1. The Origins of the Fourth Global War

LIKE ALL GREAT WARS, the Fourth Global War has its origins in the previous war. World War II grew out of the belly of World War I. The Cold War—the Third Global War—grew out of World War II. The U.S.-Jihadist war grew out of the Cold War. You cannot understand September 11 unless you understand how the Cold War ended, because the two stories are intimately bound together.

It is also important to understand something that Karl von Clausewitz, the great theorist of warfare, said: "War is politics carried out by other means." To understand a war, you have to understand the politics. You also have to understand that the means of war are constantly changing. We are used to wars that consist of millions of men and machines fighting on vast battlefields. The Fourth Global War doesn't look like that at all, which does not in any way mean it isn't a full-fledged war. Clausewitz does not specify the other means of war. They could be massive tank battles; they could also be four hijacked airlines. The nature of war changes constantly except in one respect—it always originates in politics, and politics creates enemies.

On one side, you have the United States, the victor in all three prior global wars and, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the only true global power. The United States clearly emerged from the Cold War as the only nation in the world that could project its military force anywhere it wanted, whenever it wanted. On September 11, the U.S. was a country rich beyond belief on any historical scale: peaceful, self-confident, and self-absorbed, neither wanting its power nor imagining that anyone would ever challenge it. It neither sought war nor could resist it.

On the other side, you have the dispersed and defeated remnants of another great empire. An Islamic empire once stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific. At various times in its history it occupied all of the Iberian Peninsula, north into Russia, and to the gates of Vienna. At its peak, it constituted one of the great civilizations in human history—economically, culturally, and politically. Right after World War I, this civilization reached its lowest point when the Ottoman Empire, the last multinational Islamic empire, collapsed. The rest of the Islamic world had been subjected to what was termed Christian oppression. Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia, the vast, non-Arab Muslim world, had all been occupied by Europeans. European decolonialization had left behind inevitable chaos. Between the fall of the Ottomans and the collapse of European imperialism, the Muslim world was in complete disarray.

The debris left in its wake is today's Islamic world, unstable individual states with corrupt governments dominated by rulers who secured their position by accommodating themselves to foreign powers. There were many Muslim men with dreams of resurrected greatness. All failed. But out of the ashes of failure—and the end of the Cold War—emerged a group of men who dreamed of the restoration of the Caliphate, as it was called, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, governed under Islamic law. They were patient men. They had waited for centuries.

The United States, engaged in its desperate struggle with the Soviet Union, gave these men the first sense of hope since Britain and France carved up the Ottoman Empire. The last years of the 1970s were among the grimmest and most unsettling in recent American history. Defeat in Vietnam had given the United States a sense of vulnerability and uncertainty that was rare in its history. The American economy was in shambles, interest rates were over 15 percent, and inflation was over 10 percent, as was unemployment. There was a deep and serious belief that the United States was in decline. Add to this the great oil shortages of the 1970s and the profound fear that the American economy would be shattered by additional oil price rises, and you get a sense of the "malaise" Jimmy Carter described in a famous speech to the nation.

While the United States was struggling with its internal crises, its position in the world took another massive blow: the fall of the Shah of Iran to an Islamist revolution in January 1979. Iran had been a long-term ally of the United States and a stable source of oil for the U.S. and the West, even in the midst of Arab oil embargoes. Indeed, the United States had helped establish and maintain the Shah on the Peacock Throne following an American-managed coup in 1953. The Ayatollah Ruollah Khomeini, sitting in exile in Paris, took advantage of the deep dislike of the Shah's secular regime to foment a revolution that created something that had never existed before—a Western-style republic based on Islamic law. This was an unprecedented hybrid, and it galvanized the Islamic world.

From the American point of view, the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran represented another defeat. This was rapidly followed by what was—from a psychological perspective—the low point of American post–World War II history, the seizure of the American Embassy in Teheran in November 1979. The Iranian hostage crisis appeared to be a demonstration of American powerlessness. Apart from tying yellow ribbons on trees, it seemed nothing could be done. Iran neither respected nor feared the United States.

The situation simply grew worse. Jimmy Carter, realizing that the hostage crisis was potentially interminable, ordered a complex military rescue operation. The operation would have been extraordinarily difficult to execute in the best of circumstances but was poorly organized to begin with, owing to structural weaknesses in the U.S. military. The hostage rescue ended in catastrophic failure at Desert One—the rendezvous point for aircraft in a remote desert location from which the attack on Teheran was to be launched. Frustration and anger gripped the American public, much of it focused on Iran, and a great deal of it focused on the Arab world in general—which to most Americans mistakenly included Iran. With the oil embargo of 1973 still fresh in the public's minds, the perception was that the Arab oil states were effectively taking over the world and spitting on the United States. There was a sense of impotent rage.

But there was more. The primary focus of the United States in those days was the Soviet Union. The United States had encircled the Soviets with a system of alliances that ran from the North Cape of Norway to the Bering Straits. Wherever the Soviets looked, they were surrounded by American troops, ships, planes, or those of their allies. The Soviets desperately wanted to break out of this encirclement, and the Americans desperately wanted to contain them. This struggle defined the Cold War.

