Rick Santorum
Senior Fellow
Ethics and Public Policy Center

Rick Santorum - Employment- Senior Fellow, Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he will establish and direct a program on America's enemies; former member, United States Senate (R-PA); served, Senate Committee on Armed Services and Finance; chairman, Senate Republican Conference and the third-ranking member of the Republican Leadership; former member, House of Representatives (PA-18); former attorney, Kirkpatrick and Lockhart; former administrative assistant to Senator Doyle Corman; former campaign volunteer, Senator John Heinz. Works- Author, It Takes A Family: Conservatism and the Common Good. Special Mention- Member of the renowned "Gang of Seven," a group of newly elected House members focused on cleaning up the abuse and corruption that was rampant at that time; founded, Congressional Working Group on Religious Freedom; accomplishments include combating the Global HIV/AIDS epidemic, strengthening and protecting Social Security, and providing every American with access to quality, affordable health care. Education- B.A., Political Science, Pennsylvania State University; M.B.A., University of Pittsburgh; J.D., Dickinson School of Law. Personal- Father of six; married to Karen.

"The Gathering Storm"

I just want to thank everybody here at CNP for the award.  It’s quite a thrill for me.  It’s the first award I’ve received since I lost my election so it’s something to remember.  This is actually the first speech that I’ve giving since that election night.  I haven’t had the opportunity to share comments with the public.  

Let me first start with new project that I’ve got involved with and many of you have come up and asked about it.  It’s with the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which is a think tank in Washington, D.C.  It is a project called the American Enemies Project, which is a rather stark term I know for some folks, a rather chilling term, but one that will hopefully grab attention to with the severity of the situation that confronts us.  

If you listened to what Foster talked about it’s not really my work on national security that I was known for in the United States Senate or when I was in Congress; it was a lot of other issues, issues that were very much at the core of another type of war: a war here in America, a cultural war, one that I am very passionate about.  And yet I found myself over the last couple of years confronting the issue of the battle against Islamic fascism and its growing array of allies against America has superseded, at least for the time being in my mind, the other issues because of its immediacy and maybe is more importantly the fact that America just simply isn’t getting it.  

And so I felt a real need after I left the United States Senate to take at least a little slice of my life and dedicate it to giving voice to something that I thought very few politicians were giving voice to, or at least the kind of voice that America needed to hear to be able to come to grips with this great threat that confronts us.  

The question at least I had for myself when I started to put this talk together is, what happened that led me to believe this?  Because we’ve been fighting against these Islamic radicals now for quite a long time and obviously most acutely since the events of 9/11 and why has it only been in the last year or two that all of a sudden this became evident to me that I needed to do and say more?  And I will posit to you a couple of things that happened along the way in the last couple of years.  

What I first began to see was the growing strength of Iran.  Iran has been at war with us, as you know, since 1979, since they took the hostages after the overthrow of the Shah, but what I saw was a increasing presence of Iran and the reports I was getting from lots of sources overseas was Iran’s presence in Iraq, Iran’s presence and fomenting trouble both in Lebanon and with Hezbollah and others.  And so the emergence of Iran and then the election of a guy named Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  After his election I started to learn about who this guy is and through the entire course of my campaign I gave a speech to all these groups and I would say the name Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  Now everyone in this room knows who Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is but a year ago, I guarantee you none of you would have known who that name was.  And that’s what I said.  I said, “Remember this name: a year from now, everyone in this room will know it because of the threat that I believe Iran will be to this country and to the world.”  And the more I studied, the more I got into it, the more I felt that I needed to talk about it and someone needed to get voice to this because the president wasn’t doing it and no other Republicans were doing and it and certainly the Democrats weren’t going to do it.  And so the growth of Iran as an issue was one thing.  

The second thing was as I went out the campaign trail, it was very obvious to me we were losing the war.  Yes, we were losing the war in Baghdad to some degree, but more importantly, we were losing the war in the streets of Pennsylvania.  And ultimately, I believe when it comes to America, any time we lose a war we will always lose it at home, not with our brave men and women in uniform.  

