Newt Gingrich 1996 Keeper of the Flame remarks

Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives

On the Occasion of His Being Honored at the Center for Security Policy’s

"Keeper of the Flame" Award Dinner

18 September 1996

The ANA Hotel, Washington, D.C.

MR. GINGRICH: Thank you all very much. I told Chris [Cox] that the eloquence of that particular introduction was so overwhelming, it was proof he had worked for Ronald Reagan.

This is a very dangerous city because you find yourself listening to this, and then you get all excited, and then you realize it was describing you and you know you can’t quite live up to it. So it’s a native thing.

But I appreciate very much the friendship that we have and the job that Chris has done over the last few months, particularly when he led a very, very important effort on looking at terrorism just before we broke for August. And I think he did a very, very good job of trying to sort out what was really needed and what was purely politics. And I really think he does a tremendous job overall, and it’s no accident that he produced the bill which was the first override of a Clinton veto, because he brings a level of brilliance to it that is quite remarkable.

[Applause.]

MR. GINGRICH: I’m very honored and humbled to be at a table that would have somebody of the background and the sheer brilliance of a Richard Perle; somebody who has begun to reshape the entire national debate on how we survive, such as Frank Gaffney; and my very dear friend and the leader, first in the House and now in the Senate, in the whole effort to protect America’s cities from missiles, Senator Jon Kyl–all here at the same time.

[Applause.]

MR. GINGRICH: And because this is a very serious group, this is a group that gets together because we really do believe that America’s security is at risk and we really do believe that there are dangers and we believe–I think virtually every person in this room has studied history and in many cases lived history enough to know that lack of preparation, lack of foresight, lack of realism, lack of candor about our security needs, are precisely the ingredients to truly create a catastrophe; that it is those who avoid the realities of the world and those who avoid the lessons of history who are the most dangerous because they are precisely the people most likely to create the conditions for the next disaster because they have not got a clue what their policies lead to.

And so I recognize that almost everybody who is here tonight came here with a serious purpose, and a difficult purpose. It’s very hard in a free society in peacetime to understand and take to heart George Washington’s injunction that if you want peace, you must prepare for war. It’s very hard to recognize that when every–there’s every good excuse to not think about the future. It is the absolute nature of a free society to worry about going to the lake for the weekend, to worry about paying for the next vacation, to worry about where–what we might do with our children’s college education, and to put off for another few weeks or another few months or another few years disagreeable, unpleasant, and difficult things, and to give those around the world who might do us harm every possible benefit of the doubt.

That is the nature of a free society. It is why, as late as November 1941, the U.S. Congress voted against defending the island of Guam with fortifications, because we did not want to provoke the Japanese fleet, which was already at that time preparing for Pearl Harbor and practicing it.

It is the reason why before World War I the army was so small that, as late as 1916, General Pershing was actually renting cars in order to prepare along the Mexican border.

It is the reason why at the Spanish-American War our logistics were so inadequate that we literally did not know how to organize the fleet at Tampa Bay. In one of the great moments of entrepreneurial brilliance characteristic of this country, Theodore Roosevelt promptly seized his own ship, mounted the Rough Riders, seized two war correspondents, and sailed off to Cuba, cheerfully happy.

[Laughter.]

MR. GINGRICH: Something which does not fit our current, larger, and more sophisticated military model.

[Laughter/applause.]

MR. GINGRICH: There was a book written a few years ago which is really a terrific election of chapters, each dealing with–it’s called "First Battles," produced by the U.S. Army, looking at what happened in each first battle of the American Army in each of the wars we fought and recounting again and again and again the ease with which a free society forgets the hard lessons of preparedness and drifts off into a delusion.

Now, I thought what I would talk about tonight–because when you deal with this administration, it is so easy to drown in the tactical opportunities of commenting on each week’s confusion that it’s very hard to back up and look at the larger picture. And the scale of their systematic avoidance of reality and misstatement of fact is so enormous that you could simply spend your lifetime dealing with: What did they really do? What did they really mean? Why did they say different things than they did or meant? And yet it gets you nothing in the end.

