Posted on 04/11/2006 2:09:37 PM PDT by new yorker 77
Gingrich on Hannity - "Troops Should Withdrawal Headline" is Misleading.
Gingrich on Hannity - The Headline is Just Plain Wrong.
Figures.. another BS media story.
Headline writers are the number one spin artists in all of journalism. A reporter can bust his butt to get things perfect in the script (I assure the skeptical that these still exist) and have the whole thing blown by a headline writer with an agenda.
This deserves to be its' own thread because it is such an egregious misrepresentation of the facts.
so what did he say?
</sarcasm>
Released 4/11/2006 at 2:05pm ET. Updated 2:40pm ET.
The Argus Union Leader article, Gingrich at USD: Pull out of Iraq (video) has caused confusion as to Newt's position on the Iraq War and how to win against the murders and terrorists trying to tear apart the country.
Update: (The title has now been changed to "Gingrich at USD: Scale back to small force in Iraq (video).")
In an effort clarify, Newt.org has posted the clip from the speech when he talks about Iraq. It can be found here on our media page as an audio stream. It can be downloaded as an mp3 here.
The full video of the speech (over 1 hour and 20 minutes) can be streamed from the University of South Dakota website: mms:\\video.usd.edu\newtgingrich. Copy and paste the link into your browser.
1. The decision by Paul Bremer to go from a liberation model to an occupation model in June 2003 was a major mistake (Gingrich first said this publicly in December 2003).
2. The United States needs to train the Iraqis as rapidly as possible and "pull back" from the cities to bases and air fields and serve as reinforcers as opposed to occupiers (this position is outlined in today's WSJ as the official policy).
3. The United States is likely to need to keep some forces in Iraq for a very long time (Gingrich has been saying this as far back in 2003).
##### Transcript QUESTIONER: Well, as the last person to talk at the microphone let me thank you for coming tonight and speaking to us. I found your history lesson, so to speak, very interesting, and when you talked about Edmund Burke. I had never heard of Edmund Burke until today, and you talked about how he supported the American Revolution because it was organic, and not the French Revolution because it was more mechanical, or felt more forced, is the way I looked at it. And I was wondering, if we look at that framework of conservatism, how is it okay for the United States to be in a war with Iraq which does appear to be for the export … or for the idea of exporting democracy, even though it does appear to be very mechanical and not very organic, or in other words, like, it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of Iraqi support at the time or even right now, if you look at it, for us to be there, so how can we support this exporting of democracy if it’s so mechanical? NEWT GINGRICH: That’s very … well, I mean, first of all, that’s very interesting. There’s no question that we are, by the standards of the Arab world, a radical way of doing business. As somebody earlier mentioned, if you look at Mubarak, if you look at Assad, if you look at all the various dictatorships, our effort to create democracy is clearly cutting across the pattern of the last hundred years, in which various dictators have dominated, and I think exploited, and I think frankly held back the Arab world. So in that sense, as an external force, we’re radical. On the other hand, when you go out and you look at the polling data in Iraq, well over eighty percent of the people of Iraq want freedom. The overwhelm … you know, look at the overwhelming number who voted twice now. Here are people, think of the millions of people who knew they were risking death. I talked to somebody in … who had been in Afghanistan, where … and frankly one of the mistakes we made in Iraq was a Burkean mistake. If you look at what we did in Afghanistan … I’ll give you two pieces of this now and I’ll wrap up. I appreciate you letting me be with you tonight. The first is, if you look in Iraq, the biggest mistake we made was in June of 2003 when we did something mechanical, which was try to impose an American proconsul, named Jerry Bremer, on an Iraqi population. It was totally outside the … you know … antithetical model. We had just proven in Afghanistan in 2002, we invented Karzai in three weeks. It actually occurred in a meeting in Bonn, Germany. Because we got all the key Afghans in a room and we said to them, somebody who’s an Afghan has to run this place and they ought to be a Pashtun because it’s far and away the biggest tribe, which is a very Burkean, organic model. Well, Karzai, who is a relatively weak, but I think slowly gaining strength, leader – we have had none of the nationalist rebellion in Afghanistan. The Russians have been amazed because none of the things that happened to the Russians have happened to Americans in Afghanistan, because people relaxed and said, oh they’re here as liberators, quit, you know, quit worrying about them. Okay, we had the same opportunity in May of 2003 in Iraq, and in fact Khalilzad who’s now the ambassador, who did it in Afghanistan, was poised to do it in Iraq, and we did precisely a mechanical thing. We imposed an American, who not only disbanded the Iraqi army, which meant we had to police the streets, which is a stunningly bad idea, but we also ended up with this American giving a speech once a week on television. I mean, can you imagine, and this is your point, can you imagine anything more outsider than having an American speak on television in English, reporting to the Iraqi people once a week to kind of remind them psychologically, we’re here as your conquerors? It’s utterly un-Burkean, so there I, there I would agree with you and I think it was a terribly painful lesson. But now look at where we are today. Somebody said to … who had been in Afghanistan, said to me, when they had the first election in Afghanistan that they were in a village where the women the night before went through all the rites for dying, because they were going to vote the next morning and they expected the Taliban to kill them. Now in a country where it’s hard to get people to turn out to vote, before you assume the people don’t like to be free because they happen to be Muslim, or they don’t like to be free because they happen to be Arab, look at the courage of people who walked literally miles—because remember we closed down all the vehicles—they walked to get to their polling places, they walked past signs that said we will kill you, they walked by soldiers who were trying to guard them from car bombs, and they walked by the millions. Now it is a mess. Why is it a mess? Cause it’s a mess, it’s a fact. It’s going to be a mess for a while. But it’s a mess of pretty darn brave people who have cast—over 80 percent of them have cast a ballot twice. And they have indicated that if we will have patience and we will have courage that they will have the courage to risk dying. Remember, most of the people who die everyday now are Iraqis. So this is not about the Iraqis cutting and running. This is about one group of brave Iraqis who want a democracy versus a much smaller group of vicious thugs who hope that they can kill and murder and terrorize to get back to a dictatorship. And that’s what’s at stake. And yes it’s a hard thing to do, but so was the civil war, so was Washington crossing the Delaware, so was winning the cold war. And we may lose this fight, but if we lose it there will be millions of Iraqis who lose it with us. And we have… I’ll just close with this thought because I find it so sobering. We have 12 thousand hours of tapes of Saddam’s people raping and torturing in their prisons. 12 thousand hours. These were evil, vicious people and the people who are killing innocent people in Iraqi tonight— in Iraq tonight-are evil, vicious people. And I want us to reduce American casualties, I want us to be as smart as possible, but there are no circumstances where I want to see those kind of people win. Not on our watch. Thank you very, very much.
Thank you for posting that.
Gingrich also made the above statement at this event, not found in the link above.
Bump.
I didn't see Hannity yet but there's a full transcript of his remarks on newt.org Check it out.
I agree with you. The unfortunate part is yesterday's original post on FR, where those who don't care what Newt says; took an opportunity to bash him with out the facts.
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