From the objective American point of view, what was important about the Khomeini regime was not its beliefs, or even its humiliation of the United States. America feared most that the Soviets, either covertly through their communist allies in Iran or overtly through an invasion of Iran, would punch through to the Persian Gulf, breaking their encirclement, gaining access to the Indian Ocean Basin and, not incidentally, taking control of the Saudi oil fields. This would shift the balance of power decisively in their favor. It was one of Washington's greatest nightmares.

In December 1979, this nightmare was about to become real. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan about a month after the Iran hostage crisis began. Invading Afghanistan in winter seemed a risky operation, but the Soviets were known to be careful planners and geopolitical thinkers. U.S. intelligence and military analysts worked desperately to try to identify the meaning of the invasion. The Soviets were intervening at the request of the communist Afghan government that was facing massive unrest. The Soviets knew Afghanistan well and understood the difficulties of invading in the winter, so it had to be assumed that there was a reason for this kind of risk taking beyond maintaining stability.

The United States concluded that this was a calculated risk by the Soviets—that it was part of a grand strategy to break out of their encirclement at the time and place of America's greatest weakness. It was assumed that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was intended to create bases for attacking Iran from the north and east. As it later turned out, the Soviets invaded for a host of reasons that were much more modest. There was a tottering pro-Soviet government in Afghanistan, and the Soviets simply did not want it to fall. In addition, there was fear of a growing radical influence along the Soviet border.

There was a strong belief within the Defense Department, its nerves raw after a decade of defeat and economic failure, that the invasion of Afghanistan would set in motion forces that would eventually drive the U.S. out of the Eastern Hemisphere. When U.S. intelligence started reporting that the Soviets were rapidly building airfields in southwestern Afghanistan, the scenario was complete. The only reason for building these bases would be to put Soviet fighter aircraft in range—with refueling—of the Persian Gulf, challenging U.S. air superiority over the Strait of Hormuz and canceling out the only military advantage the U.S. had. As the New Year began, there were serious analysts who felt that 1980 would either be the year a general war broke out between the Soviet Union and the United States or the year in which the Soviet Union began the expulsion of the United States from the Eastern Hemisphere.

The United States rapidly threw together staffs to plan the American counter to a Soviet invasion of Iran. In those days, the U.S. Central Command had not yet been created. There was no entity in the Pentagon directly charged with planning and executing operations in the region, except something called the Rapid Deployment Force. Therefore, no one had studied the matter systematically until after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The results of the study were stunning. The United States could, with effort, get elements of the 82nd Airborne Division into the Zagros Mountains of Iran within a week. Other reinforcements—still very small—would take longer. In other words, except for nuclear war, the United States could do little to stop a Soviet invasion. This realization was probably the lowest point in American military history since the fall of Corregidor in World War II.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor, was a hard-line anti-Soviet who had seen the Soviets use wars of national liberation against the United States for decades. The Soviets provided weapons, training, and political support for guerrillas who fought American forces to a standstill. These forces took advantage of their knowledge of the countryside, their support among the population, and their willingness to take casualties to drain the strength out of American and allied troops. The Soviet Union weakened the Americans without risking much itself, Vietnam being the classic case.

Brzezinski knew that a substantial action would have to be taken before the Americans' position in the Eastern Hemisphere disintegrated. The Carter administration's public solution was to boycott the Moscow Olympics and impose economic sanctions, including stopping grain sales, something that hurt U.S. farmers as much as the Soviets. But Brzezinski saw a sweet potential counter—one that would create the opportunity to turn the tables on the Soviets. By moving out of their encirclement the Soviets made themselves, for the first time, vulnerable to their own favorite tool: the sponsored war of national liberation. Their troops were now in hostile territory in Afghanistan. They were ripe for a counterpunch—if there was time and if they didn't move too fast.

The United States had tried to wage guerrilla warfare against the Soviets once before. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, the U.S. tried to raise guerrilla forces in Eastern Europe. It ended in disaster when Soviet intelligence penetrated these groups and destroyed them. The U.S. had tried guerrilla warfare in Vietnam with mixed results. The U.S. was not a nation proficient at insurgency or counterinsurgency. Nevertheless, Brzezinski argued that this was the only option available. Just five years after defeat in Vietnam, payback was an irresistible motive, and it made strategic sense. This was an opportunity to make the Soviets bleed.

Carter ordered the Central Intelligence Agency and the special operations units of the military—not yet organized into a single command—to recruit, organize, and supply a guerrilla movement in Afghanistan and to utilize indigenous forces that were already rising to resist the Soviets six months before the invasion. This was to resist the established communist government. Carter signed the first "Intelligence Finding," a document that authorizes covert operations, on Afghanistan. The finding was designed to aid Afghan guerrillas in the "harassment" of Soviet troops in Afghanistan. It was this "Finding" that served as the legal and operational basis for the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan. It was also this "Finding" that would culminate, via a long, circuitous, and unpredictable route, in September 11.

Copyright © 2004 by George Friedman