So we accept this totally one-sided definition of the world in

And nobody says this is totally, utterly, absolutely
       unacceptable. Why is it that the No. 1 threat in intelligence
       movies is the CIA?

       I happened the other night to be watching an old movie, To Live
       and Die in L.A., which is about counterfeiting. But the movie
       starts with a Secret Service agent who is defending Ronald
       Reagan in 1985, and the person he is defending Ronald Reagan
       from is a suicide bomber who is actually, overtly a Muslim
       fanatic. Now, six years after 9/11, you could not get that scene
       made in Hollywood today.

       Just look at the movies. Why is it that the bad person is either
       a right-wing crazed billionaire, or the CIA as a government
       agency. Go look at the Bourne Ultimatum. Or a movie like the one
       that George Clooney made, which was an absolute lie, in which it
       implied that if you were a reformist Arab prince, that probably
       the CIA would kill you. It's a total lie. We actually have SEALs
       protecting people all over the world. We actually risk American
       lives protecting reformers all over the world, and yet Hollywood
       can't bring itself to tell the truth, (a) because it's
       ideologically so opposed to the American government and the
       American military, and (b), because it's terrified that if it
       said something really openly, honestly true about Muslim
       terrorists, they might show up in Hollywood. And you might have
       somebody killed as the Dutch producer was killed.

       And so we're living a life of cowardice, and in that life of
       cowardice we're sleepwalking into a nightmare.

       And then you come to Iran. There's a terrific book. Mark Bowden
       is a remarkable writer who wrote Black Hawk Down, has enormous
       personal courage. He's a Philadelphia newspaper writer, actually
       got the money out of the Philadelphia newspaper to go to Somalia
       to interview the Somalian side of Black Hawk Down. It's a
       remarkable achievement. Tells a great story about getting to
       Somalia, paying lots of cash, having the local warlord protect
       him, and after about two weeks the warlord came to him and said,
       "You know, we've decided that we're very uncomfortable with you
       being here, and you should leave."

       And so he goes to the hotel, where he is the only hard-currency
       guest, and says, "I've got to check out two weeks early because
       the warlord has told me that he no longer will protect me." And
       the hotel owner, who wants to keep his only hard-currency guest,
       says, "Well, why are you listening to him? He's not the
       government. There is no government." And Bowden says, "Well,
       what will I do?" And he says, "You hire a bigger warlord with
       more guns," which he did. But then he could only stay one week
       because he ran out of money.

       But this is a guy with real courage. I mean, imagine trying to
       go out and be a journalist in that kind of world, OK? So Bowden
       came back and wrote Guest of the Ayatollah, which is the Iranian
       hostage of 1979, which he entitled, "The First Shots in Iran's
       War Against America." So in the Bowden worldview, the current
       Iranian dictatorship has been at war with the United States
       since 1979. Violated international law. Every conceivable tenet
       of international law was violated when they seized the American
       Embassy and they seized the diplomats. Killed Americans in
       Lebanon in the early '80s. Killed Americans at Khobar Towers in
       '95 and had the Clinton administration deliberately avoid
       revealing the information, as Louis Freeh, the director of the
       FBI, has said publicly, because they didn't want to have to
       confront the Iranian complicity.

       And so you have an Iranian regime which is cited annually as the
       leading supporter of state terrorism in the world. Every year
       the State Department says that. It's an extraordinary act of
       lucidity on the part of an institution which seeks to avoid it
       as often as possible.

       And you have Gen. Petraeus come to the U.S. Congress and say
       publicly in an open session, "The Iranians are waging a proxy
       war against Americans in Iraq."

       I was so deeply offended by this, it's hard for me to express it
       without sounding irrational. I'm an Army brat. My dad served 27
       years in the infantry. The idea that an American general would
       come to the American Congress, testify in public that our young
       men and women are being killed by Iran, and we have done
       nothing, I find absolutely abhorrent.

       So I'm preparing to come and talk today. I got up this morning,
       and a friend had sent me yesterday's Jerusalem Post editorial,
       which if you haven't read, I recommend to you. It has, for
       example, the following quote: "On Monday, chief Palestinian
       negotiator Saeb Erekat said, 'The problem of the content of the
       document setting out joint principles for peace-making
       post-Annapolis has not been resolved. One of the more pressing
       problems is the Zionist regime's insistence on being recognized
       as a Jewish state. We will not agree to recognize Israel as a
       Jewish state. There is no country in the world where religious
       and national identities are intertwined.' "

       What truly bothers me is the shallowness and the sophistry of
       the Western governments, starting with our own. When a person
       says to you, "I don't recognize that you exist," you don't start
       a negotiation. The person says, "I literally do not recognize"
       and then lies to you. I mean the first thing you say to this guy
       is "Terrific. Let's go visit Mecca. Since clearly there's no
       other state except Israel that is based on religion, the fact
       that I happen to be Christian won't bother anybody." And then
       he'll say, "Well, that's different."

