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Ten Principles
September 2001
Newt Gingrich
There are a lot of questions about what we should do to respond the terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, DC. The Bush Administration has steadily moved in the right direction in a very short period of time. They moved from talking about justice to talking about victory. They moved from talking about criminals to talking about enemies. They moved from talking about retribution to talking about defeating. These are very, very important changes and you can track them by the hour as they came to grips with the fact that Tuesday was not a political event. Tuesday was an historic event. The attack on September 11 was a 21st century Pearl Harbor committed by a 21st century enemy, and launched a 21st century war. The President was exactly correct when he said - We are not about punishing those who did this one thing. We are about defeating terrorism. He said in his Texas way, -- We will "whip" them. - "Whipping" isn't the same as punishing. "Whipping," in Texan--means defeat. Secretary of State Colin Powell at a State Department press conference also had it exactly right when he stated we will form a coalition willing to work with us, but we will act unilaterally whenever necessary. Our opponents are terrorism and the states that support them. Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon also got it exactly right when he explained that it is not just the terrorists, nor the structures, but the states that harbor and protect the terrorists. In August of 1990, we orchestrated 28 countries for eight months, put 500,000 American troops in the field and bombed Iraq for 42 days over the invasion of Kuwait. If that was the appropriate-scale campaign over the invasion of a distant country, then for the most powerful nation in the history of the world, the question is, what is the appropriate-scale campaign after thousands of American civilians have been killed in our own cities? It is important to understand this. This is not about a tiny thing. This is not about a few Tomahawk cruise missile strikes. This is not about three Special Forces teams performing magical missions. Defeating terrorism is an enormous task. In may be closer to the Second World War in terms of scale and complexity to any conflict since then. In that context, there are ten principles that will create the potential for victory. Principle One: We are at war.
We have been at war at least since 1990, when Saddam invaded Kuwait. Terrorists have been continually killing Americans since then. This time terrorists crossed the threshold of killing enough Americans in our own country that it cannot be avoided by our political system. As of September 11, terrorists have come into American territory to use American aircraft to kill thousands of innocent Americans. That was an act of war more despicable and more costly in American lives than Pearl Harbor. We are at war. We have to defeat terrorism or they will end safety, freedom, and civilization, as we know it. We have no alternative. We must win. Principle Two: In wars your enemies are allowed to be clever, courageous, and determined.
On the Washington Post website there was a headline that read, "Taliban warns of revenge. Afghanistan's ruling Taliban warned of revenge if the United States attacked their country in retaliation for this week's devastating terrorist assaults." Well, why shouldn't they? If the Taliban, given the choice of being on the side of civilization and the side of terrorism chooses terrorism, and we are so foolish as to only bomb their country, why shouldn't they seek revenge? When you go to war, you seek victory, so that they are no longer in power, so they do not have the power to take revenge, so they cannot threaten you. Time is always on the side of the evil. It is an important premise of history. Time is always on the side of evil because they can wait, they can plan, and they can look for vulnerabilities while the good go about their daily business. But in order to defeat terrorism, the good have to mobilize for decisive victory. Principle Three: In war, your vision of success is decisive for the rest of your achievement.
