Gingrich’s huge supposed war plan

In a big speech delivered to the American Enterprise Institute in September, Newt Gingrich starts off with a valid point: Iraq is a campaign, it’s not the war; we’re not doing well because we haven’t defined the war; and in order to define the war, we have to define the enemy. The enemy, Gingrich continues, is the Irreconcilable Wing of Islam, meaning the terrorists who want to destroy us. Therefore every national resource must be marshaled against this danger, in a total mobilization and re-organization of our society on the scale of World War II. But guess what word doesn’t appear once in this 10,000 word speech by a man who claims to be telling us the truth we must hear, the truth that no one has spoken before, the truth on which our safety and survival depend? Guess. I-m-m-i-g-r-a-t-i-o-n. Not once. Nor does he once mention the Muslims who already live here, steadily spreading their sharia-based customs in our society. He only mentions U.S. Muslims indirectly, in the context of his proposal to recruit American ethnics who can help us with outreach to their home countries.

According to Gingrich, the only problem is the Irreconcilable Wing of Islam. The rest of the Muslims are the good, nice Muslims who are being victimized by the Irreconcilables and whom we must bring into the modern world. The war he proposes is not a war to protect America from Islam; it is a war to help Islam, Big Time.

There are only two paragraphs in the speech concerning immigration. In one, he proposes, as an “an absolute national security requirement,” that we “secure our borders and know every person who was crossing our borders and coastline,” an effort that must include “a robust employer verification and identity verification program.”

In the other paragraph related to immigration matters (in which he doesn’t use the word immigration) he proposes expedited visas for people who want to come here. This appears in his imaginary history of America from 2001 to the present, in which he lays out the way America should have responded to the 9/11 attack:

Since maintaining popular support worldwide was essential to the successful prosecution of the war, a new visa system was designed with a dual purpose. It had to protect America and it had to be easy and accessible for people who were pro-American. American Express, Visa, Master Card, Microsoft, Google and IBM were invited in to work with the nation’s research universities, tourism agencies, airlines, and financial communities to create a Partnership for a Secure and Friendly America. The new visa system provided very high levels of security combined with ease of use and convenience for the people America wanted to have come here. [Italics added.]

Apparently Gingrich is still operating within the assumptions of the screening proposal that Robert Spencer used to advocate until he realized that there is no practicable way for us to distinguish between jihadist and non-jihadist Muslims who want to enter America. Therefore, Spencer concluded, we must stop all immigration from Muslim countries. By contrast with Spencer, Gingrich places great hopes on the moderate Muslims:

Since a major part of winning the war against the Irreconcilable Wing of Islam was going to involve modernizing and strengthening the forces of moderation in Islam a substantial effort was made to recruit the American Muslim community to help with direct outreach and with economic development across the Middle East. This people to people approach … created much deeper waves of information and activity than any government bureaucracy could have achieved. The vast reconcilable majority of Muslims [italics added] was strengthened, mobilized and assisted in its struggle with the militant minority irreconcilable wing.

Along these lines, Gingrich envisions a huge increase in the size of the State Department, not for traditional diplomacy functions, but to launch

a genuine Marshall Plan-scale effort to transform the poorest areas of the Islamic World and transform them into modern societies. [Italics added.] It was recognized that freedom was competing with Iranian and Saudi money and that the social services of Hezbollah and Hamas were among their most potent tools. It was also recognized that countries like Afghanistan could never be modernized without a substantial investment in the rule of law, in information technology, in economic productivity to wean people off of drug production, and in highways to open up the country.]

Thus Gingrich’s “war” plan uncritically adopts the fundamental contradiction of the Bush/neocon policy and multiplies it many-fold. The contradiction is to cry, in frenzied excitement, “We’re at war, we’re at war,” while what the “war” actually consists of is outreach to Muslims and the uplifting of Muslims into modernity and democracy—the political and economic reconstruction of the entire Muslim world, all to be done by us. That’s not war. That’s a global welfare state, or a global Marshal Plan. How many times must it be said that the Marshal Plan was only launched after we had utterly destroyed and defeated Nazi Germany and were in control of Europe?

The upshot is that Gingrich has learned nothing of importance from the last six years. For all his boasting of having new ideas that no one has ever thought of before, he is unregenerately immersed in the twin contradiction that have been at the core of the Bush/neocon policy, that you can democratize a Muslim country while still fighting an undefeated demonic enemy in that country, and that a “war” against Islamic extremism consists of making Muslims like us and winning them over to democracy. The only difference between Gingrich and Bush is that Gingrich wants to apply those contradictions in a much more thoroughgoing way and on a far vaster scale than ever before.

