Newt Gingrich at the AEI:
The Return of the Undead

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) emerged on April 22 from nearly a half-decade of political hibernation, to deliver a psychotic diatribe against U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, the neo-conservative think-tank that one astute Washington insider has dubbed "the Temple of Doom." Gingrich virtually accused Powell of treason, for squandering the Iraq "victory" with his planned "appeasement" trip to Damascus, Syria, and charged that the Secretary of State was willfully undermining President George W. Bush's drive for a new global Pax Americana empire.

While scarcely visible since he was driven from the Speaker's post in the late 1990s, Gingrich has been busy as one of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's closest confidants on the so-called "revolution in military affairs," and serving on the Defense Policy Board, until recently chaired by super-chicken-hawk Richard Perle.

Well-informed sources in Washington told EIR that the Gingrich appearance at AEI was part of an orchestrated campaign by the neo-conservative crowd, including Vice President Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld, to force Colin Powell's ouster as Secretary of State, and his replacement by none other than—Newt Gingrich. These sources report that the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal intends to overhaul the State Department in the same Jacobin fashion that Rumsfeld, and Deputy Defense Secretary and Leo Strauss disciple Paul Wolfowitz, have already "transformed" the Pentagon into a chicken-hawk redoubt. The recent appointment of longtime Rumsfeld intimate Steven Cambone, as Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, giving him hands-on control over the super-secret "Gray Fox" elite counter-terror unit, is typical of the overhaul that the Defense Department has undergone—all over the ferocious protests of the uniformed military command. Rumsfeld, additionally, makes no secret of the fact that he is directly challenging Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet for control over the vast U.S. intelligence community, whose budget and personnel are largely military assets.

Gingrich should be best remembered for his Jan. 20, 1995 "I am Robespierre" speech at a Republican National Committee gathering in Washington. Celebrating the Republican "Conservative Revolution" sweep of both the House and Senate in the November 1994 mid-term elections, Gingrich openly declared himself a Jacobin: "We need to understand that the scale of revolution that we need is so great and it is so dramatically different.... This is a real revolution," he ranted. "In real revolutions, the defeated faction doesn't tend to convert. It tends to go down fighting.... I mean, if you look at the Bourbons, in France, they didn't rush in and say, 'Oh, please, can I join the revolution?' They remained Bourbons. In fact, most of them learned nothing and forgot nothing, and 50 years later were still locked into a world that was dead.... I am a genuine revolutionary; they [the Democrats] are the genuine reactionaries; we are going to change their world and they will do anything to stop us, they will use any tool, there is no grotesquerie, no distortion, no dishonesty, too great for them to come after us.... The future of the human race for at least a century rests on our shoulders. If we fail ... then Bosnia and Rwanda, Haiti and Somalia are the harbingers of a dark and bloody planet."

Within hours of the April 22 Gingrich AEI speech, the neo-con assault on one of the few sane figures of stature in the Bush Administration had already backfired. An unnamed White House spokesman told reporters that the attack on Powell was viewed as an attack on the President himself—since George W. Bush had personally asked Powell to undertake the diplomatic mission to Syria (the Perle gang, in stark contrast, has targetted Syria for military destruction since the publication of the now-infamous 1996 "Clean Break" memo that Perle crafted for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu).

Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage was more to the point, in a statement published on April 23 in USA Today. Asked about Secretary Powell's reaction to the Gingrich fit, Armitage said that "the Secretary was astonished that Mr. Gingrich attacked the President. It's clear, that Mr. Gingrich is off his meds and out of therapy."

Writing in the April 24 Wall Street Journal, Al Hunt pointed to Gingrich's membership on the Defense Policy Board, and noted that, if Rumsfeld does not fire him immediately, it will be tantamount to a Secretary of Defense endorsement of Newtzi's attack on Powell. And that, alone, as one former senior Republican Senate staffer told EIR, is cause for Rumsfeld to be fired!

