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Warnings from Gaza

By Newt Gingrich
June 26, 2007

The Hamas victory in Gaza is a warning that World War IV (as Norman Podhoretz has called it) is going to be long and hard. It is also a warning that the West is currently losing that war.

These defeats are not a function of the courage and will of the American people. In a June poll sponsored by American Solutions, 85 percent of the American people said it was important to defend America and its allies. Only 10 percent were opposed. On an even stronger question, 75 percent said it was important to defeat America's enemies. Only 16 percent disagreed.

So the hard left in America is only 16 percent. It is outnumbered almost 5-1 by those who would defeat our enemies.

The source of failure is not to be found in the American people but in the inarticulate and unimaginative leaders all across government who now preside instead of lead.

The tragedy of the current debate in Washington is that while the inarticulateness and the failing performance of the Bush administration have led the American people to desire a new direction, the politics of the left insists that the new direction be less than President Bush. Yet the lessons of Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, New Jersey, the JFK plot, the Algerian bombings, the Iranian nuclear program, the conflict in Lebanon and now the defeat in Gaza all point to the need for a war policy that is substantially bigger and more robust than Mr. Bush.

As the forces of modernity are being ground up by terrorism, our political process is not producing a Churchill or Roosevelt to rally the democracies but instead embracing advocates of surrender withdrawal and defeat. As women are being oppressed, we remain silent. Faced with the weakness, vacillation and inarticulateness of the leaders of Israel and America, the people see the violence as senseless, the bloodshed as repugnant and the current strategies as too flawed to continue to invest in them.

Gaza is the most recent example of where Western failure of imagination is being defeated by ruthlessness and determination.

Israel has had enormous power over Gaza for 40 years. The United Nations has been running refugee camps since 1949 with disastrous results that have led to massive population growth, vast unemployment, deep bitterness and a society which produces entrepreneurs of terrorism rather than entrepreneurs of wealth creation. Michael Oren has noted that since 1993 the Palestinian Authority "has garnered more international aid than any entity in modern history — more per capita than the European states under the Marshall Plan." With all these advantages the old "reasonable" terrorist organization has been destroyed in Gaza by the newer, more militant and more ferocious Hamas.

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