And so I thought I would come in the opposite direction and back all the way out and suggest that what those of us who care the most about American security should focus on is Orwell’s "Politics and the English Language," maybe the most insightful single essay about politics in the 20th century, the essence of which is quite simple: Words matter; that it is desperately important in a free society to insist on clear language; and that, in fact, our opponents on the left consistently fail to be clear in their language because they cannot survive in an honest debate if they’re clear.

And so they deliberately, systematically, and willfully misuse the English language because they cannot possibly stand up and honestly and accurately defend their policies.

Now, let me suggest to you–and I’m picking up one of the words that Chris had gotten from Dwight Eisenhower, a pretty good source. That’s clarity. But I want to talk about three words: clarity, coherence, and consistency–three things I want to suggest to you are lacking in this administration at levels that are breathtaking, and if you are a serious student of American survival, at levels that are, frankly, frightening.

And I want to make the following observation: I believe intellectually in our capacity to understand the world. The democracies are in a greater danger than they have been at any time since Stanley Baldwin lied to the English people about the Luftwaffe and Hitler’s Germany. I believe that we are in a greater danger than we were under Jimmy Carter because at the time that Carter was willfully neglecting reality, there were surrounding him a strong alliance, a consistent military commitment, a generation of people dedicated to the defeat of the Soviet empire, and a political movement fully aware of the fact that if we were not armed and we were not strong that freedom would die.

And so there was a clear, compelling, and coherent alternative, and every day that Carter was in office, there were people making the case across this land. And some of them, of course, are here tonight, and several have been recognized: Jeane Kirkpatrick, Dick Allen, I saw Fred Ikle here. People who spent their life intellectually creating the framework and day by day, again and again and again, communicating that what Carter was doing was madness. And, of course, we were then saved from any argument by the combination of the Iranian hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a moment at which President Carter, you will remember, said with enormous clarity he had now changed his opinion of the Russians and realized for the first time that they were, in fact, not friendly neighbors committed to hanging out together and drinking soft drinks and eating popcorn.

This was a sign that maybe he had been missing during things such as the Hungarian revolution suppression and a variety of other moments of learning that had occurred during his lifetime. But it was nonetheless a wonderful moment and one which filled many of us with a sense of security that we were moving towards an awareness that the world was dangerous.

Now, while Carter in himself and in the McGovernites that he surrounded himself with–and I once got in trouble for using that term. Technically, for any press that are here, it’s McGovernite. It was translated by the New York Times into "McGovernik," because it was very late at night and the reporter couldn’t remain any coherence or clarity about what I had actually said.

[Laughter.]

MR. GINGRICH: But McGovernite’s a legitimate term. The McGovern movement was a foreign policy movement which believed sincerely that the greatest danger to the planet was the United States, the greatest threat to the world was the CIA, and that the American military on any given day were probably bad, and that if only we would allow all those nice other people to go do nice things, that they would all be good.

And I have always respected a great deal the courage of Morton Kondrake and Fred Barnes, both of whom said they had believed all that until they watched the North Vietnamese Army enter Saigon, and that they realized at that moment on that day that this was an occupying not a liberating army and that everything they had believed was a lie.

Now, they at least had the moral courage to confront reality. There are scattered through this administration a number of people who not only do not have that courage but they have to compound their lifetime of being wrong with new errors and new falsehoods. And it is an enormous danger to the world, because we can’t talk honestly, we can’t have a coherent, clear conversation.

Let me start with point number one. The world is dangerous. Now, this is an important debate. If the world is dangerous, we should have a CIA Director who believes in the CIA. Now, I know this a high standard–

[Laughter/applause.]

MR. GINGRICH: But the truth is, after this election, when we’re beyond immediate partisanship, there should be a thorough investigation of the current Central Intelligence Agency. The degree to which it has been politicized should be ripped apart, and we should insist on the establishment of a professional Central Intelligence Agency with a professional director dedicated to the defense of the United States rather than to the defense of left-wing politicians. And I think it is a desperately important thing.

[Applause.]

MR. GINGRICH: Now, let me just suggest to you that if we, in fact, focused intently, what is happening in northern Iraq is simple a Middle-Eastern equivalent of the Bay of Pigs. You can tell who lost. We are flying people out of the country so they won’t be killed.

