Speaking truth to power

The speech former House Speaker Newt Gingrich delivered yesterday at the American Enterprise Institute may be one of the most important foreign policy addresses by a former national leader since Winston Churchill warned in March 1946 that “an iron curtain has descended across the [European] Continent.” Today, Gingrich warns of “the collapse of the State Department as an effective instrument” of American power threatens to put at risk vital U.S. interests in a world similarly up for grabs.

Specifically, Mr. Gingrich described the hash-up the Department of State made of its pre-Iraq war assignment — a period he characterized as “six months of diplomatic failure.” He proceeded scathingly to describe State’s undercutting President Bush at the United Nations; its inability to promote America’s position internationally or even to counter France’s campaign aimed at fomenting opposition to it; and the Department’s failure to secure military transit rights through Turkey.

More importantly, Speaker Gingrich fears that — left to their own devices — Powell’s diplomats will prove no more willing, or able, to consolidate the victory wrought by the Defense Department’s “month of military success.” He warns that “the State Department is [now] back at work pursuing policies that will clearly throw away all the fruits of hard won victory,”

Powell’s defenders respond to such charges by contending that the Secretary of State is faithfully executing the President’s directions and that Gingrich’s critique is really an attack on Mr. Bush. A helpful corrective to this transparent scam appears in Ramesh Ponnuru article in this week’s National Review, entitled “The Teflon Secretary.”

Which brings us to Mr. Gingrich’s bottom line: the need for systematic and comprehensive reform at the Department of State — the sort of “transformation” Mr. Bush has correctly assigned Donald Rumsfeld to carry out at the Pentagon.

In a column today, Center President Frank Gaffney argues that the Speaker’s call for rigorous congressional hearings — ideally of the sort Senator Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson convened several decades ago that helped overhaul U.S. national security-making machinery — should be embraced by President Bush and by all those who want him to succeed in the conduct of foreign and defense policy.