Newt Gingrich doesn’t just want to lay waste to his political enemies and a large part of the news media. The former House speaker and presidential hopeful wants to bomb a significant part of the planet, too.
Gingrich is on the record favoring American military intervention from North Korea to Lebanon. He recently threatened cyberwar with China and Russia. And on Monday, he called for an all-out assault to topple the Castro regime in Cuba. With such a wide range of targets, no wonder Gingrich has consistently said that the U.S. is in the middle of “World War III.” His plans for overthrowing the Iranian government? Just the beginning. In fact, if President Gingrich encounters any little green men while building his moon base (!), they had better pray to their astral maker for mercy.
In a July 2006 interview, Gingrich lamented President Bush’s alleged reluctance to “connect the dots” between what a Seattle Times reporter summarized as “bomb attacks in India, North Korean nuclear threats, terrorist arrests and investigations in Florida, Canada and Britain, and violence in Israel and Lebanon.”
That same month, citing the same litany of conflicts, Gingrich said on Meet The Press, “I believe if you take all the countries I just listed, that you’ve been covering, put them on a map, look at all the different connectivity, you’d have to say to yourself this is, in fact, World War III.”
In a follow-up interview with Sean Hannity, Gingrich went further, suggesting that the U.S. needed a more aggressive military posture. “Being Americans, we prosecute wars to win them, not to have ‘reasonable response,’ not to have ‘appropriate levels of retaliation,’” he said. “Our theory is you start bombing our cities; we’re going to defeat you and make it impossible.”
When challenged by Alan Colmes, who asked if the U.S. had a responsibility to avoid a third world war, Gingrich replied that the war was forced upon a reluctant America. “My point is we’re in a war!” he said. “We need to understand this isn’t an option. This isn’t some diplomatic moment to wring our hands and hope that Hezbollah will become more mature. We have to defeat the terrorists and we have to replace the terror-supporting governments.”
His 2006 book Winning The Future married that argument to the contention that “elites” refused to acknowledge the danger. “Most of us believe that 9/11 was proof that we have enemies that hate us and who would kill millions of Americans if they had the chance,” Gingrich wrote. “Our liberal national security elites believe that we should defend America only within the framework of an ineffective United Nations and the approval of a skeptical Europe.”
To some degree, Gingrich considered the rhetoric of world war to be a marketing tool. “The minute you use the language” of an epic global conflict, public opinion on the wars would change, he argued to theSeattle Times, leading Americans to think, “‘OK, if we’re in the third world war, which side do you think should win?’”
As broad as Gingrich’s third world war may be, it’s not the only conflict he envisions. Is there a Communist regime still in existence, however nominal or vestigal its relation to communism? Gingrich wants to intervene there, too. And Russia and China, he’s argued, are also at war with the United States.
Take Cuba, a dictatorship that gave up any plausible threat to the U.S. when the Soviet Empire collapsed. At the Republican debate on Monday, Gingrich said the U.S. should use “appropriate covert operations” in order “aggressively to overthrow the regime.” This is even after Fidel Castro’s health has rendered him a null factor; and 50 years after a certain climactic covert operation with the same mission created one of the U.S.’s worst Cold War donnybrooks.
Last month, Gingrich said that Russia and China’s online economic espionage represents “the equivalent of acts of war.” That didn’t merit a bombing campaign, but Gingrich thinks the U.S. should consider responding in kind: “[L]ook, there are games we’re not going to tolerate being played. And we either need an armed truce or we’re going to engage as aggressively as you are.” (He’s also warned that “the Chinese James Bond” is “trying to hack into an American defense-industrial company.”)
Then there’s North Korea, whose missile threat Gingrich has warned about for decades. In 2009, ahead of a (failed) long-range missile launch, Gingrich demanded that President Obama should take “whatever preemptive actions are necessary” to blow the missile up. It wasn’t even the first time Gingrich issued that call. Three years earlier, in an op-ed, Gingrich argued that the military “should destroy” that very same missile, the Taepodong-2, “on its site before it is launched. Our ability to preempt the launch is nearly certain.” His preferred means to destroy it: lasers.
Then there are the threats closer to America’s shores. Gingrich hasn’t signed off on invading Mexico, ashis former GOP rival Rick Perry did. But he told Yahoo News in November that the U.S. should “execute” leaders of Mexican drug cartels convicted in U.S. courts. “We need to think through a strategy that makes it radically less likely that we’re going to have drugs in this country,” Gingrich said.
That’s a rather busy docket for the military under President Gingrich. None of it should be surprising. Gingrich, like Danger, is something of a mil-nerd. He writes counterfactual historical fiction about aConfederate victory in the Civil War.
But the strange thing about it is the fatalism that sometimes surrounds the candidate about America’s future. In 1995, he gave an interview to Wired that suggested that America is doomed to be nuked.
“Am I happy that a terrorist might someday be able to rent a truck and have a tactical nuclear weapon?” Gingrich mused to Esther Dyson. “It’s inevitable.” LINK
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