Now, one of the ground rules of history is that the people being evacuated probably didn’t win.

[Laughter.]

MR. GINGRICH: And I want to stick here again–clarity, clarity, clarity. This is an enormous defeat for the United States. This is a defeat that will reverberate for a generation in the Middle East.

I don’t know any of the details. I’m just telling you what I have read in the paper, but which my staff has confirmed is within reasonable grounds something I can repeat without being too wrong. And that’s sort of–I think that’s what public politicians should do. I think you should consciously avoid learning all those little secrets that you can then, you know, tell various and sundry strange people, who then go and tell various and sundry strange people, and then it ends up in The Star or something, and you just feel so embarrassed at having tossed that stuff around.

[Laughter.]

MR. GINGRICH: I think that you should actually try to restrict what you learn that is secret while you’re a public politician.

[Laughter.]

MR. GINGRICH: It just saves you from later embarrassment.

So let me repeat the public source information about Iraq. As the story is told, the Central Intelligence Agency, under the leadership of a group of left-wingers who don’t believe in it, has spent something like $100 million, to no avail, has propped up several groups trying to undermine Saddam, has failed on a large scale, having first enticed people into working with the United States, and then, in effect, having allowed them, A, to be killed and, B, to be driven out of their homeland.

Now, everywhere in the world people will notice this, and America will be weaker, and our belief the next time somebody meets with us will be weaker, and people will be less likely to work with us. This is bad. It is bad for freedom, it is bad for America, and it is bad for the people who we first enticed to get involved and then failed to defend.

[Applause.]

MR. GINGRICH: Now, I believe there are three levels of dangers that we should deal with with three different strategies, and I think they are very discrete and quite different. The first is terrorism; the second is adventurous or outlaw states; and the third is great powers. And they’re quite different challenges.

Terrorism comes basically in three forms: random people who have unusual personalities. The Unabomber is a case. It’s likely, if we ever find out who had the bomb in Atlanta, that will turn out to be a case. Those are, frankly, police actions requiring the FBI, are virtually unstoppable, and in a free society you will occasionally have somebody who acts out their particular derangement in a violent way.

The second group are private groups engaged in terrorism. There are remarkably few of them. They are very hard to sustain. And the fact is you can almost always track them down if they engage in action over any length of time.

The third, which is often mistaken for the second, are organized, systematic extensions of terror–of state power engaging in guerilla warfare, but masking it as terrorism. When you have organized groups in the Bekaa Valley and they are sustained by Iran and they have a headquarters in Damascus, they are acts of war. They are not terrorism in any traditional, anarchic sense of the turn of the century. They are guerilla warfare being waged by a state for its diplomatic and military purposes. And we should deal with them accordingly.

[Applause.]

MR. GINGRICH: For the greatest power in the world to say to Libya "We don’t quite know how to get two people out of your country" has to be regarded in historic terms as an extraordinary abdication of our capabilities.

For a great power to say to the Sudan "We know you harbor terrorists, we know you threaten your neighbors, we know you have caused people to be killed, but we don’t know how to deal with a country as weak as the Sudanese Government" is a lack of purpose on a historic scale.

For a country to say "We will blind our eyes to Lebanon, we will wonder why the Israelis are so harsh when they retaliate to protect their own children and their own women and their own innocent civilians, we will tolerate Iranian money propping up various terrorist groups across the planet, we will know that in country after country, in Latin America, in the Philippines, across Europe, that the Iranians are engaged, but we will not, of course, engage Iran as though we were a great power and we were fed up with state-supported terrorism, and we will coddle the Syrians while they sustain and defend terrorism"–terrorism would not last a week in Lebanon if Syria did not protect it. Terrorism–

[Applause.]

MR. GINGRICH: And for this administration to have had the Secretary of State visit, I believe it was 27 times, the city of Damascus, to have tea with the dictator, to raise him to the level of being the equal of the United States, is the worst possible foreign policy. We should be doing the opposite. We should be saying to Assad, Prove you are worthy of treating with the greatest democracy on the planet by expelling the terrorists from Lebanon, and when you have proven you are worthy of being part of the civilized world, give us a call.