And so I felt the need to go out in the biggest race in the country and give voice to something that candidly the president was not giving voice to and no other Republicans were either, so I started thinking about how can we turn this around, how can we convince the American public?  And Tommy Franks told me a story that really helped shape me in how I thought about this war.  He told the story of a conversation he had with the president a year and a half after the events of 9/11.  

He went to the president and he said, if you may recall, right after 9/11 and for quite a time afterwards, the president would refer to the terrorist as cowards.  He would refer to them as cowards.  And General Franks went to the president one day and said, “Mr. President, please stop referring to these people as cowards.  Number one, they are not.  These are people who are willing to die for what they believe in.  That is not a cowardly act.  It may be a misguided act, but it’s not a cowardly act, and secondly, you are misinforming the American public.  You want the American public to take stern action against people and you want them to have a respect for the enemy; no one respects a coward.  Words matter Mr. President.  What you tell people about who you’re fighting matters because people hear and put in their own mind and interpret in their own mind what these words mean.  And when they hear the word coward, no one is going to rally and fight and sacrifice to fight a war against people who we shouldn’t be afraid of.”  

And so it is with these other war of words that we’ve had.  I became convinced that one of the reasons we were losing this war is because the American public didn’t respect the enemy.  They didn’t think there was any consequence of losing.  They didn’t think we could lose.  And even if we did lose, it didn’t matter.  Why?  Well, who are we fighting?  Terrorists.  Who are these terrorists?  The terrorist number one is Osama bin Laden.  Who is he?  He’s a guy we haven’t seen in five years who lives in a cave, who communicates with rather crude instruments, to mostly other terrorists of the like.  We don’t see them either.  They look like a bunch of ragamuffins.  They have crude telecommunications and even cruder weapons.  This is who we’re afraid of?  This is who the United States of America is going to lose to?  No, people don’t believe that.  You’re not afraid of a guy you don’t see.  You don’t even know if he’s alive, how are you afraid of him?  Yet we continue to say, as the president continues to say, we’re in a war against terror.  Terror is a tactic; it is not an enemy.  

The day after the president returned back from Baghdad at a meeting of the Republican leadership, House and Senate, in the Cabinet Room and we were talking about the war and he was talking about the prospects for success now that, as he just came back and met the new government – al-Maliki, the new prime minister of Iraq, and I told the president something I’d never done.  I’d never really given a lecture to the president, but I felt, after having gone through what you heard me go through on the campaign trail and other things that I felt that I needed to do so.  And I told him just what I told you: “Mr. President,” I said, “you are misleading the American public.  This is no more a war on terror than the World War II was a war on blitzkrieg.  Terror is a tactic; it’s not the enemy.  The enemy has an ideology and we have to be courageous enough, brave enough to be able to confront the American people with the truth: that we are fighting a war against Islamic fascists, people who use Islam to support their fascist ideology of wanting to control the world.  That’s what they’re doing.  That’s who they are.  And if you don’t tell that to the American public, then why would the American public believe it’s true?  If you’re not willing to stand up and say what the truth is as an advocate for this war, how are they going to know it?”  

Franklin Roosevelt had the courage in the 1940s to go up and say we’re fighting Nazism, that we’re fighting Japanese imperialism.  I’m sure there are many Germans who were very upset about that, many Japanese who were upset about that, but you know what?  Roosevelt didn’t care, because the stakes were high enough that we had to tell the truth because we needed the support of the American people.  If we use euphemisms to describe our enemy, then that tells you that we’re not particularly serious about what we’re up against, doesn’t it?  

I told the president he had to start to change the lexicon and he had an opportunity to do so, which I’ll get to in a moment.  Well, he didn’t.  I gave the National Press Club speech about a month later.  I walked into my next meeting at the White House, which happened to be two days after that speech and handed the speech to Tony Snow and then said to the president, “Mr. President, you need to give this speech.  You have to start using these terms.  You have to start educating the American public or not only are we going to lose this election, we’re going to lose this war.” 

A few days later, you may recall was when the British thwarted the attempted airline hijacking, so it was actually the airline bombings and the president the next day was quoted as saying that we were at war with Islamic fascists.  Well, there was a huge outcry over his remarks.  Most of the complaints were that we can’t use that term, Islamic fascists, it disgraces Islam.