       We tolerate this. We have created our own nightmare because we
       refuse to tell the truth. We refuse to tell the truth to our
       politicians. Our State Department refuses to tell the truth to
       the country. If the president of the United States, and again,
       we're now so bitterly partisan, we're so committed to
       red-vs.-blue hostility, that George W. Bush doesn't have the
       capacity to give an address from the Oval Office that has any
       meaning for half the country. And the anti-war left is so strong
       in the Democratic primary that I think it's almost impossible
       for any Democratic presidential candidate to tell the truth
       about the situation.

       And so the Republicans are isolated and trying to defend
       incompetence. The Democrats are isolated and trying to find a
       way to say, "I'm really for strength as long as I can have
       peace, but I'd really like to have peace, except I don't want to
       recognize these people who aren't very peaceful."

       I just want to share with you, as a grandfather, as a citizen,
       as a historian, as somebody who was once speaker of the House,
       this is a serious national crisis. This is 1935 or 1936, and
       it's getting worse every year.

       None of our enemies are confused. Our enemies don't get up each
       morning and go, "Oh, gosh, I think I'll have an existential
       crisis of identity in which I will try to think through whether
       or not we can be friends while you're killing me." Our enemies
       get up every morning and say, "We hate the West. We hate
       freedom." They would not allow a meeting with women in the room.

       I was once interviewed by a BBC reporter, a nice young lady who
       was only about as anti-American as she had to be to keep her
       job. Since it was a live interview, I turned to her halfway
       through the interview and I said, "Do you like your job?" And it
       was summertime, and she's wearing a short-sleeve dress. And she
       said, "Well, yes." She was confused because I had just reversed
       roles. I said, "Well, then you should hope we win." She said,
       "What do you mean?" And I said, "Well, if the enemy wins, you
       won 't be allowed to be on television."

       I don't know how to explain it any simpler than that.

       Now what do we need?

       We need first of all to recognize this is a real war. Our
       enemies are peaceful when they're weak, are ruthless when
       they're strong, demand mercy when they're losing, show no mercy
       when they're winning. They understand exactly what this is, and
       anybody who reads Sun Tzu will understand exactly what we're
       living through. This is a total war. One side is going to win.
       One side is going to lose. You'll be able to tell who won and
       who lost by who's still standing. Most of Islam is not in this
       war, but most of Islam isn't going to stop this war. They're
       just going to sit to one side and tell you how sorry they are
       that this happened. We had better design grand strategies that
       are radically bigger and radically tougher and radically more
       honest than anything currently going on, and that includes
       winning the argument in Europe , and it includes winning the
       argument in the rest of the world. And it includes being very
       clear, and I'll just give you one simple example because we're
       now muscle-bound by our own inability to talk honestly.

       Iran produces 60 percent of its own gasoline. It produces lots
       of crude oil but only has one refinery. It imports 40 percent of
       its gasoline. The entire 60 percent is produced at one huge
       refinery.

       In 1981, Ronald Reagan decided to break the Soviet empire. He
       was asked what's your vision of the Cold War. He said, "Four
       words: We win; they lose." He was clearly seen by The New York
       Times as an out-of-touch, reactionary, right-wing cowboy from
       California who had no idea what was going on in the world. And
       11 years later the Soviet Union disappeared, but obviously that
       had nothing to do with Reagan because that would have meant he
       was right. So it's just a random accident the Soviet Union
       disappeared.

       Part of the war we waged on the Soviet Union involved their
       natural gas supply because we wanted to cut off their hard
       currency. The Soviets were desperate to get better equipment for
       their pipeline. We managed to sell them through third parties
       very, very sophisticated American pipeline equipment, which they
       were thrilled to buy and thought they had pulled off a huge
       coup. Now we weren't playing fair. We did not tell them that the
       equipment was designed to blow up. One day in 1982, there was an
       explosion in Siberia so large that the initial reflection on the
       satellites looked like there was a tactical nuclear weapon. One
       part of the White House was genuinely worried, and the other
       part of the White House had to calm them down. They said, "No,
       no, that's our equipment blowing up."

       In the 28 years since the Iranians declared war on us, in the
       six years since 9/11, in the months since Gen. Petraeus publicly
       said they are killing young Americans, we have not been able to
       figure out how to take down one refinery. Covertly, quietly,
       without overt war. And we have not been able to figure out how
       to use the most powerful navy in the world to simply stop the
       tankers and say, "Look, you want to kill young Americans, you're
       going to walk to the battlefield, but you're not going to ride
       in the car because you're not going to have any gasoline."

       We don't have to be stupid. The choice is not cowardice or total
       war. Reagan unlocked Poland without firing a shot in an alliance
       with the pope, with the labor unions and with the British. We
       have every possibility if we're prepared to be honest to shape
       the world. It'll be a very big project. It's much closer to
       World War II than it is to anything we've tried recently. It
       will require real effort, real intensity and real determination.
       We're either going to do it now, while we're still
       extraordinarily powerful, or we're going to do it later under
       much more desperate circumstances after we've lost several cities.

       We had better take this seriously because we are not very many
       mistakes away from a second Holocaust. Three nuclear weapons is
       a second Holocaust. Our enemies would like to get those weapons
       as soon as they can, and they promise to use them as soon as
       they can.

       I suggest we defeat our enemies and create a different situation
       long before they have that power.t