Newt is an interesting guy.
An ordinary man who engineered, through his 'Contract With America,' a stunning takeover of bi-partisan government and then pissed it all away.
If you round up the usual suspects, personal hubris is right there at the top of the pile.
A great thing about America is that it lays low those whose high and mighty is higher and mightier than it ought to be.
Newt was leveled big-time, having lost it all and since clawed his way back into the public eye.
He's back and, according to him, none too soon.
Gingrich has a plan for our Middle East foreign policy that pretty much picks up George Bush's dropped sword and carries it into new battles.
Which is easier today than it was in the past, when leaders such as the various kings and emperors of Europe led their troops into battle personally.
Right up there where the bullets and arrows flew, Newt.
Napoleon didn't send his troops off into Russia and then wait for dispatches from the front.
He rode with them and froze his ass off and came home defeated.
But he knew what went wrong, because he was there.
Why is it all these people who want to put smart-bombs in the air and troops on the ground don't have the slightest idea of what war is about? Spirited into Iraq or Afghanistan, they smile for the cameras and sneak out like thieves in the night.
Winners can't be told from losers on the field of battle--they are all lost, put there for the most part by men who never went to war.
Bush, Cheney and now Newt.
Possibly they are striving to make up for their diddling with the rules in younger years and their almost messianic avoidance of military service.
But it's a hell of a painful way to prove your manhood, sending off others' sons and daughters to kill others' sons and daughters.
In an Op-Ed piece, Newt has taken out after Clinton U.
N.
Ambassador, Richard Holbrooke, who feels that Iran's nuclear ambition is being overblown in the more urgent issue of all else that is going awry in the Middle East.
Gingrich is like many, who would seek to cover the stupidity and arrogance of Bush's past four years in this theater, with further escalation.
He says, importantly (and wrongly) In fact an Iran armed with nuclear weapons is a mortal threat to American, Israeli and European cities.
If a nonnuclear Iran is prepared to finance, arm and train Hezbollah, sustain a war against Israel from southern Lebanon and, in Holbrooke's own words, "support actions against U.
S.
forces in Iraq," then what would a nuclear Iran be likely to do? Remember, Iranian officials were present at North Korea's missile launches on our Fourth of July, and it is noteworthy that Venezuela's anti-American dictator, Hugo Chávez, has visited Iran five times.
Sit down, Newt, before you have a fainting spell.
A nuclear Iran is ultimately inescapable, a fact that everyone who just can't wait to go to war with Iran fails to mention.
The nuclear issue is over.
It's a miracle we were able to hold off proliferation for as long as we did.
Lean back and fan yourself before you swoon.
Pakistan has the bomb, for God's sake--a country that is socially and economically in the 9th century.
Why does it not smoke your shorts that Pakistan, which could be taken over at any minute by militants and is geographically at ground zero, has weapons that Iran merely seeks? India and Pakistan are as sworn enemies as Israel and Iran, yet no one is forecasting imminent nuclear holocaust.
To answer your question, a nuclear Iran would not be all that different from the one we now confront.
You think they're going to bomb Israel? Do you actually think any country in the world will be allowed to use nuclear weapons without annihilation by the United States? Newt--take a walk around the block.
Iranian officials present as North Korea Tapedonged into the sea? On our 4th of July? Omigosh, the sky is falling.
Chavez has been in Iran five times? Our shores are no longer safe.
It is because the Bush administration has failed to win this argument over the direct threat of Iranian and North Korean nuclear and biological weapons that Americans are divided and uncertain about our national security interests.
Dead wrong, Newt.
Americans are divided and uncertain because Bush and Condi, Cheney and Rumsfeld have taken us where you would have us go and had their (and our) asses kicked as brutally as anything since Vietnam.
Americans are divided and uncertain because no one knows how to disengage and the hornet's the Bush-bunch slashed and bashed continues to sting us all.
Americans are divided and uncertain because they have been lied to and stolen from and trashed time after time after time by politicians who don't have the slightest idea of what they're doing.
Americans are divided and uncertain because this administration, so arrogantly begun, has the absolute reverse of the Midas touch--everything it touches turns to disaster, failure, incompetence, barbarism, tragedy, catastrophe and financial ruin.
It has not even a dim vision of how to wander its way out of the morass.
Yet Holbrooke indicates that he would take the wrong path on American national security.
He asserts that "containing the violence must be Washington's first priority.
" But a nonviolent solution that allows the terrorists to become better trained, better organized, more numerous and better armed is a defeat.
A nonviolent solution that leads to North Korean and Iranian nuclear weapons threatening us across the planet is a defeat.
So, Newt, is the debate over lessening the threat to America or 'a defeat?' With all the chaos and bloodshed, are you actually worried about saving face? You compare Iran, with the Shah's worn out American-supplied air force, to Hitler, who held in his grip the most modern military machine the world had yet seen.
You think Iran or North Korea are capable of blitzkrieg? You see Iran and North Korea threatening us with nuclear weapons 'across the planet,' when the Brit scare was that of common household liquid chemicals, mixed on board to make a crude bomb.
Newt, you are an idiot.
Worse than that, you are a demagogue at a very dangerous time.