We’re not saying that all people of Islam are fascists.  What we’re saying is there are people who are fascists who are using Islam and we have to say it.  But the president said it and then a couple of days later he unfortunately made a trip to the State Department.  The State Department pleaded with him, and Karen Hughes in particular pleaded with him, please don’t use that term again, it’s offending our friends in the Islamic world and here at home.  The State Department said that you can’t use that term, it’s just too offensive.  The president hasn’t used it since.  

If we’re not going to be honest with whom the enemy is, don’t expect the American people to follow us.  It’s as simple as that.  And so I spent the rest of the campaign talking about that because I though this was the issue of our time.  It was not the smartest political move, as it turned out.  A lot of my advisors reading the polls said, “You know, Rick, this is a losing effort here.  I mean, this is all you’re talking about.  This is what your commercials are about.  You’re driving this train and it’s just going nowhere, not in this environment.”  But I continued to work at it and then some things happened that made me think that maybe I don’t even have the whole picture.  The events in the fall of 2006 made me rethink again about the nature of the enemy that we confront.  

There was a meeting down in Havana, Cuba, of a group of non-aligned nations and we saw the warm up act for the United Nations meeting a couple of weeks later.  These non-aligned nations, more accurately, nations aligned against the United States – led by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chavez, and others, floated out an enormous amount of anti-American rhetoric and efforts to stand up as a movement against the United States.  Then we saw in the interim North Korea explode a nuclear weapon, then we went to the United Nations and saw the tag team of Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad calling the president a devil to the applause of the American left. 

I thought to myself, well,  maybe we need to take a little deeper look at what’s going on here, what is this relationship between radical Islam and these leftist organizations?  And so we started to look a little bit more.  I started seeing the moves of our enemies and the American left.  I started to see the chess pieces move around and I had this eerie feeling that I know what’s going to happen and someone better start talking about it.  

And so I gave a speech called “The Gathering Storm.”  A good friend, Frank Gaffney came up and helped put some exclamation points on that toward the end of the campaign.  Some pretty good speeches but a bad idea, really bad idea.  They got lots of press, really huge coverage in all the press, all of which said, basically, Rick Santorum, warmonger, wants to go to war with the world.  Not exactly the right message to the time when America is tiring of the war that we’re in.  So the lesson learned by most Republicans, if they paid attention, was: good idea not to talk about expanding this war or any complexity with respect to Iraq, just keep it simple.  Let’s just keep focusing on Iraq.  

But there is a gathering storm.  There’s a gathering storm of Islamic fascists.  The president for the first time thankfully at the State of the Union Address began the education process about who we’re up against and it’s not just this group of people called terrorists or radical Islamists.  They’re two really distinct groups of folks, radical Sunnis and radical Shiites.  We need to understand who they are and what they’re all about, what their objectives are, where they come from.  As many books as have been published on the subject, most people haven’t read them.  Oh, you’ve heard about them but it takes a lot of time and why read them?  It’s not that important.  The president doesn’t talk about it and he’s the principal advocate of war.  And if he’s not talking about how this is important, then why do you need to know?  Why does the American public need to take the time to find out?  

You need to know that we are up against two virulent strains of radical Islam, one within the Sunni religion, the other within the Shiite religion.  In the Sunni religion, this is not necessarily unprecedented.  The Sunnis are the ones who have been waging war against the West forever. Well, since the creation of Islam.  But this particular strain is new.  The old strain was snuffed out at the end of the Ottoman Empire when Ataturk eliminated the last caliph, and so the strain of sort of the general sense of warring of Islam against the West came to a close and now what has come up through the ranks is this rather odd strain.  This strain really being a minority called Wahhabism.  

This Wahhabism is much more virulent than the strain that confronted the West for over 1,000 years.  These people are very serious about what they want and take extremist views of what the Sunni faith is all about.  We ask ourselves, and who are these people?  Yes, you know them as al Qaeda; you know them as a whole variety of different terrorist groups.  You also knew them as the Taliban in Afghanistan. Those that were at their zenith at the events of 9/11.  

