Regarding Newt Gingrich — Who Appears Unable Even to Define the Word “War” in Meaningful Geopolitical Terms — My Comment regarding the Former Speaker’s Editorial on Politico Yesterday

© 2012 Peter Free

 

14 September 2012

 

 

Citation — to Newt Gringrich’s foolish editorial

 

Newt Gingrich, An act of war, not 'senseless violence', Politico (13 September 2012)

 

 

Regarding my “heated” tone

 

My harsh words are due to the fact that I am sick of the unthinking cowards, who perennially send other people’s sons and daughters to wars that cannot be won in the ways that we implement them.

 

Nothing infuriates me so much as America’s failure to learn from this death toll.

 

Enter former Speaker Newt Gingrich and his succinct embodiment of the Republican Party’s apparently still-reigning geopolitical stupidity.

 

 

Here is what former Speaker Gingrich wrote yesterday — in criticizing President Obama

 

Mr. Gingrich wrote — regarding President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton, and the deaths of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three colleagues in Libya:

 

The president asserted we have to oppose “the kind of senseless violence that took the lives of these public servants.”

 

Clinton reinforced his analysis when she said, “We condemn in the strongest terms this senseless act of violence.”

 

This concept of “senseless violence” is at the heart of the left’s refusal to confront the reality of radical Islamists.

 

These are not acts of senseless violence.

 

These are acts of war.

 

Our ambassador to Libya and three other Americans were not killed by a senseless mob. They were killed by a purposeful group of men armed with sophisticated weapons. These killers had tracked Ambassador Chris Stevens down to the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, where he was much more vulnerable to attack and had less protection. They waged a coordinated, military-style assault.

 

Our four dead are combat casualties as much as anyone in Iraq or Afghanistan.

 

It is tragic that the president is so committed to a leftist worldview that he cannot allow himself to face these facts.

 

© 2012 Newt Gingrich, An act of war, not 'senseless violence', Politico (13 September 2012)

 

 

The subtle effects of “Macho Boy” brain-deaded-ness

 

Superficially, Speaker Gingrich’s words make attractive emotional sense — until one brings facts and analytical intelligence to bear.

 

Once we do that, we recognize that Mr. Gingrich is perpetuating the conceptual trap that President George W. Bush and the neo-conservatives fell into — when they committed the United States to two land wars against “terrorism” that we had no hope of winning, given the way that we approached them.

 

Iraq and Afghanistan went awry (in the long term) precisely because President Bush and colleagues considered our terrorist adversaries to fall under the semantic umbrella that the word “war” implies.

 

In consequence of their analytical error, for more than ten years, the United States has been weakening itself, and needlessly killing its own troops, by continuing to act on neo-conservatives’ fundamental misunderstanding of geopolitical realities.

 

Specifically pertinent to my essay today, former Speaker Gingrich yesterday took President Obama and Secretary Clinton to task for their willingness to re-orient our thinking in more productive geopolitical directions.

 

The Commander in Chief’s judicious comments, in regard to the embassy attacks, does not represent a crisis of unrealistic, “leftist” thinking, but a positive move in the direction of a saner foreign and military policy.

 

The President and his Secretary of State are apparently evolving beyond misusing the word “war” toward a more productively workable way of managing the murderous small groups of terrorist lunatics, who wish to bring America down.

 

I am harshly critical of Speaker Gingrich because his:

 

near-imbecilic refusal to learn from America’s most recent history,

 

and

 

his apparently pig-headed wish to have the United States engage in a dose more of the same —

 

if implemented, constitute a threat to United States’ successful future.

 

The man is demagogue and a geopolitical fool of the most dangerous kind.  I sadly extend this label to presidential candidate Mitt Romney, and the similar others, who so unthinkingly wish to repeat the tragic national defense mistakes of America’s recent past.  For these testosterone-poisoned folk, it is always easy to sacrifice other people’s lives in the implementation of egregiously mistaken Macho Boy causes.

 

War-mongering nitwits (in both political parties) seem not to have the sense to recognize that repeating failed tactics does not a more successful geopolitical strategy make.

 

Clear thinking, not reactive emotion, is the appropriate reaction to national crises.

 

 

Mr. Gingrich was not even bold enough to propose how the Commander in Chief might implement the Speaker’s advice about “war”

 

Former Speaker Gingrich’s editorial makes no mention of the means by which the Commander in Chief is supposed to wage the “war” that Gingrich is recommending.

 

The former Speaker’s cowardly failure to set down specifics is typical of today’s Republican Party.

 

 

An aside — on Republicans’ combination of truth-distorting political criticism and no policy substance

 

For me, as a political independent, the circumstances surrounding Ambassador Steven’s and colleagues’ deaths have definitively highlighted the unethical nastiness that the Republican Party has come to represent.

 

The Party’s descent into the muck of deplorable behavior upsets me because many of my most respected political figures used to come from that party, including (for example) presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s father, Governor George Romney.

 

As Gingrich’s substance-lacking editorial yesterday demonstrated, today’s group of diffusely angry white men cannot even be bothered to explain to anybody how they would proceed if the mantle of governance fell upon them.

 

Combatively telling one egregious lie after another is apparently all that the Party’s leadership thinks is tactically necessary to win national leadership.

 

Witness, for example, Governor Mitt Romney’s untruthful characterization of the Obama Administration’s response to the embassy attacks and Ambassador Stevens’ and colleagues’ deaths.

