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Deja vu — Judith Apter Klinghoffer

Judith Apter Klinghoffer

TIM RUSSERT NO MATCH FOR NEWT GINGRICH

I wish the man did not have the personal baggage he has for he is most impressive. He hit every Russert pitch smack out of the ball park. He should be giving lessons. Here are some examples though you may wish to read the entire transcript. It is that good.

First on data collection (my italics):

MR. RUSSERT: Let’s go right to it. This is the headline that greeted our country on Thursday in USA Today: “The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA Today. ... Your reaction to this development?
MR. GINGRICH: Well, first of all, the amazing thing is—everything that has been done is totally legal. You just look at the, at the specifics of what they’re doing, it is totally legal. . . . So, I think this administration, if they would come straight out on this, go right at the, the Senator Leahys of the world and say, "This is the choice. We’re going to have a nuclear weapon some day or a biological weapon that could kill millions of Americans. We have the technical ability to stop it. Now do you want us to be able to stop it or not?"

There is an excellent exchange on the Congressional elections and immigration. It includes the following vignette:

I think you then establish that you’re going to be very rigorous in enforcing the law, which means the jobs are going to dry up, so you don’t have to go out and chase away people, you don’t have to—you just have to say to people, “Within the next year, you’re not going to be able to get illegal work,” because it’s going to be too expensive, which also requires the government to fix its own system, because last year the government got $6 billion 400 million dollars in money for Social Security from accounts that don’t exist. And yet, nobody in the government called the company and said, "Gee, that check you just sent us was for a person who’s not here legally."

Actually, the IRS trains lawyers and accountants to reach out to illegal immigrants and encourage them to pay their taxes with the implied promise that it will prove useful when the time came to legalize their status.

Now, we come to Iraq - Russert began by quoting his own criticism of the post war period. But Newt would not let him use them to imply that the war was either unnecessary or counterproductive. Instead, Gingrich reminded Russert of the failure of the sanctions and proceeded to put the blame for the post war difficulties where they belonged on Jerry Bremer's proconsul act and on Bush's failure to put an early stop to it:

. . . it’s very clear from the United Nations information that sanctions were breaking down. The French and the Russians, basically, were, were being increasingly bribed to allow all sorts of loopholes. So if, if Saddam were still in power today, there’s no doubt in my mind the sanctions regime would be gone, and the Middle East would be in much worse shape than it is.
Second, the initial war was, was a brilliant campaign. Tommy Franks’ campaign, in 23 days, eliminated the government, the dictatorship, created the opportunity for us to do exactly what we’d done in Afghanistan, which is turn the country back over to an interim government. We did it in Afghanistan in three weeks. The ambassador, Khalilzad, who is today the ambassador in Baghdad, did a brilliant job in Afghanistan. For reasons which—this is why I said I was mystified—I cannot, to this day, tell you why Ambassador Bremer thought it was his job to create an American-centered system to give speeches on Iraqi television, to be clearly seen as the guy in charge.

Russert then asks him the question he asks every single person he interviews on foreign policy matters and got an earful:

MR. RUSSERT: ...but knowing no weapons of mass destruction, knowing the level of insurgency resisting—resistance, knowing the sectarian violence, knowing the cost, do you believe it was still worthwhile and do you believe it was a war of choice or necessity?
MR. GINGRICH: Look, I believe that the president was exactly right in the State of the Union in 2002 to say there is an “axis of evil.” I think he was exactly right to say North Korea, Iran and Iraq are very, very dangerous. I think historians are going to look back and say that they are more troubled by what we have not yet done to figure out North Korea and Iran, both of which have made progress towards getting nuclear weapons in the following four years, than they are going to be by Iraq.
Iraq has been painful, we have learned some very difficult lessons, we are better prepared today if we have to do something than we were four years ago. But if you were to say, again, because all of history is looking forward. I would—I read the—as you know I’m on the Defense Policy Board—and I went—I read the initial report, the 100-page report the president got. Knowing what the intelligence community—not in the U.S., in Russia, in France, in Italy, in Britain—knowing what they believed in 2003, it would have been irresponsible not to have eliminated Saddam’s regime in 2003.
MR. RUSSERT: War of choice or necessity?
MR. GINGRICH: It was, it was a war of choice in the sense that we believed that sooner or later he was going to hit us, and therefore I would argue that the only question was timing. But I believe it’s much harder to make the case that the United States would be safer today with Saddam Hussein in power. . . .