What is at work in Gingrich is the weird combination of realism and liberalism that constitutes modern conservatism. (Note: by realism I do not mean the “Realist” school of foreign policy, but simply seeing reality as it is, particularly as it relates to the distinct qualities of different peoples and civilizations.) On one hand, conservatives, unlike liberals, recognize that we have an adversary that threatens our existence, and they want to do something about it. On the other hand, the conservatives, just like liberals, refuse to recognize that the threatening adversary is Islam itself. So, instead of defending us from this adversary, they construct a “war” that consists of our extending immigration privileges and global social services to the vast majority of the adversary, while we only fight a tiny minority of the adversary, and while we also believe that that the vast majority is our ally against the tiny minority. Gingrich, as I’ve said, takes these fatal contradictions and falsehoods and expands them to gargantuan proportions.

Beyond that, his speech mostly involves his extremely ambitious plans for the changes in governmental organization and operation that he says are needed to carry out the “war.” The main focus of the speech is not on defining the enemy and laying out a strategy to defeat him, but on re-creating the U.S. government. This appears to be where Gingrich’s passion really lies.

* * *

Below are excerpts from the speech:

In the same speech, General Hayden summarizes the fight at hand with these words:

We who study and target the enemy see a danger more real than anything our citizens at home have confronted since our Civil War….

Our very survival as a free people is challenged by a large threat and defeating it on a worldwide basis is inherently going to involve a large effort.

We need a debate about a vision of victory for the larger war in which we are engaged and the strategies needed to achieve that vision.

We need a debate about the genuine risks to America of losing cities to nuclear attack or losing millions of Americans to engineered biological attacks.

We need a calm reasoned dialogue about the genuine possibility of a second Holocaust if the Iranians get nuclear weapons and use them against Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem.

Iraq has to be analyzed as only one campaign in this larger war. It is a very important campaign and it deserves thorough consideration but it should not be confused with the larger war.

In war there are winners and losers. If the American people will sustain this effort we will ultimately win. If the American politicians decide to legislate defeat, America will be defeated.

However, supporting General Petraeus in Iraq is not enough to win the larger war and it is to winning the larger war that this speech is dedicated.

[In his imaginary history of America from 9/12/01 to the present, in which he shows the way America should have reacted to the September 11th attack, he writes: ]:

Under this new Convention on Civilization, the Rule of Law and the Illegitimacy of Terrorism the advocating of terrorism and of suicide bombing was outlawed. This went far beyond acts of terrorism. This Convention emphasized the advocacy, preparation, supporting, planning, and actions would be treated with equal severity and were equally unacceptable. And that combatants who chose to live and work among civilian populations, essentially in disguise, should be dealt within in the same framework as spies during wartime.

Since maintaining popular support around the world was going to be a major challenge, a far greater effort was developed to have both a people to people campaign and a systematic official campaign involving a public-private partnership larger than anything seen since World War Two. Millions of Americans of foreign birth were recruited to help communicate with their native lands in their own language. The White House, recognizing the inability of the State Department to manage a program on this scale and with this intensity, established a new Office of Global Communications and recruited temporary staff from the ethnic communities and the media communities.

The Saudis were also put on notice that their position as oil supplier would not protect them if money continued to flow to terrorists and to advocates of terror from Saudi citizens.

The President established a system of metrics based on the Mayor Giuliani achievement system that dramatically reduced crime in New York. An Office of Metrics was established in the White House and many of Giuliani’s best practitioners of planning and implementation were brought in to help the federal government move to a new system of accountability, focus, and constant change. Using an evidence based model of leadership Giuliani had established, a policing system which reduced crime in New York City by 75% between 1994 and 2006. This model enables senior leaders to define what matters, monitor what is happening, and change the system until it meets the goals.

The National Security Budget for defense and intelligence was set at 5% of Gross Domestic Product. While this level of defense funding was arbitrary, it was lower than at any time during the Cold War and represented a smaller increase in overall defense spending than in any previous major war.

Expanding the Army and the Marine Corps substantially at a time when patriotic response to the attacks of 9/11 led to a large number of young Americans who wanted to serve their country;

· Developing a robust national security oriented system of Islamic and Middle Eastern regional studies comparable to the investment in understanding the Soviet system and in developing a generation of Soviet experts begun in the 1940s and 1950s and sustained throughout the Cold War. [LA adds: and their job will be to help cultivate all those moderate Muslims out there.]

