First, I don't think for a minute that this was just Newt popping off spontaneously. I think his speech was the kick-off of a carefully planned campaign for State Department reform by the conservative policy establishment. Consider:
Newt's talk was given at the American Enterprise Institute, the think-tank with the closest ties to the Administration. Newt is a Senior Fellow of AEI. This was not a casual invite to a speaker who just happened to talk about State. Newt was delivering a manifesto from the present-day nerve center of conservative policy research. And I would bet that AEI people in the White House and Pentagon are informally but influentially in the background.
Furthermore, Newt's talk follows 18 months of increasingly severe conservative criticism of State and exposure of Foggy Bottom malfeasance and madness by conservative journalists such as Joel Mowbray. The evidence that well-placed elements at State have persistently and deliberately undermined the President (and the security of the United States) is overwhelming. There is much more at stake here than jockeying amongst Republicans.
While I almost never disagree with Miss Marple, I do have to differ about the timing. This is exactly the essential time for conservatives to hit State hard with everything we've got. State really is gathering itself to ruin the US victory in Iraq. Entrenched bureaucrats who have built their careers on assumptions about the Middle East that have now been exposed as deadly failure are fighting back to preserve their comfortable, failed paradigms. They are actively trying to preserve the substance of the Baathist regime. They are pursuing a campaign of disinformation and personal destruction against Chalabi for little other reason than spite at a guy who wouldn't be bought. For interim head of state, they are pushing an 80 year old Sunni who has spent the last decades advising Gulf State emirs and is a favorite of the Saudis.
Some posters seem to have read a different speech than the one I read. In the speech I read, Gingrich does not say anything that faintly resembles what Daschle said. Daschle said that better diplomacy could have prevented war. Newt says that the State Department did not effectively make the case for the President's policies. These seem very different charges to me.
In the speech I read, Secretary Powell is not even mentioned by name, much less trashed. The critique is clearly aimed at the career bureacrats, at "the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs' propensity for appeasing dictators and propping up corrupt regimes." Gingrich criticizes the very idea of a Secretary of State visiting Damascus at this point in time, but that is an attack on a decision, not a person.
I believe that it is absolutely necessary that this be said publicly, openly, aggressively at precisely this moment. I don't see anything irresponsible in the way Gingrich undertook the task, and I suspect we will see the pressure for reform ratcheted up much more tightly by other influential conservatives as the weeks go by.
Baath = socialist Pan Arabism.
Now we are getting to the nub of the matter. Rhodes scholars. Can you say Clinton, Wesley Clark and all those Oxford trained socialists dedicating their lives to socialist public service? The career diplomats and bureaucrats of Foggy Bottom have not received the attention like the leftist judiciary. Neither department is subject to voter approval.
Newt knows these commies and has dedicated his life to ridding our government of 70 years of majorities in federal government. He made the big breakthrough in '92 in the congress but found himself with a Rhodes Scholar Oxford socialist for a president. Since that time the socialists have been fighting for their political lives pulling every dirty tactic out of their manual.
GW knows these people also. Newt is in the loop.
yitbos