Let me be very clear–

[Applause.]

MR. GINGRICH: Let me be quite clear. Ronald Reagan was correct when he said of the Soviet Union it is an evil empire. And, in fact, after the collapse of the Soviet empire, there were Russian leaders who said it was a remarkably helpful speech, because they hadn’t quite been sure.

[Laughter.]

MR. GINGRICH: And they meant it quite seriously. If we in the West in our freedom didn’t have the nerve to condemn their tyranny, maybe it wasn’t such a bad deal.

Well, let me suggest the same thing about Syria’s behavior and Lebanon. A regime which is itself a dictatorship internally, which has ruthlessly killed its own people in large numbers, which actively sustains war against its neighbors by terrorism, and which then claims it has no control over those it controls is behaving in a destructive and despicable manner and should be treated as a nation more appropriately isolated than negotiated with, and we should have the nerve to set down a marker for the world that we are tired of terrorist states and we are tired of states which support terrorism. And that includes Syria, Iraq, and Iran, and we are quite large enough and powerful enough to organize efforts to make sure that we make our will felt.

[Applause.]

MR. GINGRICH: What I am suggesting in part is that we pull most terrorism out of terrorism. That’s not an FBI problem. It’s a military problem. It’s a diplomatic problem. It’s an intelligence agency problem. Let’s let pure, true terrorism by random individuals and tiny groups, that’s the FBI’s problem. But anytime there is systematic, organized support by a state, that is a military/diplomatic problem and should be dealt with by the intelligence agencies, the military, and the State Department at the highest levels. And it, frankly, then shades into the next problem, which is outlaw states and adventurous states.

Now, these are manageable problems, but they require those three words I talked about earlier: clarity, coherence, and consistency. You need to be able to define early: What is our goal with Iraq? What is our goal with Iran? What is our goal with Syria? What is our goal with North Korea? What is our goal with Libya? Just to take five random examples, none of which this administration could tell you because it’s so complicated to be clear. And then you have to remember the next day what you said, and that’s so hard.

[Laughter.]

MR. GINGRICH: And then somebody might actually make you stick to your word, and that’s so difficult.

But you can’t lead an alliance, you can’t educate a free people, you can’t design a strategy if you don’t have clarity, coherence, and consistency.

Now, at the level of Iran, Iraq, Libya, we frankly can design strategies that are relatively conventional. I think through diplomatic, economic, military, and other pressures we can over time have an enormous impact.

But I want to raise a third area that we don’t even talk about very seriously that I think is a real challenge. It’s not necessarily a problem, but it’s a challenge, and that is great powers. We are very foolish to look out over the next half century and assume that we can deal with China without an enormous amount of thought. And I think that we’re a little silly–

[Applause.]

MR. GINGRICH: –to look at Russia with anything less than seriousness. And I don’t by this mean paranoia and I don’t by this mean defining them as enemies. I would simply suggest to you that a nation of over a billion, two hundred million people, developing in a serious way, with a strong sense of ethnic and cultural identity, is a profound and an important force on this planet, and that we Americans have an obligation to take far more seriously, in the best sense of the word, the emergence of China as a partner on the planet, and that we have to be thinking very deeply and very seriously, far beyond the issues that currently tend to fascinate us, far beyond what will be seen by the long run of history as secondary issues, and ask ourselves: What’s our vision of our relationship with China 50 years from now? What’s our vision of how we interact with the Chinese people as they emerge as a world power?

It is inconceivable in the Information Age that a billion, two hundred million Chinese will be anything less than extraordinarily important. And yet we have no positive, long-term, active engagement designed to reach out and designed to transform our relationship. And I think our view towards China, frankly, should be very much what happened with Britain at the turn of the century when they decided they could not afford America as a competitor and they had to find a long-range relationship with us that was much more based on an alliance and a friendship rather than a competition and hostility. And it was an enormous change, and it took over 20 years to effect.

