CAMDEN – Former CIA chief James Woolsey said Sunday the United States faces three totalitarian movements in the Middle East and that conflict between the West and Islamic militants will continue for years.

The three groups at war with the Americans are the clerics who control the theocracy of Iran, the Islamists who support al-Qaida, and the supporters of Saddam Hussein, the deposed leader of Iraq, he said Sunday at the 18th annual Camden Conference.

“I called it World War IV for a while,” he said, but now he refers to it as “the longest war of the 21st century. I think it will last for decades.”

“These are three totalitarian movements,” Woolsey said. “Totalitarian regimes around the world pretty much know they’re going to run into us” at some point.

Describing himself as the nearest thing to a neoconservative those attending the Camden Conference would hear, Woolsey said he supports the U.S. war with Iraq, while at the same time outlining what he believes are the mistakes of policy that led to it.

Woolsey, who served as director of central intelligence under the Clinton administration from 1993 to 1995, tied the Islamic animosity toward the United States to misunderstandings and mistakes.

“What we wanted from them is to be polite filling station attendants,” he said. “All we really wanted was the oil and we more or less ignored the rest.”

For their part, some Islamic militants deliberately spread misinformation about the United States, including what Woolsey called “a conscious effort to educate” those attending Muslim worship services that American women regularly sleep with their fathers and brothers. The militants also urge Muslims to hate all Jews and Christians and to see Jews “as pigs and monkeys,” Woolsey said.

Without oil, these groups would be small minorities in the middle of the desert, he said, but with funding, they are a formidable force.

These groups also believe the United States is cowardly, based on its response to key events in the last 25 years, he said.

When U.S. citizens were taken hostage in Iran in 1979, there was negotiation, not a military response. When the U.S. Marine barracks and embassy were attacked in Beirut in 1983, the United States eventually withdrew. When terrorism continued against American targets through the 1980s, the United States “generally … sent the lawyers,” Woolsey said.

The Gulf War sent a different message, but when the first President Bush encouraged rebellion against Hussein and stood by while Kurds and Shiites were massacred, the coward label stuck. The U.S. response to the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 continued this pattern, he said, convincing the Islamic militants that Americans, “if bloodied … will run.”

“It’s understandable how they underestimated us,” he said.

Rather than force democracy on the Middle East, Woolsey said, “We need to help countries in this part of the world and others draw on their own traditions.”

In 1945, there were 20 democracies in the world, and now there are 118, he said. Only three democracies were established by U.S. forces: Panama, Grenada and South Korea, he said.

Just as the Allies let French leader Charles de Gaulle liberate Paris in 1944, Woolsey said, the United States “should have stood aside and let free Iraqis liberate Baghdad.”

At the same time, he said the United States is correct in ignoring the complaints of totalitarian regimes who call Americans “busy-bodies” for interfering.

Woolsey said the U.S. response to those regimes should be, “We’ve been at this a while, and we don’t always get it right. We’re on the side of those you fear the most – you’re own people. You’re right to be worried.”