Word: gingrichs
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...quite "Who lost China?" - the mantra of Joe McCarthy's witch-hunt that began a purge of the State Department - but Newt Gingrich's attack on Foggy Bottom certainly matches McCarthy for hysteria. Indeed, if the (dare we say "disgraced"?) former Speaker of the House is to be believed, President Bush's foreign policy is being systematically sabotaged by a determined group of fanatics in the very department charged with carrying it out. The evidence? Quite simply that most of the world opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq; that no UN Security Council resolution could be garnered to authorize...
...hold no brief for the State Department, although I have often pondered sympathetically their unenviable task of selling a foreign policy that has so consistently alarmed and alienated so many of America's closest allies on so many issues. No such sympathy from Gingrich...
...according to Gingrich, the State Department has worked systematically to dilute President Bush's Iraq campaign ever since last year's UN address. They began by diluting the impact of Bush's speech by negotiating Resolution 1441, which sent arms inspectors back to Iraq. This is a rather bizarre reading of what was generally hailed as a triumph of administration diplomacy - the resolution passed unanimously, after all. Gingrich and his pals in the ultra-hawkish Defense Policy Board may have wanted to see a resolution back then demanding military action for Iraq's previous non-compliance, but that wouldn...
...Gingrich's indictment sometimes verges on the laughable. After the treachery of 1441, he says, "The State Department then accepted Hans Blix as chief inspector - even though he was clearly opposed to war and determined to buy time and find excuses for Saddam. The State Department then accepted Blix's refusal to hire back any of the experienced inspectors thus further drawing out the process...
...Gingrich blithely ignores these realities and lays into what he sees as a communications failure by Powell's people: "The State Department communications program failed during these five months to such a degree that 95 percent of the Turkish people opposed the American position. This fit in with a pattern of State Department communications failures as a result of which the South Korean people regarded the United States as more dangerous than North Korea and a vast majority of French and German citizens favored policies that opposed the United States...