Newt Gingrich's reputation as a geo-strategist has taken some hits lately, including from this blog. So it's only fair to report that a 2003 strategy paper the current GOP frontrunner penned back when he was a Pentagon adviser is a remarkably prescient assessment of how badly the U.S. is at winning the peace.
"We are very good at creating a first campaign to defeat the bad guys or the bad regime," Gingrich wrote in June 2003, a few months after what at that point still looked like a cakewalk in Iraq. "We are stunningly less effective at creating a campaign to build systems of safety, health, prosperity and freedom."
This was not a lesson that Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon wanted to hear. It had just won a fight inside the Bush administration to control the civilian occupational government in Baghdad, the Coalition Provisional Authority, against the wishes of the State Department. The administration would later discover that whipping together a diplomatic and development structure out of whole cloth -- and staffing it with political hacks -- wasn't such a great move. Gingrich, at the time a member of the Defense Policy Board, which had Rumsfeld's ear, practically saw it coming.
"Compare the quality of people and level of resources spent thinking through and creating the units and people which won in Iraq in three weeks with the stunningly smaller effort to think through how we rebuild a country," Gingrich warned in a June 27, 2003 memo, "and the disparity becomes unchallengeable."
The memo was obtained by Foreign Policy magazine's Josh Rogin. Gingrich's campaign provided it to Rogin when asked for a "detailed idea of how President Gingrich would organize his national security and foreign policy priorities." The campaign did not respond to an inquiry from Danger Room about the memo.
Gingrich's 2003 memo is short on specifics for reorganizing the government to build structures dedicated to promoting "safety, health, prosperity and freedom." But it became a cause that both the Bush and Obama administrations would both embrace. Bush created a Civilian Response Corps of diplomats and aid workers that could deploy to conflict zones like the military; Obama surged civilians into Afghanistan to complement his military surge.
Both efforts underperformed. But the point is that it's now conventional wisdom that the U.S. needs the sort of structures that Gingrich foresaw in 2003 -- before the unhappy experience of nation building in Iraq fell almost entirely on the military's shoulders.
Not everything in Gingrich's memo stands the test of time. He proposes larding the government with Pentagon "detailees" in order to exercise greater control over "the policy making apparatus," which seems somewhat paranoid. And he wants to "divide the country" in order to marginalize Democrats in a domestic debate on the war, which is a big no-no for the Pentagon.
Other ideas Gingrich appears to have abandoned. His 2003 memo urged the Pentagon to "overtly ally with those Palestinians who will accept Israel if they have safety, health, prosperity and freedom." On the campaign trail these days, he prefers to call all Palestinians an "invented people." That's an especially remarkable shift because the 2003 Gingrich considered nurturing pro-peace Palestinians as a crucial pivot for American power in the Mideast.
Still, Gingrich appears downright prophetic in diagnosing a task that's undermined U.S. efforts in two wars. And even as both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars recede, Gingrich's warning is as true in 2011 as it was in 2003. "We can continue muddling through at increased cost and risk to
ourselves," he wrote, "or we can take winning the peace as seriously as we take winning the war."
Photo: Flickr/Gage Skidmore
