA director argued that in its battle against terrorism, the United States is fighting " World War IV, " a formulation he credited to scholar Elliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. It took " four-plus decades " to win " World War III " — the Cold War — and the current conflict will also be a long one, Woolsey said. He continued:

As we move toward a new Middle East over the years ... we will make a lot of people very nervous. And we will scare, for example, the Mubarak regime in Egypt, or the Saudi royal family, thinking about this idea that these Americans are spreading of democracy in this part of the world.... Our response should be, " Good! " We want you nervous. We want you to realize now, for the fourth time in a hundred years, this country and its allies are on the march and that we are on the side of those whom you — the Mubaraks, the Saudi royal family — most fear: we’re on the side of your own people.

Coming on the heels of the ups and downs of war in Iraq, Woolsey’s remarks made Americans as " nervous " as Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak or the House of Saud that rules Saudi Arabia may be. The Bush administration’s recent saber rattling toward Syria, which it warned not to harbor fugitive Iraqi officials, has also reinforced Americans’ jitters about ongoing conflict.

But the " world war " conceit that Woolsey has adopted is nothing new. Right after the September 11 attacks, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman dubbed the war on terrorism " World War III. " President George W. Bush also adopted the " global " and " total " war concept, telling the US Congress in a speech given in the wake of 9/11 that " Americans should not expect one battle but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen. "

In the aftermath of 9/11, Woolsey has become one of Washington’s most ardent ideological stumpers for extending Bush’s vision. One such " stumping " incident even created an embarrassment for the Pentagon early on. In a November 2001 article in the Village Voice, writer Jason Vest reported that Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz dispatched Woolsey to Great Britain on a government plane in September 2001 to investigate links between the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and Iraq. Vest reported:

Woolsey’s pursuit of the World Trade Center connection led him to the small town of Swansea, Wales, where his sleuthing piqued the curiosity of the local constabulary, whose chief decided to ring the U.S. Embassy in London for clarification as to whether Woolsey was visiting in an official capacity. This was the first anyone at State or CIA had heard of Woolsey’s British expedition, and upon being apprised of it, [Secretary of State Colin] Powell and [CIA director George] Tenet were not amused. " It was a stupid, stupid, and just plain wrong thing to do, " an intelligence consultant familiar with the " operation " said.

Such mishaps haven’t checked Woolsey’s rise to new prominence as a neoconservative advocate, however. And in light of his high profile as a former CIA director, his hawkish enthusiasm for the war of ideas (as well as the war of regime change) has helped transform a scholarly conceit into a call for a sort of perpetual American jihad.

After all, the concept of World War IV underscores the notion that we’ve only recently emerged from a " war " — albeit one labeled " cold " with good reason, since it was fought by bankrupting the Soviet Union through massive military spending rather than by actual armed confrontation — and that we’re fighting another one now. It’s a portrait of a perpetually martial society at war for 50 years — with only the recent 10-year respite between major conflicts. It also doesn’t square with concrete reality. The US was involved in three wars during the 1990s, that supposed decade of post-WWIII/Cold War peace — including the Kosovo campaign, which was the first-ever military action taken by NATO, the bulwark of WWIII.

Nonetheless, the World War IV conceit is a genius stroke of propaganda in support of continuing war and US-prompted regime change in other countries. A nation that President Franklin D. Roosevelt called an " arsenal of democracy " has changed its role to that of active agent of democratic regime change abroad. And the linking of the " war on terrorism " to the Cold War transforms recent US military experience from a string of more-or-less-successful conflicts into a grand march of history. Forget the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam. Forget the 1990-’91 Gulf War that left Saddam Hussein in power. Forget the messy and fussy Balkan wars. We won the Cold War, right? This new one is just like that one.