Video and Transcript: America at Risk: Camus, National Security, and Afghanistan

July 29, 2010 4pm

Former Speaker of the House and AEI senior fellow Newt Gingrich insisted that America must have an honest debate about a grand strategy for victory against the irreconcilable wing of Islam. Such a victory, Gingrich said, must be won in Afghanistan, where President Barack Obama's withdrawal deadline risks a disastrous defeat with worldwide consequences. This effort will take place on many fronts and will include stopping a nuclear Iran and defeating radical Islam in the United States and Europe. America's elites have been blind to the mortal threat posed by both stealth and violent jihadists, leaving America at greater risk than at any time since 9/11. Harkening back to the prescient warnings of Camus and Orwell, Gingrich illustrated the dangers of a government that uses language to obscure problems rather than to define them. Recalling America's legacy of victory in World War II and the Cold War, he juxtaposed the confused and vague language of the Obama administration with the bold moral and intellectual clarity of America's greatest wartime statesmen, including George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy.

Watch the full speech below or watch the highlights here. 

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Address by Newt Gingrich

America at Risk: Camus, National Security and Afghanistan
July 29, 2010 at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research

Arthur C. Brooks:  Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen.  I'm Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute and I'm delighted to welcome all of you to this address by AEI Senior Fellow and Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.  The address is entitled, “America at Risk: Camus, National Security and Afghanistan.”  Newt Gingrich hardly requires an involved introduction from me.  He is the undisputed idea leader of new American conservative politics.  He has been associated with AEI for many years and for me that is a truly great honor.

Ordinarily, I would give a little bit more of an introduction than I am today but that duty today falls to Newt's wife, Callista Gingrich so I'm going to instead introduce her.  Please welcome Callista Gingrich.

Callista Gingrich:  Thank you.  Good afternoon.  It's an honor to be here today at the American Enterprise Institute.  Newt and I both deeply value the intellectual leadership and scholarly effort that make AEI such an extraordinary asset to our national debate.

Together with Citizens United Productions and Peace River Company, we are now working on a very important new movie entitled, America at Risk, which outlines the intellectual case for reframing the war on terror nine years after 9/11.  It's also the subject matter of Newt's talk today.

I vividly remember evacuating the Longworth House Office Building on 9/11 and running down New Jersey Avenue away from our Capitol.  I will never forget the combined sense of fear and anger that I felt toward those who would come here to our nation's capital to kill and attack our most powerful symbols of freedom.  We are making America at Risk because we believe that our country today is in even more danger than it was in 2001 and that it is absolutely essential that Americans insist on victory over our enemies if we wish to remain safe and free.

Newt and I also believe that AEI is the perfect place to begin to make this case.  After all, just one floor down is the AEI conference room where scholars and retired generals outlined the surge strategy, making victory in Iraq possible.

Many of you already know Newt's biography as it pertains to national security issues but let me highlight a few: a PhD in European history; advisor to the Army's Training and Doctrine Command from 1979 to 1986; cofounder of the Military Reform Caucus in 1981; cosponsor and advocate for the Goldwater-Nichols reforms in 1986; member of the Hart-Rudman Commission; member of the Defense Policy Board from 2001 to 2009; member of the Terrorism Task Force for the Council on Foreign Relations; the longest-serving teacher - over 23 years - of the Joint War Fighting course for major generals; and of course, a senior scholar at the American Enterprise Institute since 1999.

Please welcome my husband, Newt Gingrich.

Newt Gingrich:  Thank you, Callista.  I want to thank the American Enterprise Institute and Arthur Brooks who is an extraordinary leader.  I also want to thank Chris DeMuth who has been an adviser, an encourager, a mentor for all of these years.

I want to comment briefly on one of my colleagues whose courage I admire deeply, Ayaan Hirsi Ali who has done as much as any one person to serve as a personal witness and testify to the concepts I'm going to be outlining.  Her AHA Foundation dedicated to helping women who have suffered the consequences of Sharia is really a very, very important foundation.

I also want to thank Brady Cassis who has been our very able research associate and helped put together much of the material we're using today.

