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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (95993)	4/24/2003 1:37:35 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

OT: You will like this one. Will Rumsfeld kick Newt off the Defense Policy Board; if not, suspicions are in place that Rumsfeld played a role in his talk. If so, how will the White House read that? POLITICS & PEOPLE By AL HUNT A Loose Cannon online.wsj.com Newt Gingrich, a historian by training, has always been a revisionist. Family values were a staple of his successful Republican revolution, even though he gave his first wife her walking papers the day after she got out of cancer surgery. He launched the impeachment of Bill Clinton for lying about sex, while the remarried speaker was carrying on an affair with a staffer. He made his initial splash with devastating attacks on the ethics of top Democrats and then became himself an ethical leper. This is important context when considering the savage attack that Mr. Gingrich -- a confidante of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld -- mounted against Colin Powell and the State Department this week. The former speaker assailed "six months of diplomatic failures" by Secretary Powell, blasted his planned trip to Syria as "ludicrous," and said America cannot lead the world with "a broken instrument of diplomacy," namely the State Department under President Bush. It was vintage Gingrich; bold, provocative, dishonest and politically dumb. Politically dumb because George W. Bush is riding high as a respected commander-in-chief with a top-rank national security and foreign-policy team. Fellow Republican Gingrich says that's a canard. A favorite Beltway speculation today is whether Rummy put his pal up to this broadside. If so, he's even more arrogant than critics suspect. One certainty, people familiar with both men say: The defense secretary knew about the Gingrich blast in advance. The details on who else knew and how this was staged is a promising project for some enterprising reporter. Back in the early '90s, when Don Rumsfeld was in political exile -- incensed that lessers like President George Herbert Walker Bush were where he should be -- Rep. Gingrich reached out, bringing him in as a consultant. Several years later he tapped Mr. Rumsfeld to lead an outside commission on ballistic missiles which provided the framework for candidate George W. Bush's national security agenda in the 2000 campaign. Newt left office in 1999 in disgrace. When the Bush administration came to power, he was untouchable. But his pal Rummy repaid the favor, putting Mr. Gingrich on the Defense Policy Board and chatting with him periodically -- even, some associates say, heeding his advice. Military strategy has long been an avocation of the ex-speaker; he's a voracious reader of military histories and lectures at the War College. He fancies himself an expert and even pretends he played an important role in the first Bush administration's national-security decisions -- a role that eluded most of the participants. The egocentric Georgia Republican has never claimed expertise in diplomatic and foreign-policy matters: that's precisely what he paraded as in this week's attacks. As is his custom, he distorted facts and history. For example, he accused the State Department of bungling reconstruction in Afghanistan. Yet it was his patron, Mr. Rumsfeld, who, after toppling the Taliban, adamantly opposed increasing the size of the International Security Assistance Force and expanding it beyond Kabul. The predictable result: President Hamid Karzai rules Kabul and warlords control the rest of the country. (Mr. Gingrich also was horrified that during reconstruction "not one mile of road had been paved in Afghanistan." The State Department pointed out you can't put down asphalt during the Afghan winter and road building is now proceeding on schedule.) One of Mr. Powell's great diplomatic blunders, according to the Gingrich Doctrine, was failure to win Turkey's approval as a staging base for the Iraqi invasion. He ignores again that it was the Deputy Defense Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, who conducted much of the negotiations with the Turks and it was the Pentagon that kept insisting at the end a deal was still possible. This was a regrettable action by an inexperienced Turkish government, but it was the vote of democratically-elected parliament, reflecting public sentiment. Democracy, Mr. Gingrich, can be untidy; watch what unfolds in Iraq. The most significant Powell achievement that Mr. Gingrich brushes aside is United Nations Resolution 1441 last fall, a brilliant piece of statecraft that paved the way for the Iraqi invasion. Without it, Tony Blair and the Brits would have been on the sidelines. (For the record, since Powell critics constantly complain about his spoon-fed sycophantic press, I barely even know the secretary of state and have not spoken to him about any of this.) Newt Gingrich is really only an incidental irrelevancy in the battle between Secretaries Rumsfeld and Powell, perhaps the most intense and high-stakes intra-administration power struggle since World War II. Like many political feuds, it can be petty -- asked on Meet the Press recently about the "Powell Doctrine" of employing overwhelming military force, the defense chief gratuitously replied it was the Weinberger Doctrine, not the Powell Doctrine. But, more than any other recent rivalry, the policy differences -- does America hegemony require delicate diplomacy to build alliances and burden-sharing or are we so powerful that our leadership should not be debased by compromising with others on post-war Iraq, the Middle East, North Korea and elsewhere -- are profound. Rumsfeld disciples have contempt for Colin Powell. One of Mr. Gingrich's colleagues on the advisory board, Richard Perle, only days after Sept. 11 openly proclaimed that the secretary of state should be sacked. Mr. Perle was recently embroiled in controversy himself over allegations his chairmanship of the defense advisory board furthered his business interests. He resigned as chairman but stayed on the board and was praised by the defense secretary. If Newt Gingrich stays on this board, it will tell us a lot about Don Rumsfeld.