And yet I would suggest to you that when you start thinking about great powers in the Information Age, the speed of information, the nature of worldwide monetary systems, the level of violence at low cost that’s going to be available, that we have an obligation to really think creatively at the level of Russia, of Germany, of Japan, of China, of Brazil, and to really start–of Indonesia, for example, one of the great giants we pay far too little attention to, and to really begin to rethink what is the 21st century model. It’s not just NATO redesigned. It’s not just some kind of unilateral power projection. But it’s, in fact, a very different engagement of the American people.

Now, as we think about all that–and I want to draw a distinction here between diplomatic and military thinking. Diplomatic thinking should always look out for the best, for the greatest opportunities, for the opening up. Military thinking should be ruthlessly engaged in looking at capabilities, not intentions.

This is why I would draw the comparison to Stanley Baldwin. Just as the democracies in the early ’30s enormously underestimated the potential military capability of their competitors, the objective reality is that, for all practical purposes for most Americans, the relative safety and capabilities is no greater today than it was 15 years ago. The objective fact is, if anything, there are more missiles on the planet, and the odds of their proliferating are greater.

I would say that there is no single insult to intelligence and to the desire to protect America greater than the CIA report which was deliberately rigged by this administration to ensure that it would not tell us the truth. The fact is there are countries that are dangerous that will be able to purchase long-range missiles almost certainly within a decade, and at least one news report suggests that Iran may be able to buy Russian launch vehicles within the next two years.

Now, anyone who believes in a world in which the Germans are rushing to sell equipment of dubious nature to Iran no matter what, a world in which we are constantly policing our allies about chemical warfare weapons getting to Libya, anybody who believes that major countries with a lot of money are not going to be able to reach out and purchase space launch vehicles, which happen to have remarkably similar characteristics to ICBMs–as in identical. The only difference is, remember, if you are a terrorist state, all you want is an area weapon. As long as you hit somewhere near a major city, it’s good enough. It’s not the sophistication we’re used to. It’s not the complexity we’re used to. But I would suggest to you that the damage it does is extraordinary, and we are not psychologically nor intellectually prepared for that world.

That’s why I think that national missile defense should be as large a crusade for our generation as radar was for Winston Churchill, and we should be as adamant in getting it as they were in the 1930s because it may well be that decisive in our survival in the 21st century.

[Applause.]

MR. GINGRICH: There are several other things we should insist on. We should insist on the re-establishment of human intelligence and the capacity of the intelligence agency to, frankly, have spies. And let’s be blunt. Words matter. If you asked me would I like to have people inside terrorist organizations who favor the West and help us know when they’re going to do something, my answer’s yes. Would I like to have people in Beijing who care about our values and will let us know things? My answer’s yes. Do I think it would be good to know what the Iranian Government is doing or the Libyan Government? My answer’s yes. And I think we have to be prepared to win the intellectual argument in a free society that, as long as the world is dangerous, it is better for America to have knowledge, and that requires an intelligence agency that is respected, that is policed by the Congress but it is not destroyed by the Congress, and that systematically engages in trying to understand what is happening everywhere in the world. And the dismantling of our human intelligence capabilities in this administration is a disgrace, and it is weakening our capacity to survive, and it is exactly the wrong direction. We need more intelligence because the fact is when you start dealing with regional powers and terrorist groups, you need fewer things that satellites tell you with photographs and more things that people tell you with a phone call. And that is simply an objective reality that this particular administration totally is ignoring, and ultimately it’s going to cost American lives.

[Applause.]

MR. GINGRICH: I just want to mention three other words. This administration is stretching our military, frankly, on the verge of the breaking point. The military gets smaller. There are fewer personnel. They get sent more places.

Every time you send a soldier or a sailor or a Marine or someone from the Air Force to a country, you need two other people, one on the training base and one on the rotation base, just to be able to do that. So when you hear about 25,000 people going somewhere, you just tied up 75,000 people. If you continue to have troops in South Korea, if you continue to have troops in Okinawa, when you send troops to Bosnia, to Haiti, when you find new places and new activities, it is amazing how thin the structure is getting.

And yet if you were to look at the serious plans of this administration for what they would really do if they didn’t have a Republican Congress, you’d have an even smaller military with an even smaller budget sent even more places with even less adequate training and less adequate equipment. And I think at some point somebody needs to stand up and say there is a minimum size to being the world’s only superpower, and we have gotten smaller than that in terms of our regular units, and we have an obligation to insist on a military in which people can serve without being burned out by the sheer constancy of their being used.