We’ve done a pretty good job with our coalition allies of coming down and hammering this strain.  We’ve eliminated the Sunni regime and the Sunni radical regime in Afghanistan.  We eliminated a sympathetic Sunni regime to Sunni terrorism in Baghdad, and that is Saddam Hussein.  And we have degraded al-Qaeda greatly and other Sunni terrorist organizations, but that does not mean that they are quiet.  There’re still two nation states controlled by radical Sunnis: Somalia and Sudan.  There are a whole other variety of other terrorist organizations and they have spun off and continue to cause problems as we saw just the other day in Great Britain.  So Sunni radicalism is still alive and well and being fed, as we know, by Saudi Arabia and their madrassas, as well as other houses of worships all over the world funded by the Saudis and others who preach this radical and hateful version of Islam.  The Sunnis are the majority.  I think it’s about 85 percent of Islam is Sunni.  

And then you have the Shi’as.  For years, for centuries the Shi’as were sort of the peaceful Muslims.  They didn’t want to govern anything.  In the majority Shi’a countries, Sunnis will always govern because that was a theological thing, until 1979 and guy named Khomeini.  He sort of changed things.  He decided you know what; these Sunnis have a good idea about trying to establish a worldly kingdom.  Sunnis always were waiting for the ultimate kingdom, the return of the imam, the 12th imam, but now they thought, we got to take control of the situation and rule in his stead, and so Khomeini came up with this idea that started the revolution in Iran and they’ve spun off terror groups like Hezbollah.  Shi’a is the only majority in three states. Three major states: Lebanon, Iraq and Iran.  Those are the three majority Shiite Muslim states.  All problem area’s for us right now.  Why?  Because of this radical brand of Shiism that is brand new to the Shi’a, making them very much like their brothers the Sunnis.  

I believe the Shi’a is probably, at this point, the most dangerous strain.  Why; because of Iran, because they’ve got huge oil money behind this effort.  None of this would be a big deal if oil money was not contributor to these strains.  Osama bin Laden wouldn’t be anywhere if it wasn’t for one thing: oil.  And so now we have Iran in a position to project power and to use Sunni-like theology, if you will, to conquer the world.  So we have these two entities. This is the enemy, but it’s not just them anymore.  

You saw the other day Mahmoud Ahmadinejad traveling around Central and South America, to Venezuela and to Nicaragua and to Ecuador and to Bolivia.  This wasn’t a family vacation; he was there for a reason.  These are all countries that are very sympathetic and aligned with Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.  Hugo Chavez is, in the eyes of most Americans, a buffoon.  He’s a buffoon who is the fourth largest supplier of oil to the United States of America.  He’s a buffoon who is, you hear in the press, nationalizing just about everything in the country.  He just got his parliament to give him supreme authority to do whatever he wants to do in Venezuela.  There will be no further elections and certainly not anything close to a fair election is Venezuela as long as he is in power.  He is learning everything right at the knee of Fidel Castro and as those who have followed Cuba know, the Cubans are very good at keeping control once they get it.  

So now he is spreading his power throughout Central and South America and you say, well, Castro has been trying to do this for years. The major difference being that Castro never had a drop of oil to do it with.  No, Chavez is not as smart as Castro, but he’s smart enough to know to listen to Castro.  And so now we have this alliance between Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Iranians and Venezuela.  Yes, they have a defense pact between the two countries.  They started a fund, you may have seen it: $2 billion to counter America in the Americas.  I refer to it as his hedge fund against America.  As he says often, he will use oil as a weapon.  He used it to get Daniel Ortega elected in Nicaragua.  He gave all sorts of assurances of oil supplies for the Nicaraguans at cheap prices in exchange for their votes for Daniel Ortega and he’s trying to do it in other areas of Central and South America.  

And who is Venezuela?  They are not just a partner of Ahmadinejad’s but they are the largest purchaser of foreign arms in the world.  They have a million-person army; they are spending $30 billion over the next few years to build 20 military installations in Bolivia which is the heart of South America.  And where are these military installations?  They’re on the borders of the countries that border Bolivia, like Argentina and Chile and Brazil.  And they are manned, yes, by Bolivian troops, but they are commanded by Venezuelan and Cuban troops.  You think he’s sending a message to his neighbors in South America?  He is serious about effectuating what Castro has preached for 40 years and has the resources to do it and is in alliance with radical Islam. 