We had become the dominant military power in other zones because we invested the manpower and the capital to create the systems, doctrines, technology and organizations that could defeat anyone. The Commander in Chief insisted that we now had to learn to do the same in urban terrorist warfare.

This visionary goal of making the world safe from terrorism by defeating terrorists wherever they appeared may have been the biggest breakthrough of the post 9/11 period and the one in which the American government drew best on the lessons of American history. We win by flooding the zone with resources and creative people. This would take time but it would work.

The State Department Budget was increased by 50% but off a much smaller base.

There were only 26,456 people on the State Department payroll in 2002. With a war time approach to budgeting, the State Department Budget grew by nearly $5 billion and personnel by 13,000.

This investment would have been counterproductive if it was simply turned over to the traditional State Department mindset. What made the investment worthwhile was a new commitment to a proactive State Department actively engaged abroad side by side with other National Security organizations and actively integrated at home into a unified system of command, implementation, and accountability. The new resources came with a determination to change the culture of the Department from one that seeks friendly relations with almost all nations at any cost, to one that is willing to confront others in order to promote American interests and win this war.

Part of the State Department’s new assignment was a genuine Marshall Plan-scale effort to transform the poorest areas of the Islamic World and transform them into modern societies. It was recognized that freedom was competing with Iranian and Saudi money and that the social services of Hezbollah and Hamas were among their most potent tools. It was also recognized that countries like Afghanistan could never be modernized without a substantial investment in the rule of law, in information technology, in economic productivity to wean people off of drug production, and in highways to open up the country.

A New Energy Strategy. Given the centrality of oil money to Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, and Russia in 2001 and the degree to which we had been financing our own enemies, the President called in November 2001 for a massive and market oriented incentive program to develop alternatives to foreign oil including nuclear power, biofuels, conservation through radical breakthroughs in engines and in weight (note the 787 Dreamliner that Boeing is building), new exploration for oil and natural gas, a crash program for clean coal, and a program to move to a hydrogen economy as rapidly as possible. In fact, as plans were made to construct several new nuclear power plants, it was realized that if the United States used nuclear power to produce electricity to the same extent as the French, then the United States would reduce carbon in the atmosphere by 2,200,000,000 metric tons a year, or 15% better than Kyoto Treaty limits.

Some will read this speech and ask whether the United States would have invaded Afghanistan and Iraq in this alternative history.

The answer is not immediately obvious but the principles are.

Afghanistan would have been dealt with in a regional context which would have included the Waziristan section of Pakistan. The Taliban would have been given no sanctuary. From day one, there would have been a dramatic effort to build highways and modernize Afghanistan and open it up so farmers could make money without relying on the illicit heroin trade for a living.

In the Middle East, the challenges of Iraq, Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia would have been dealt with as a regional conflict. There would have been no safe harbors for Iraqi dictators to send their money and their key staffs. There would have been no free passage through Damascus for foreign terrorists to come kill Americans. There would have been no tolerance for Iranian subsidies, training, and weapons to kill Americans. A grand strategy would have built up sufficient economic, political and military power to confront the four nations with a simple choice: change your behavior or have your regimes changed.

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N. writes:

Hirsi Ali makes the point in her Reason interview that the sheer material success of the West blinds us to its weaknesses, and leads us to the foolish position that we can do anything. No doubt many in Rome thought the same around 200 AD, and many in the Eastern Empire based in Constantinople held similar beliefs even after the loss of Anatolia. She also has made the point that Islam is a powerful force due to the way it enforces conformity upon not only those who follow it, but everyone around them.

Gingrich is not only a product of the success of the West, he is busy fighting the last enemy. His plan would work just fine if Islam were a recent invention that had been imposed upon a population, as Fascism, National Socialism and Communism were. But it is not those things, and Gingrich, not only ignorant of the nature of Islam, doesn’t know he is ignorant. He “doesn’t know, and doesn’t know that he doesn’t know.”

Fighting the last war is dangerous enough, but fighting the last enemy is worse. Gingrich is doing both, and he is not alone. This problem of ignorance and of lack of humility on the part of leaders and thinkers is arguably our greatest danger. So long as the problem is not properly described, it cannot be discussed, let alone attacked and solved.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 02, 2007 09:40 AM | Send