It stuns me that at the very time we were engaged in military action in Iraq, we had troops is Bosnia, and the State Department was sending people to Haiti. The administration was asking us to cut our defense appropriation by $3 billion. It just to me was mindless.

[Applause.]

MR. GINGRICH: So I would make an argument that we need to get–we need to understand the importance of a sustainable military force of a size large enough to truly help us lead the planet.

Second, I think we have to talk honestly about modernization. We are living off of Ronald Reagan’s buildup. We are living off of Cap Weinberger’s contracts. The fact is this is an administration that cheerfully uses B-52s older than the people who are flying them, that fires off Tomahawk missiles it did not ask for. I cannot tell you how galling it is to be told by the administration they don’t need something they won’t use which they’ll then be proud of when they do use it.

[Applause.]

MR. GINGRICH: And it’s a continuing pattern.

I believe that the Chiefs of Staff will tell you in private that they believe we’re at least $120 billion short of the money we need for modernization to keep this force going, and that’s before the next round of cuts if the liberals keep control of the Office of Management and Budget.

The fact is we’re going to have too small a force with too obsolete a weapons system, and I think it is a serious problem in not very many years. And we’re going to risk the lives of young men and women because we send them places without adequate strength, with weapons that will, in fact, not have any great qualitative advantage over the people we send them against.

Desert Storm was the one-time decisive victory of the Reagan buildup before it was dismantled. It should not be seen in any way as an example of what we could do in the next ten years, and we are closer to Task Force Smith in the Korean War than we are to Desert Storm if we stumble into a big problem five years from now with a shrinking military, with obsolescing weapons, with a political leadership that doesn’t know how to design a serious campaign, which gets me–

[Applause.]

MR. GINGRICH: Which gets me to the last word I want to use for a minute, and this is the right kind of group to use it, but it makes you a little frustrated in a democracy, and it’s useful to remind yourself that democracies are great and wonderful things which stumble along for long periods not doing the wisest of all things, but then somehow have this romantic capacity to get enormous energy to mobilize themselves in a crisis, and that one of the keys is to just persistently keep saying it in the hopes that when the crisis shows up, enough people will have read your books or heard your speeches that they decide to do the right thing. But it’s the nature of democracies.

But at the level of those who really care about thinking about the issue, there’s another word that I think is probably the ultimate condemnation of this administration. It’s the word serious. Security policy is a serious business. Diplomacy is a serious business. National defense is a serious business.

Now, let me just give you two or three very quick examples, and let me start by saying I’m so proud of Chairman Ben Gilman because on one of the topics, Haiti, he has consistently maintained the willingness to dig in and dig in and dig in. And you had this extraordinary spectacle Saturday of the newspaper article which said, if I read it correctly, that because of the enormous success of this administration in pacifying Haiti and establishing human rights, we were rushing security personnel down to protect the President from his own presidential bodyguard, who turned out to have become a left-wing death squad, based on our most recent indications. And so as a sign of the stability we brought to the island, we now felt everyone was so safe that we would surround the President of the country with bodyguards.

Now, I thought that was probably not as stable as I had hoped would be happening–

[Laughter.]

MR. GINGRICH: But Ben is looking into it because it represents a very serious flaw. Apparently the people we were training had developed this odd habit of killing people that they didn’t agree with, which I thought was much closer to Papa Doc Duvalier and an older and more primitive Haiti, which I saw a presidential speech two years ago promising us we were eliminating by the sending of American forces to Haiti. But I may have missed something, and Ben will be holding hearings on this. Now–

[Applause.]

MR. GINGRICH: But let me cite what I think has been in the last two weeks the sort of thing which a novelist would have found a little hard to put into a novel as an example of non-seriousness in a serious way. And that’s what happened in the last couple weeks in Iraq.

Apparently, we got the sense that Saddam Hussein was going to go into some villages in order to disrupt what we were doing and in order to break apart the Kurdish opposition. We apparently told Saddam, You shouldn’t do this. He apparently thought we weren’t serious. So he did it.