How so?  One of the axioms I learned early in my life is the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and we see that playing out today.  Let’s throw in North Korea, too.  Yes, they exploded a nuclear weapon.  What’s the relationship?  Well, there are widespread reports that there are Iranian scientists in North Korea and you saw in the paper the other day about North Korean scientists being in Tehran.  There was an exchange there of a nuclear North Korea in need of cash with an Iran in need of nukes with tons of cash.  That is a very bad and dangerous combination, with a world that continues, as Jacques Chirac so aptly said the other day, just decides to look the other way as they pursue their nuclear ambitions.

And then finally you have Russia.  Russia, a country that is increasingly looking familiar, increasingly looking like the old Russia in the way they support nations that align against the United States.  They block actions to contain nuclear technology and to block actions that again are harmful to the free world.  These are the countries that are lining up and arraying against us.  This is the gathering storm and it’s a gathering storm that’s real.  

Winston Churchill said in his book, The Gathering Storm, which is the history of the second World War, it began with a short description: “How the English speaking peoples through their unwisdom, carelessness, and good nature allow the wicked to rearm.”  And here we sit.  

Listen to the debate on Capitol Hill, listen to the mainstream media.  The president for once confronts a country, Iran, that is providing training, logistics, resources, and weapons and personnel and leadership to the insurgents in Iraq who are killing our men and women in uniform.  Mike Hayden, who’s the head of the CIA said, when he was asked the question about EFPs – we all know IEDs, now there’s EFPs, explosive formed projectiles – he was asked a question by Ron Wyden about these EFPs and where they’re coming from, that there were reports that they’re from Iran and General Hayden said, quote: “The EFPs are coming from Iran. They’re being used against our forces and incident for incident cause significantly more casualties that any other improvised explosive devices do and they are provided to the Shiite militia.  That’s correct.”  We have the head of our intelligence department saying that Iran is giving weapons to our enemy, who are killing our men and women in uniform and Democrats and many Republicans stand aside and say, “Oh, we dare not provoke them.”  To do what?  Kill more?  We didn’t provoke them to do this.  They are at war with us.  At some point, hopefully not too late, we will understand that and act accordingly.  The president is taking the right steps.  He is being hammered on both sides and in the media for doing so.  

So as bravely as I stand up here before you and talk about how we need to confront these threats, let me assure you there is absolutely nothing in it for a politician to agree with me.  If you’re a Democrat, why would you?  Why are you going to talk about a broader threat?  You’ve got a great gig going right now just focused on Iraq and how messed up things are.  Why are you going broaden this thing?  Just let’s keep focusing on Iraq.  And of course, if we just focus on Iraq, we’ll never win in Iraq because the problem isn’t just in Iraq.  So it’s great for the Democrats politically.  Obviously, I’m not suggesting they’re not patriotic and that they don’t want to win the war.  You can suggest that but I’m not going to suggest it.  They’re not going to bring in all these other threats that we have and start to confront them because Republicans do not want to be seen as warmongers.  

The president, God bless him, I can guarantee you that the State Department is saying, Mr. President, don’t go after the Iranians in the country, don’t kill them, don’t sanction them, don’t go after companies that do business with them, all of which that he has suggested that we should do and that we are doing now.  But I guarantee that the State Department said, don’t do it, you’re going to offend.  We need to talk to them.  We need to negotiate with them.  

The Defense Department, you saw the reason the president took so long to make his decision, you heard General Casey; they didn’t want more troops.  Why?  They were afraid of stretching the military.  It’s already stretched, they know that, and they don’t want to stretch it anymore.  And my goodness, taking on Iran?  No, Mr. President, you can’t do that – can’t do that.  

What are our intelligence folks telling to the President?  Well, you look at Iran and you say, Mr. President what are your options here?  Well, you know, there’s nearly no great alternative in Iran.  There’s no strong leader in the opposition.  There’s no organized resistance.  Therefore, Mr. President, I suggest you negotiate with them.  That’s what they’re all telling him.  The national media is beating its brains in.  In my opinion, he’s doing the right thing.  