Show Them You're Nuts

The most dramatic counter to the Rumsfeld-Gingrich flight-forward, however, came from Democratic Party Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon LaRouche, who held an April 24 Internet press conference with dozens of university newspaper editors and political activists. LaRouche has been personally leading a drive among leading U.S.A. political institutions, to conduct a counter-coup against the "war party" inside the Bush Administration, which has driven "Bush 43" policy since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York City and the Pentagon.

In response to a question about the Gingrich AEI speech, LaRouche declared: "This is the most stupid, but understandable mistake that the friends of Newt Gingrich ever made. This is like the re-birth of the undead. Gingrich is a very dangerous person. He's a fascist of the worst type. His famous speech in January of 1995, is typical: He made himself a Jacobin revolutionary—he's a real fascist; nasty fellow. He has a long history of being very closely associated, and swapping spit with, 'Bugsy' Rumsfeld, the current Secretary of Defense, and he's a stooge for that. He's being deployed, presently, to try to become (the idiot!) to become the Secretary of State to replace Colin Powell; that's what this crazy speech he made was all about. He's saying, 'I should be the new Robespierre, who chops the head off Colin Powell, and goes out and does what Donny Rumsfeld, Bugsy Rumsfeld, wants me to do for him.' They're very close—swapping spit.

"Now, this clown, and the people behind him—their greatest virtue is, they are stupid. I mean, we have two guys whom I played a key role in destroying, politically, in the United States, in their careers at the time. One was Oliver North. And, my friends and I, we really wrecked Oliver North's efforts to become a Senator from Virginia. And he's never come back, since, to any significance. Newt Gingrich, we worked to destroy. I considered him a number-one enemy of Bill Clinton, and did everything I could to try to destroy Newt Gingrich. And finally, with Newt Gingrich's own help—because he's also a fool and an idiot—was destroyed, and out of the key position at the time, that the impeachment proceedings were dumped against Clinton. And, they were dumped against Clinton, not because of Monica Lewinsky, but because they wanted a pretext to get him out of there, because they didn't like what he thought about economic reform, or monetary reform.

"So, at this point, the idiots, who are backing Newt Gingrich—including Newt Gingrich himself—are bringing up an issue which were better forgotten, if they had been wiser. The one thing these guys should never have done, if they wanted to slide something through—never again, drag that idiot, Newt Gingrich out, and display him in public! That is one thing, that is going to cause mass-to-mass, and coast-to-coast vomiting, across the United States, and around the world. And it's going to be very interesting, to see how the friends of Bugsy Rumsfeld dig their way out of this Gingrich flap that they've created."

Reality Stinks!

What has Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Gingrich, et al. in such a desperate flight forward to consolidate their putsch, can be summed up in one word: reality. Every aspect of their utopian scenario for the "cake-walk" takeover of Iraq has blown up in their faces, despite desperate efforts by the Conrad Black and Rupert Murdoch-led yellow media in America to cover up that fact. One establishment view was expressed by columnist David Ignatius in the April 25 Washington Post: Saddam Hussein is gone from power, but "we may have created a new Iran here—an Iraqi democracy that will be dominated by a Shi'ite majority among which pro-Iranian clerics seem, at this point, to be the best-organized political force. Or Iraq may become another Lebanon—a lawless nation ruled by car bombs and warlords.... American actions over the next few weeks will determine whether Iraq loves its liberators or becomes a seething pit of anti-American anger." (See article, p. 40, for EIR's analysis.)

Beyond the borders of Iraq, the Wolfowitz-Perle gang are desperate, along with their serial war criminal ally Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, to prevent the release of the "road map" plan for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, a prospect that drives the whole gang into murderous fits, and, in Sharon's case, to acts of brutal terrorism. As LaRouche observed, "The operative question is whether Ariel Sharon will not resort to terrorism, to stop the release of the road map. For Sharon not to unleash terrorism would be an anomaly."

And, inside the United States, the latest polls show that 64% of the American electorate consider the collapsing economy to be the number-one election issue. President Bush's tax-cut folly is coming under mounting attack from inside his own Republican Party. Moderate GOP Senators refuse to go along with further cuts at a moment that the economy is crashing, and the Federal deficit is skyrocketing to a record high, as the current account deficit races, as well, towards a new record.