 

For a stomach-turning example of even more determined mendacity, watch Romney-surrogate Senator Rob Portman continue grossly distorting the truth — even after CBS this Morning’s Norah O’Donnell repeatedly corrected his ignorance of fact:

 

CBS this Morning, Sen. Portman: Cairo embassy statement "inappropriate", CBS News (13 September 2012) (video clip)

 

 

Returning to Newt Gingrich’s essay — why the word “war” represents a conceptually erroneous approach to terrorist realities

 

The word “war,” historically, has always presumed a “nation-state” opponent.  American history, almost uniquely, tends to turn war into an unconditional commitment of national resources toward permanently eliminating an adversary.

 

The use of the word “war,” in regard to international terrorism, is semantically and conceptually mistaken on two grounds:

 

First, the word subliminally assumes that — by attacking terrorist entities and their leaders (both of which become substitutes for the idea of the “nation-state”) — we will eliminate terrorist activities.

 

This has repeatedly proven itself not to be true.  Particularly in the area of religious sectarianism.

 

Second, the word “war” subliminally assumes that some sort of final “victory” is possible.

 

This, also, has proven not to be true, especially where religion-associated terrorist activities are concerned.

 

The core problem is that terrorism tends to result from a mix of murderous personal craziness and geopolitical excuses for indulging that “wacko” bent.  Most “normal” people do not become terrorists, no matter how offended they are by geopolitical realities.

 

The terrorist mix — of personal craziness, spiritual backwardness, and camouflaging political means —contrasts markedly with “state” activities, which most often have a quasi-rational foundations that emotional jingoism later fuels.

 

With warring nation-states, it is sometimes possible to extract such a high price for depredations that offending national entities eventually back off, as a simple matter of rationally understood survival.

 

Exceptions — like Germany and Japan, during World War II — occur when the victors-to-be have (in that instance justifiably) removed any chance of national dignity in defeat.

 

The same is not so true of terrorism, which (apologists aside) is not usually quite so rationally based.  This is especially so, where the sacrifice of personal self for the good of the cause is seen as a spiritual positive.

 

Here, there is no entity or “idea” to conventionally defeat.  Take down Al Qaeda (by killing everyone in it), and we simply fuel parallel movements, across borders, from other unhappy people.

 

In light of these realities, using the word “war” (in the context of terrorism suppression) subliminally misdirects us into thinking that conventional — or even conventionally based counter-terrorist — military means will defeat something that is fundamentally resistant to being defeated by large-scale, widely applied, temporally serial soldierly means.

 

Terrorists and terrorist activities are more akin to criminals and criminal activities than they are to warring nation-states.

 

 

A better paradigm — imported from medicine and policing — the idea of “managing” chronic disease and crime

 

Terrorism is a chronic disease of the human condition.  It pops up, again and again, all over the place.  No one is going to win a final victory over it.  There is no entity to extinguish.

 

Trying to achieve “victory” over terrorism, via “war,” merely fuels more of the hatred and dissatisfaction that so frequently fuels terrorist paybacks.

 

The analytical key is to recognize that “war” is too heavy-handed, too resource intensive, and too conceptually all-embracing a concept.

 

Medical “management” and “terrorist policing” are conceptually less heavy-handed and less in-the-box confining.  Both imply more nuanced ways of approaching seemingly ineradicable problems.

 

Contrary to Speaker Gingrich’s thinking, management and policing do not imply a tolerance for evil activities.

 

You will not find a doctor or a cop, who is willing to let harm come through the door.  But both these occupations recognize that our counteracting means have to be narrowly and realistically targeted against specific instances of the outbreak.

 

Hospitals do not declare “war” against infectious disease.  They know that potentially infecting organisms are always with us.  In fact, medicine “knows” that beneficial or innocuous organisms can turn harmful under some circumstances.  Consequently, medical professionals fight specific organisms, in specific instances, in specific patients.

 

Police do the same.  Successful cops do not declare wars on “criminal behavior.”  They deal with specific violations, by specific people, in specific places.

 

By tackling pervasive problems in identifiable “bits,” medical and police professionals “manage” and “control” that which cannot be forever defeated.

 

The conceptual difference between “management” and “war” is stark.  Terrorism is more akin to outbreaks of infectious disease and crime, than it is to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor or Germany’s on Poland.

 

In this regard, the military’s “special operations” are better suited to terrorist “management” than are the military means that the word “war” too broadly implies.

 

 

The “war against drugs” — as a parallel instance of the word “war” resulting in self-defeating policies

 

The misguidedness of applying the word “war” to terrorism is exemplified by the parallel error that American law enforcement and politics made in declaring a “war on drugs.”

 

How well has that “war” gone?  And at what cost to us?

 

The drug war’s failure was predicted by the conceptual misunderstanding — of the intertwined drug supply and drug use problems — that the word “war” implied from the outset.

 

When we misunderstand the root causes and manifestations of the problems we see, we cannot be successful in dealing with them.

 

Semantic errors lead to, and are indicative of, analytical misunderstandings.

 

 

The moral? — When we fail to think accurately, about drugs or terrorism, we do unproductive and self-destructive things

 

When national leaders —

 

like former Speaker Gingrich,

 

presidential candidate Governor Mitt Romney,

 

and Senator Rob Portman —

 

obtusely and deliberately refuse to acknowledge facts and History, they do the United States egregious disservice.