But he’s not doing enough.  He’s not doing enough.  He’s doing the right thing with Iran, but we’re not going to solve the problem by just chasing down a few bad guys in Iraq.  This is a much bigger problem than just chasing down a few bad guys.  The president was right when he said that we are, “in the decisive ideological struggle for the 21st century.”  

Now, think about what he just said.  This is not just a military conflict, this is an ideological conflict and so we’re not going to just win or lose this battle on the battlefield.  There are some who would like to pretend that if we retreat, that the problem will just go away; it won’t follow us here.  Some have suggested that the Islamic fascisms is just a few crazies in the world and that Islam is a peaceful religion mainly and that really it’s not in need of reform, it just needs to be left alone to their own designs.  It’s what people say in America.  It’s a reason for getting out.  It’s wrong.  It’s wrong.  

The question is what do we do?  How do we win this war?  I want to share with you some of my ideas.  I suggest that we evangelize, educate, engage, and eradicate.  

Evangelize: I don’t mean Christianize Muslims by evangelizing.  What I do mean is to share with them a witness, a witness of what happened in Christendom.  Christendom like Islam, was a connection between the church and the state for 1,000 years, over 1,000 years.  Papal armies, papal wars; after the reformation, kings going to battle, who were the heads of also the church.  This is something that’s very familiar to Christendom and we changed.  We modernized.  We understood the importance of religious pluralism not just for the sake of the state, but for the sake of the faith.  Islam has to do the same and we have to help them do that.  Now it will be hard for them; some say impossible.  They said that about Christendom, too, but we have to try.  

Second, we need to promote religious freedom everywhere, including here, as hard as it may be, but certainly around the world.  It has to be a high priority for us.  It’s something that we have to talk about and we are absolutely ill-equipped with a State Department who doesn’t know religion from first base.  

I was on the phone today with Ambassador John Hanford.  He happened to call Mark Rogers, who was in the car with me and Ambassador Hanford was put in that job – there was a job of ambassador on religious freedom.  That job was supposed to be a job that reported directly to the secretary.  After the State Department got through interpreting the law, he is now buried in some bowels in the State Department doesn’t see anybody anywhere and he’s not seen as an important person over there.  They just don’t understand.  They won’t understand.  We need to reprioritize and understand that the conflict is not just a military conflict, but really an ideological one and faith is at the center of it.  

Third, we need to re-evangelize Europe.  Why?  Well, if you look at what we’re up against, Mark Steyn wrote the book called America Alone and we really are alone in this.  Maybe Britain will be with us, maybe.  We’ll see what happens after Tony Blair.  Israel will be with us?  Not really a big help during this time.  They took a pretty big shot with the loss to the war and Hezbollah.  It’s going to be tough for them.  We will be alone unless we somehow get some of our traditional allies back and we will not get them back save faith.  

These secularized countries that are dying.  Europe is dying.  At their current birthrates, they’re going to lose half their population in 50 years.  In Steyn’s book, he talks about the most popular boys name in Belgium: Mohammed.  Forty percent of Amsterdam is Muslim, it will be Eurabia or Eurostan in the lifetime of your children unless something changes and that something is faith.  It is a belief in something other than the self that makes one want to do things for others instead of just yourself, like giving of children.  It is faith.  It is faith that keeps our populations rates up.  We need to re-evangelize.  

Second, educate.  I’ve talked about this so I’ll go through it quickly.  We need to define the enemy.  We have to say what this war really is.  We must be not afraid.  We have to publish articles and books and do all the things that smart people want to do, but we also have to do more.  We have to fund and produce artifacts of the culture that communicate the message on a broad base scheme, because the other side does.  The George Soroses and the Ted Leonsises and the Al Gores do the documentaries that get wide distribution and critical acclaim?  Why?  Because they are well funded and they’re supported.  Jeffrey Skoll does Syriana, which says that we went to war for Haliburton.  Why?  Because he put his millions or maybe billions behind movies that get on your movie screen.  

Invest in the culture.  I’ll tell you what, answer this question: would you rather have someone, if you wanted to win America, someone get up and give a great political speech or have a movie in every theater across America?  If you can answer that question, then you know where you have to start putting some of your resources. 

For rest of speech, CLICK HERE