We then told Saddam, We’ll show you. So we then fired off missiles, which cost about $1,200,000 apiece and take about 18 months to build.

Now, we fired them at the south, although we were mad about the north, but we didn’t have anything to hit in the north so we hit something in the south. Furthermore, the Turks, who were the neighbors we were protecting, didn’t want us to do anything in the north, and, in fact, it turned out neither the Kuwaitis nor the Saudis who we protect in the south wanted us to protect them in the south. So we fired the missiles from ships and aircraft so that we wouldn’t have any of the neighbors we were protecting mad at us for protecting them.

Then we did such decisive damage that the best estimate I can get is that per $1,200,000 missile that took 18 months to build, we probably did about $60,000 of damage, which took about three days to fix.

Now, this is normally not an exchange rate you invest in. If you look at systems analysis in World War II or operational analysis, as it was called back then, we tried to avoid this kind of exchange rate because it turns out you go broke before victory.

[Laughter.]

MR. GINGRICH: But, nonetheless, we were–

[Applause.]

MR. GINGRICH: Now, at that point, this administration, which had so thoroughly failed to consult the Congress, after I watched the briefing on CNN, I got the call telling me about the briefing I had just seen, which I thought was a little unusual and out of sequence, but kind of interesting.

We then found out that this administration, which had not done this for public relations and did not mean this in any way to involve publicity, had released the sending of 5,000 troops to Kuwait to the press before they mentioned it to the Kuwaitis, which caused the Kuwaitis to be more irritated than the Congress, so the Kuwaitis said, We don’t think we’ll take them. Which led the administration to say, Well, we really meant to ask you first, and we didn’t really know this was going on.

Any of you who happened to watch "Meet The Press" on Sunday, I followed Ambassador Albright, whose explanation of confusion was, I thought, elegant and professional. She took an impossible situation and turned it into one which was incoherent in a way which no one could follow so you could never render judgment because you didn’t have a clue what had happened. It was a marvelous moment.

[Laughter/applause.]

MR. GINGRICH: Now, I just want to suggest to all of you that while you waver between rage and the combination of wrong policy, incompetence, and mendacity in this administration, and a sense of humor at the burlesque nature in which they carry out foreign policy, there’s something deeper that should strike. And I want to close this, but I want to say this for the record as seriously as I can, because every American who is worried about safety in the world and every American who’s worried about the survival of freedom should think about it seriously.

I would comment to every American going back and reading the opening chapters of Winston Churchill’s "History of the Second World War." I would commend they go back and remember the years that the locus eight(?), the period when, as he put it, in the ’20s and the early ’30s the democracies could have protected freedom at virtually no cost, the years when the democracies had the time and the strength and the opportunity that, with the smallest amount of wisdom, they could have succeeded. Because we have had four years of a tragedy. We have had four years of lost time in Russia, four years of lost time in reaching out to China, four years of lost time in defeating state terrorism, four years of lost time in building a national missile defense, four years of lost time in rebuilding our intelligence capabilities, and four years of lost time in sustaining the extraordinary level of professionalism and commitment and dedication in our armed services. For four years–

[Applause.]

MR. GINGRICH: For four years, this administration has mismanaged, misled, and misconstrued our security and our foreign policy. So far it has not led to a calamity. But everyone who is sophisticated knows that on virtually every front we are fraying at the edges. We’re fraying at the edges with our allies, who wonder what we’ll do next and who they can believe. We are fraying at the edges domestically in holding us together with an administration which systematically fails to consult the Congress and systematically fails to inform us and, we were told today, will not tell us what they are spending in the Middle East because they know it will force them to sign the appropriations bill. And so they don’t even want to tell us what they’re spending until after we get beyond the election, because they know it undermines everything they’re trying to do in cutting defense.

And I just want to suggest to all of you that at the core of the survival of our children’s country, we need to re-establish a seriousness of purpose and an honesty of intellect and a willingness to have clarity, to have coherence, and to have consistency. Or we are going to once again face a crisis of enormous proportions, and we will pay in blood what we are giving up today in time and preparation.

Thank you very, very much.