It is important for this administration to codify what the President has said. In World War II we picked a very specific goal--unconditional surrender. It was quite clear. We occupied Germany, Japan, and Italy. We created democracies. The world has been better ever since. That was a direct goal. In the Civil War, Lincoln chose a specific very, very hard goal--unconditional victory, and he paid with more lives to achieve that goal than in any other American war. In Korea, we tolerated the goal of stalemate because we thought the geopolitical consequences were too great. We have had troops in the Korean Peninsula since 1950. Korea has been a long campaign, this is the 51st year. In Vietnam, we decided that defeat was preferable to the risk of victory, not that we could not win, but the nation, the body politic, after a decade of agonizing internal struggle, decided that defeat was preferable to the cost of victory. In Desert Storm, we arranged a coalition for or a limited goal--kick Saddam out of Kuwait and weaken him. That was a very specific goal. It turned out, in my judgment, in retrospect, to have been wrong, and I think all of the architects of it would now agree. They thought he would fall as a consequence, an underestimation of the survival mechanisms of dictators. It is vital that we have the right vision. It is not going after bin Laden, who is trivial in this larger context. It is not going after the specific terrorist organization that launched the attack in New York. Yes, it would be useful to know who they are, yes, we should get them, but they are a symptom of the disease. If we eliminate them, we will simply create martyrs. They will be the bin Laden brigade. There will be a new generation of their children who decide to fight us. The only legitimate vision is the defeat and the destruction of the system of terrorism, and that requires that we declare terrorism to be a crime against humanity, just as we did with piracy, and that we refuse to accept the existence of any regime which harbors, supports, or protects terrorists. Anything short of that simply sows the seeds so that in a few years organized terrorism will come back. I was on the National Security Commission, the Hart-Rudman Commission, and we spent three years studying the world of 2025. Our number one unanimous conclusion by a bipartisan panel of 14 people was that the most significant threat to the United States is a weapon of mass destruction going off in our cities, biological, chemical, or nuclear. We know today, that Saddam Hussein is willing to accept any level of sanctions to keep his program for weapons of mass destruction, that Iran has a massive program underway, that North Korea, while its population is starving despite being the largest recipient of U.S. food aid in Asia, has a massive program of weapons of mass destruction. You read what these countries are saying and you wonder why no one understood Hitler in the 1930's, just as we don't understand our generation's Hitlers. So we have to take their words and their programs seriously. Principle Four: The stakes are enormous.
The Second World War we understood. Our way of life was threatened. A world in which the German Nazis, the Imperial Japanese, and the Italian fascists had won would have been a stunningly different world. Today we face a similar stark choice. There are principles at stake on two grounds. The first is the very fabric of a free worldwide economic political structure, the ability to travel, the ability to have a decent job. Also consider the necessity in the global economy to have just-in-time delivery where Taiwan or Thailand or China or Mexico is making something that arrives at the auto factory exactly on time for production. Terrorists are directly threatening the entire fabric of the world we have built for the last 60 years. Second, if we do not defeat terrorism while it is still using conventional weapons, we will inevitably in our lifetime be faced with terrorism using weapons of mass destruction. This is a tragic, but providential warning, of a much worse future. Principle Five: Issue a series of ultimatums.
Sudan will cease to house terrorists or we will replace the government of Sudan. The Taliban will cease to house terrorists or we will we replace the Taliban. This does not mean you have to be stupid. It does not require us, for example, to decide that we will put seven American infantry divisions in Afghanistan. It may mean we decide to allocate $3 billion to hire every Afghan who does not like the Taliban and arm them and then help then with American firepower. And in less than a year, my guess is American air power, combined with armed Afghans, would drive the Taliban from power. Similarly, in Iraq, we should not do something indirectly with volunteers as guerrillas. We are the most powerful nation in the world. If we want to eliminate the regime of Saddam Hussein, we have the capacity to eliminate it. We did not say, let's set up a free Japanese guerrilla movement in 1942. We did not say the OSS could liberate Europe. We said the OSS is a helpful addition while we land at Normandy and bomb German cities. This is a serious nation, and if this is a serious war, then the message is simple. Saddam will either close down all of his efforts toward weapon systems of mass destruction, and he will expel all of his terrorists or we will create a government in Iraq that will agree not to do this. We must insist on change, because we now have vivid proof in New York and Washington of the future if we do not. The next time it will not be an airplane. The next time it will be a chemical weapon or it will be a germ agent or it will be a nuclear weapon. We must take this seriously. No one should say they have not been warned by the facts of their own life during the week of September 11. Principle Six: To achieve victory we must plan for a coercive, not a consensual campaign.