Newt went on to remind him of Iraqi payments to suicide bomber and direct relationship with Al Qaeda. Russert pulls out the Iran card. Newt turns his argument on its head and uses the opportunity to inform the American people of the realities of Ahmadinejad's Iran:

MR. RUSSERT: Has our involvement and presence in Iraq and the difficulties in that war, and the costs of that war, limited our options with Iran?
MR. GINGRICH: I think we’re only limited by our own psychology. I think we clearly have the capability if we need to, to replace the regime in Tehran. We clearly have the power and capacity in the region. I—it’s hard for me to understand why people think that an America too timid to take on Saddam would have had more support from the Arab world against Iran, that an America which has shown enormous endurance and enormous courage in doing what it has to do. And I think that Iran is, in fact, the centerpiece of our future, and Ahmadinejad, the current dictator, clearly intends to defeat the United States and to eliminate Israel from the face of the Earth. And people who are watching us ought to really think through what those words mean and ask yourself, "Do you prefer to wait until we lose Tel Aviv and Jerusalem or do you prefer to wait until an Iranian nuclear weapon is in New York harbor?"
MR. RUSSERT: So what do we do?
MR. GINGRICH: Ultimately, if you have no choice there may be a morning you have to replace the regime militarily. That’s the last step, it’s not the first step. But you can’t read what Ahmadinejad says—and this is not a CIA analyst problem. He says this stuff publicly on television. . . .
MR. RUSSERT: ...people would support another war? And do you—how would the world respond to the U.S. invading another Muslim country?
MR. GINGRICH: Well, first of all, I mean, you just jumped past two or three years of trying to replace the regime peacefully.
MR. RUSSERT: No, but these are options that people policy...
MR. GINGRICH: I believe if, if the world under—is forced to confront the degree to which Ahmadinejad—first of all . . . why is the United Nations still allowing Iran to vote? Here you have a regime that says publicly, "We want to eliminate a fellow member of the"—you know. And he talks about "eliminate from the face of the earth." He talks about catastrophic attack. He’s the—this—Ahmadinejad is very clear, and he’s a religious fanatic, and there’s every reason to believe he means this. This is not idle bluffing, that the morning they get nuclear weapons if he—if it’s—if he gets his say, he’s going to use them.
Now, if the American people come to believe that’s true—and all you got to do is, one, watch his speeches, and, two, watch the nine-minute cartoon they ran on television recruiting 10-year-olds to be suicide bombers—this is on Iranian public television—I think the American people faced with that would say, very sadly, "Get rid of that government. We hope you do it peacefully, we hope you do it diplomatically, but we will not accept you coming back and telling us you didn’t do it."

No, Russert did not show the audience the 9 minute tape or read from its transcript. He moved on to domestic questions. And Gingrich remained his formidable self. I like his suggestion for an updated version of the Lincoln Douglas debates though I am not holding my breath. I am grateful Newt cares enough to run around Iowa and New Hampshire. He knows his presidential prospects are nil and I agree with Russert that interminable chicken dinners and Holiday Inns are not Gingrich's idea of the good life. So why? Because he cares deeply about the country.

MR. RUSSERT: You doubt you’ll run for president?
MR. GINGRICH: I doubt it at this point.
MR. RUSSERT: Let me show you your travel. You’ve been in Iowa four times, New Hampshire three times, and then you told the Des Moines Register that—at the Lincoln Day dinner, that you’d be back in Iowa to see the state fair, that your wife had graduated from a college in Iowa that “we hope to personally visit all 99 counties.” Is that because you love Iowa?
MR. GINGRICH: Well, first of all, we are trying to create a movement for real change. I mean, I do believe the concept the real change requires real change, and whether you’re talking about education, you’re—so you can compete with China and India; you’re talking about using bioenergy so you can be safe, whether you’re talking about transforming health so that you could eliminate cancer as a cause of death, which I think is possible, these are all real changes, these are not just cosmetics. The two places, as you know as a professional, the two places you’d most like to change the language of politics are Iowa and New Hampshire.

God speed, Mr. Gingrich.

Posted on Sunday, May 14, 2006 at 6:53 PM | Comments (2) | Return

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