The heart of our talk and the heart of what we're doing with Citizens United and with our director who's right here, Kevin Knoblock, with whom we've made a number of movies, is that America is at risk.  I think this is a very important debate to have because many of our elites are sleepwalking as though we are managing at the margins trivial problems, but the fact is that America is at risk.  And I deliberately chose Camus, National Security and Afghanistan as a title partly because Callista and I were so influenced when we did a film with Kevin on Nine Days that Changed the World, involving Pope John Paul II's nine-day visit to Poland in 1979 which both Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa told us was the opening stage of the end of the Soviet empire a year and a half before Reagan was elected and only one month after Margaret Thatcher was elected.  As part of the 10-year struggle between the 1979 visit and the 1989 visit, the people of Poland, as they struggled with the dictatorship, developed a very interesting slogan which I felt was at the heart of what America needs in the near future.

Our intellectual leader on this and our policy director of American Solutions is also here, Vince Haley, who passionately fought for us making the movie and fought for the meaning in our generation of John Paul II's pilgrimage to Poland.  Part of what he found and he said this to me the other day, "This is a sign from the 10-year struggle."  It basically says, "Let Poland be Poland."  I'm relying on his translation.  "Two plus two must always mean four."  Now, I know that for a number of you, the concept of two plus two equals four, this is the American Solutions' simple version of it, it is a bumper sticker.  This may seem slightly strange but I don’t think it is because it really relates to two things: one is the nature of reality and the other is the importance of telling the truth.

Camus wrote in The Plague, "There are times when a man can be killed for saying two plus two equals four because the authorities can't stand the truth."  I think that, frankly, our debate over national security in many ways represents that level of establishment pressure to avoid telling the truth.

George Orwell wrote 1984 about Great Britain and the dangers of centralized planning leading to tyranny, and in there he has the state torturer say to the innocent citizen who he's torturing, "If the state tells you two plus two equals five, it equals five.  And if the state tells you two plus two equals three, it equals three."  The citizen is thinking, well, what if it’s really equals four?  As many of you know, one of Orwell's most influential essays is on politics and the English language in which he says, "The less defensible a policy, the more obscure the language will be."  There's much I think that the national security apparatus and the intellectual institutions in this country would learn by reading Orwell and thinking about it.

So I want to discuss Afghanistan which is the topic of the moment, but I want to discuss it in a way that makes sense historically.  To discuss strategy in Afghanistan without first defining the larger war and outlining a strategy in the larger war would be like discussing Gettysburg without taking into account the Civil War of which it was a part.

I think the fact is the United States has three great national security challenges, each of which is dramatically different.  The first is the threat from radical Islamists which is what today's speech will mostly focus on.

The second is the challenge of competing successfully with China and India in order to sustain the largest, most productive and most advanced economy in the world which is the sine qua non of our being able to sustain our national security system.  We've had an enormous advantage for at least 160 years of being the largest economy in the world.  It enabled us to drown Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan.  It enabled us to contain and ultimately defeat the Soviet Union.  And if we lose that advantage, we will in the long run lose our national security and we will lose our ability to sustain freedom.

The third great challenge is the destructive influence of a secular-socialist system.  The fact is the secular wing of that system does not want to talk about radical Islamists and the socialist wing defends reactionary institutions that are incompetent in order to prop them up rather than change them as is needed to compete in the world market.

This speech focuses on radical Islamists and their threat to American survival.  Other speeches will talk about other components and other speeches will also expand this.  Let me say I want to cite a number of things here but because the topic is so huge we're going to post a substantial amount of material at our American Enterprise Scholar site under Newt Gingrich and you'll be able to go there and get a tremendous amount of background material plus links to other people and other institutions who are engaged in this.

I think that we have to keep in mind that any strategy we design to win the struggle with radical Islamists has to also take into account the requirement to rebuild our economy so that we are competitive with China and India.  The people who led the Cold War understood this perfectly.  If you read the writing of Nitze or you read George Catlett Marshall or you read General and then President Eisenhower, they all had a vivid sense that sustaining America's freedom and sustaining America's economic capabilities was integral to the ability to contain the Soviet empire, that you could not allow yourself to get distorted into a short-term investment as a result of which you went bankrupt.

I think we have to approach the same process as I will outline in the next few minutes.  So, we have to design a strategy which is compatible with our success.  I think that it's important to recognize in that setting that we are at risk.  This is the key precedent to everything else.  Thirty-one years after what Mark Bowden called the first battle in America's war with militant Islam in his book, Guests of the Ayatollah, about the Iranian hostage crisis.  Nine years after the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center killed more Americans than have been killed on American soil since 1865, more than Pearl Harbor.  We still have not come to grips with what our challenges are. 