In a consensual campaign you say, I really wish the Sudanese would be nice, but they won't do more than X. In a coercive campaign you say, anyone not doing X, anyone not doing the minimum we have set, we will have to replace. So we just need to know which team you are on, and there are only two teams on the planet for this war. There's the team that represents civilization, and there's the team that represents terrorism. Just tell us which team you are on because there are no neutrals. The Swiss Banks have to now break their secrecy law to find out everything we need to know about terrorism, period. If not, we should isolate the Swiss Banks, and they will not be part of the world banking system. Again and again, across the planet, when the United States is serious, it is amazing how many people decided that they are on the side of civilization. This is not asking permission, this is stating a fact. There are two scorecards, which scorecard do you want? We are going to replace the government who choose the terrorist scorecard, so if you would like to be on the replacement list, we need to know it because we have a planning process underway, and we already have two lined up, and you know if you want to be third, we need your information. The key word is replace, not punish. You do not punish governments that are dictatorships because they do not care if you kill their civilians. They do not care if you kill their infantry. If we have killed 100,000 Iraqis, and it has not replace Saddam's dictator ship it should teach us something. Saddam could not care if every Iraqi died, as long as he was the hero of the myth. We have to talk about replacement, not about punishment. Principle Seven: The campaign has to be comprehensive.
We should reach out economically, diplomatically, and militarily to all Muslims who oppose fanatical terrorists. We should offer the future of a better way of life for every Palestinian who would like to live in peace and prosperity. We should be clear to every Muslim country that we are not anti-Muslim. We are anti-fanatic, and we would like to have good relations with every non-fanatic. It is as important to be prepared to be economically supportive as to be militarily effective. One of the keys to winning the Cold War was the Marshall Plan, which was at least as important as creating NATO or the CIA or the Strategic Air Command. We should have a comprehensive understanding that in this war, we will be the proactive ally of creating prosperity, and safety and freedom for the entire Muslim world that wishes to live in civilization. We will only be coercive and focused on those fanatics who give us no choice, including governments that give us no choice. It cannot be only a military or an intelligence campaign. It has to be an economic, military, diplomatic, and political campaign. Principle Eight: The coalition must be the largest willing to support our plan.
It is a very important distinction. We cannot write a plan designed to have a big coalition. We have to write a plan to win and then recruit to the plan. Countries that are not willing to participate but also not harbor any terrorists are fine. This is a passive support we will tolerate. But, we should not tolerate opposition. For example, Uruguay may decide they're not in this fight. That's fine, as long as they do not harbor terrorists. No country can harbor terrorists and claim to be out of the fight. Principle Nine: We have to sustain freedom every day.
A worldwide economic system and a high-speed prosperous free society is inevitably vulnerable to a deeply committed state-supported terrorism. It is inevitable. Whatever we brilliantly figure out how to stop this time, they will study, and they will look for the one thing we have not figured out because they only have to hit once. They do not have to hit every day. We have to sustain freedom every day. It is unavoidable, if you intend to remain a prosperous, free society, then our campaign must be 90-percent offense and only 10-percent defense. Our job is to root out the terrorists, root out the organizations, and root out those governments which support them because only by pursuing evil abroad can we stop evil from entering the United States. We cannot ever passively build a system that will stop evil from entering the United States. We can only slow it down. Principle Ten: We must continuously communicate to the American people and most people around the world about what it means to be on our side. This war will be fought in the age of 24-hour news channels. The powerful wrenching images of Americans dying on September 11 will gradually fade as new images are projected on a daily and even hourly basis. Our opponents will maneuver to maximize civilian casualties in any American action. The timid and the undecided will seek every opportunity to explain why we should accept minimal results, be patient, and avoid aggressive action. Mistakes will happen. It is vital that the right explanations and the right language are available within the news cycle on a 24-hour basis. It is also vital that those words and explanations fit both the American people and audiences around the world. Information campaigns are the decisive campaigns of the 21st century. They have to be organized, resourced, and led just like any other aspect of warfare. This campaign to defeat terrorism will only last as long as the popular support sustains it and that support will require a substantial continuing information campaign both at home and abroad.
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