James Woolsey for...

President! Or, Secretary of State! Or, Director of National Intelligence or, something useful! I've read some of James Woolsey's public writing (on the state of the world, and on oil) and that prompted me to watch meeting of the House Committee for Foreign Affairs (January 11, 2007, Next Steps in the Iran Crisis) on C-SPAN yesterday during which he testified.

In his prepared statement he provides the committee members with the type of analysis that our brilliant media could never bring itself to do:

The regime’s threats to destroy Israel and, on a longer time-scale, the United States are part and parcel of its essence. Recent official statements to this effect represent not a shift in policy – Iran’s regime has defined itself by its fundamental hostility to the West, and especially Israel and the US, for nearly three decades (“Great Satan” etc.) – but rather a greater degree of public and explicit candor.

This fundamental hostility is now seasoned by a more pointed expression of the views of the circle of fanatic believers around Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi in Qum, including Ahmadinejad himself. This group expressly promotes the idea that large-scale killing should be welcomed because it will summon the return of the 12th Imam, the Mahdi, which in turn will lead to the end of the world. Recently the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting web site has begun to assert that the world is in its “last days” and that, as the world ends, Jesus will appear with the Mahdi, as a Shi’ite and as his lieutenant. This rhetoric is not limited to a small circle. Rafsanjani, e.g., has utilized it as well. To us, of course, it sounds bizarre – but we ignore such ideology at our peril. As Enders Wimbush points out in the current Weekly Standard “Iran’s leadership has spoken of its willingness – in their words – to “martyr” the entire Iranian nation, and it has even expressed he desirability of doing so as a way to accelerate an inevitable, apocalyptic collision between Islam and the West . . . .” Those in decision-making roles in the Iranian regime who believe such things are certainly not going to be very inclined to negotiate in good faith with us about Iraq, their nuclear program, or indeed anything at all. Even deterrence is questionable, much less arms control agreements.

I can't find a record of the question and answer that followed just yet. One member rattled off a litany of grievances worthy of Michael Moore against American policy toward Iran and wondered, "why shouldn't they distrust us? hate us?"

Mr. Woolsey replied that the Iranian leadership does not want to destroy us because of what we've done wrong but, because of what we've done right. He attributes this insight to a conversation with a DC cab driver just after 9/11. In otherwords, our affront to their ideology. It wouldn't matter what we'd done in the past, the end result would not differ. Thanks a bunch Jimmy!

In general, he advocates a policy of non-violent regime change modeled on Cold War efforts in Eastern Europe. This seems like they type of policy everyone could get behind.

Later, he addressed the role of oil in international [in]security (an issue he speaks to at length in the article I link to above).

And finally, by moving toward technology that can reduce substantially the role of oil in our own economy and that of the world’s other oil-importing states, we can help deprive oil exporters – Iran, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela, and others – of much of their leverage in international affairs. As Tom Friedman of the NY Times puts it, the price of oil and the path of freedom run in opposite directions. The attached op-ed piece of mine, published in the Wall Street Journal December 30, notes the possibility of plug-in hybrid vehicles soon making it possible for consumers to get around 500 miles per gallon of gasoline (since almost all propulsion would come from much less expensive electricity and renewable fuels, the latter mixed with only 15 per cent gasoline). This may seem an extraordinary number. But when General Motors last Sunday joined Toyota in the plug-in hybrid race to market and unveiled its new Chevrolet Volt, one of its executives used a figure of 525 miles per (gasoline) gallon. Five hundred and twenty-five miles per (gasoline) gallon should give Minister Nejad-Hosseinian and his colleagues a bracing degree of concern.

Surely everyone can get behind this type of policy as well.

James Woolsey for President! Or, Secretary of State! Or, Director of National Intelligence or, something useful!