Word: gingriched
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...eagerness to trash State, Gingrich appears to undo his own argument when he says it was Pentagon diplomacy, rather than State Department efforts, that won the U.S. basing rights in Kuwait, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. But it was the same Defense Department diplomacy, in the form of Paul Wolfowitz's intense direct lobbying, that failed to sway the Turks: Turkey is a "guided" democracy in which the military holds considerable sway. And the Turkish military, despite its closeness to Washington, declined at a crucial moment to advise parliament on how it should vote on Iraq - for reasons that have more...
...Gingrich warns, the State Department is at it again. Exhibit A: "The concept of the American Secretary of State going to Damascus to meet with a terrorist supporting, secret police wielding dictator is ludicrous. The United States military has created an opportunity to apply genuine economic, diplomatic and political pressure on Syria." Well, yes. But pressure to do exactly what? Gingrich may be horrified to learn that American Secretaries of State have been going to Damascus for years to meet the "secret police wielding, terrorist supporting" dictator, and his father before him. So do American intelligence officials, grateful for Syria...
...State Department "Arabists" have long been a favorite target of Washington neoconservatives, precisely because their support for the hawkish Likud line in Israeli politics makes them hostile to any effort in Washington to balance U.S. foreign policy between support for Israel and recognition of Arab interests. Gingrich and his pals in and around the Pentagon, like Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz want to turn Iraq over to Ahmad Chalabi, the exiled banker (or swindler, according to the Jordanian courts) whom they have cultivated in their own image as a leader that would toe the U.S. line and embrace...
...Saber rattling to press Syria to modify its behavior is not something any one at State would likely disagree with. But Gingrich seems bent upon pursuing regime-change in Syria - a proposition that might have considerable appeal in Washington, but would horrify even those allies that worked with the U.S. in Iraq, starting with Britain. A related State Department transgression, for Gingrich, is that its "invention of a quartet for Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations defies everything the United States has learned about France, Russia, and the United Nations. After the bitter lessons of the last five months, it is unimaginable...
...Gingrich is being disingenuous. Everybody knows that the Quartet is not a voting body; it's nothing more than a talk-shop and the decisions that count will be made in Washington. If the other three had any say whatsoever, the "road map" would have been published a year ago. And the Quartet was only invented as a fig leaf to cover the Bush administration from the urgent clamor among Arab and European allies for Washington to do something about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict...