Neo-con
favorite declares World War
III By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - Two years before the 2008
presidential election, Newt Gingrich, the former
Republican Speaker of the House of
Representatives, is trying desperately to grab the
national spotlight by declaring he'd be a lot
tougher than George W Bush in prosecuting what he
calls "World War III".
In the latest in a
series of recent presentations and writings,
Gingrich called this week in a speech at the
neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute
(AEI) for, among other things:
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
to "clear out
any
Taliban forces" in Waziristan if Pakistan fails to
do so.
Washington to "take whatever steps are
necessary" to force Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia
to stop the flow of weapons, money and people into
Iraq.
To help "organize every dissident group in
Iran" with the goal of replacing the regime,
failing which, "we certainly have to be prepared
to use military force".
"End" the North Korean regime if it ships
nuclear weapons or material anywhere.
Insist that Congress immediately pass
legislation "that recognizes that we are entering
World War III and serves notice that the US will
use all its resources to defeat our enemies - not
accommodate, understand or negotiate with them,
but defeat them".
Gingrich's remarks,
which significantly earned a rave review in the
neo-conservative Weekly Standard, came in the
context of early jockeying in the 2008
presidential race, whose leading - albeit
unannounced - candidates besides Gingrich include
Arizona Senator John McCain, former New York mayor
Rudy Giuliani, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist,
Virginia Senator George Allen, and Massachusetts
Governor Mitt Romney.
Of these, McCain,
the neo-conservative favorite until his defeat by
Bush in the 2000 Republican primaries, is the most
popular, along with Giuliani, among the electorate
as a whole. However, McCain's occasionally
maverick ways - such as his support for reductions
of greenhouse-gas emissions and his efforts to ban
torture and other abuse against terrorist suspects
- have created tensions with the right-wing core
of the party.
According to the latest
polls, Gingrich, who is widely credited with
masterminding the stunning 1994 Republican
landslide that gave the party control of both
houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years,
ranks third behind Giuliani and McCain and appears
to be making steady progress among the Republican
faithful, who have, according to pollster Frank
Luntz, forgotten the many controversies he
generated during his four-year tenure as Speaker.
After taking responsibility for Republican
losses in Congress in 1998, Gingrich resigned as
Speaker, but he has remained politically active as
a senior fellow at the AEI, an advisory board
member of the pro-Israel Foundation for the
Defense of Democracies, and a member of Pentagon
chief Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board
(DPB).
In all of these capacities, he,
along with fellow DPB members Richard Perle and
James Woolsey, has been an outspoken champion of
the hardline hawks within the Bush administration
led by Vice President Dick Cheney and a constant
critic of the State Department, which, from time
to time, he has accused of disloyalty to the Bush
agenda.
Indeed, in mid-April 2003, just
one week after invading US forces had consolidated
control of Baghdad, he gave a speech in which he
charged that the department was undermining
Washington's military victory by endorsing a
high-level dialogue with Syria and the "Quartet's"
roadmap for reviving peace talks between Israelis
and Palestinians.
His remarks, which were
also delivered at the AEI, were so extreme that
they provoked blunt-speaking deputy secretary of
state Richard Armitage to give USA Today one of
the most memorable quotes of the Iraq war: "It's
clear that Mr Gingrich is off his meds and out of
therapy."
Although both more Churchillian
and alarmist in tone, Gingrich's latest speech,
titled "Lessons from the First Five Years of War:
Where Do We Go from Here?", was very much in the
same vein in that it included attacks on the State
Department, the news media, and even Harvard
University, whose recent hosting of "tyrants" such
as former Iranian president Mohammed Khatami
should, he said, be openly compared to hosting
Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels or SS
commander Heinrich Himmler in 1937.
While
praising Bush for his "courage and determination"
in pursuing his "war on terror", Gingrich
implicitly criticized the president for failing to
communicate the potentially cataclysmic threats
posed by "an emerging anti-American coalition"
consisting of al-Qaeda, Iran, Syria, Hamas,
Hezbollah, the Taliban, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia
and doing more to counter them.
Bush's
"strategies are not wrong, but they are failing",
he said, in part because "they do not define the
scale of the emerging World War III, between the
West and the forces of Islam, and so they do not
outline how difficult the challenge is and how big
the effort will have to be".
"We have
vastly more to do than we have even begun to
imagine," he stressed, larding his text with
quotes by Iranian officials, "Islamic fascists",
and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez threatening
the United States and Israel, and warning against
"appeasement" and "utopian elites [at home who]
suffer from ... denial of near-psychotic
proportions".
Gingrich proposed a series
of steps to counter the threat, beginning at home
with gaining "absolute control of our borders" and
"decisive port security", adopting a "one war"
model in which everything in the country is "done
in a coordinated, integrated manner with the same
precision and drive in the civilian as in the
military agencies" and major increases in the
military and intelligence budgets, and developing
a "strategic energy policy which is explicitly
aimed at making the Persian Gulf and the
dictatorships less wealthy and less important".
In Afghanistan, NATO should "clear out
"any Taliban" in Pakistan if Islamabad cannot
police the border areas and provide a major
economic-aid program that would reduce the Afghan
economy's dependence on heroin production and that
would not be based on "hopelessly obsolete" State
Department and US Agency for International
Development (USAID) rules.
For Iraq,
Gingrich called for "revitaliz[ing]" the economy
by asking US corporations to buy "modest amounts
of light manufacturing from Iraq" and creating a
new US agency, other than USAID, capable of
administering expanded public-works programs;
improving security by doubling the size of the
Iraqi military and police forces to get a "much
larger forces-to-bad-guys ratio than we currently
have planned"; and putting Iran, Syria and Saudi
Arabia "on notice" against any interference in
Iraq.
In Iran, "a dictatorship dedicated
to Islamic fascism and ... a mortal threat to our
survival", Gingrich called for a regime-change
strategy through support for all dissidents,
diplomatic and economic sanctions, and military
force, if necessary. "This strategy means no more
visas for Iranian leaders" and United Nations
sanctions against President Mahmud Ahmadinejad for
"threatening to wipe Israel from the face of the
Earth".
"If we do not stand up against a
Holocaust-denying, genocide-proposing, publicly
self-defined enemy of the United States, why
should we expect anyone else to do so?" he asked.
Washington must also pursue regime change
in Pyongyang, according to Gingrich, who called
for militarily preempting any launch of a North
Korean missile and the announcement that "any
effort by North Korea to ship nuclear weapons or
material anywhere will be a casus belli and
will lead to the end of the regime".
It
was "vintage Gingrich: brassy, confrontational,
direct, polarizing, articulate, harsh, disarming,
and charismatic", wrote the Standard's Matthew
Continetti approvingly. "His rivals should take
note. The first speech of the 2008 presidential
campaign was delivered on the fifth anniversary of
September 11, 2001."