We are in fact more at risk every year because every year that we fail to win the dangers of a nuclear, chemical or biological weapon being on the hands of our enemies becomes greater, and they have a learning curve too, so you can't assume that we're brilliant and they're static because the fact is our opponents are constantly evolving in ways that are going to task us a great deal in the next few years.  So I think we have to recognize that our risks are growing greater, not smaller.

The key lesson of the Christmas Detroit bomber and the Times Square bomber is that our national security system failed completely.  We ought to think about this, when did we learn that there was a bomber on the airplane over Detroit, when the bomb failed to go off and his pants began to smoke.  When did we learn that there was a bomb in Times Square?  When the bomb failed to go off and a t-shirt vendor walked up to a policeman. Nine years, billions of dollars, massive reorganization later, the fact is the national security apparatus failed totally.  That's why this is a really serious problem, and yet there's been no honest assessment of failure.  Indeed, nobody has yet been fired for failure to perform even though it's obvious there have been many failures.

I think the failure of national security should be frankly a national scandal.  America is at risk of a catastrophic disaster here at home and that is the reality our elites are hiding from, and so I start from there.  By the way, notice even at a conventional level, a serious sustained conventional campaign would cause chaos in this country and lead to dramatic limitations of our freedom and would weaken our economy further in our competition with China and India.

I point out to you in terms of asymmetric warfare, a term that people in the Pentagon like to talk about.  One shoe bomber has led to an estimated eight billion pairs of shoes being taken off by innocent people.  Now, would you like to calculate the economic reward-to-cost ratio of that combat?  I warned people at the time let us hope they don’t develop an underwear bomb given that tradition but luckily, so far since Christmas, TSA has not followed their normal logic pattern.

Yet, it's pretty clear that the Obama Administration is willfully blind to the nature of our enemies and the forces which threaten America.  I think it's willful because I think if you look carefully at the Attorney General's comments, if you look at the Homeland Security Advisor Mr. Brennan's comments, only a person willfully hiding from reality could say these things.  So it's not ignorance; it's determined effort to avoid it.  But that shouldn’t surprise us, certainly not here at the American Enterprise Institute.

The left's refusal to tell the truth about the Islamist threat is a natural parallel to the 70-year pattern of left-wing intellectuals refusing to tell the truth about communism and the Soviet Union.  If you go back and look at all the years of disinformation, all the years of denial, that were the left's response to communism, why would you think that the next threat to Western civilization will be more accurately studied?  This is why the secular-socialist system is itself such a threat.  It is the natural pattern of secular-socialist intellectuals to prefer our opponents to us and to accept their lies over our truths.  If you doubt that, go look at any study of the 70-year period in which the left consistently apologized for the Soviet empire, and look at the shock of the left when Ronald Reagan described the evil empire.

Now, in that context, I want to challenge head-on their use of language, define an alternative use of language and do so precisely in terms of Camus' two plus two equals four assertion.  Because I think what I'm going to say today is as patently defensible as two plus two equals four and I think that it is the intellectuals on the left and the policymaking members of our national security establishment who are fundamentally out of touch with reality, and in the process, endangering the nation.

Let me start with Mark Bowden who wrote Black Hawk Down and is a great reporter and wrote Guests of the Ayatollah.  He said the following -- now remember I'm taking you back now.  Understand this is not this week's problem.  I'm taking you back 31 years to the Iranian hostage crisis.  Here's what Bowden wrote. 

"The capture of the U.S. embassy in Tehran was a glimpse of something new and bewildering.  It was the first battle in America's war against militant Islam, a conflict that would eventually engage much of the world.  Iran's revolution wasn't just a localized power struggle; it had tapped a subterranean ocean of Islamist outrage.  An ignored but growing vision in the Middle East nurtured in mosques and madrasah but considered quaint or backward by the Western world and even by many wealthy, well-educated Arabs and Persians, saw little difference between the great powers.  Both were infidels, godless exploiters, uprooting centuries of tradition and trampling sacred ground in heedless pursuit of wealth and power.  They were twin devils of modernity.  The Islamist alternative they foresaw was an old twist on a familiar 20th century theme: totalitarianism rooted in divine revelation.  It would take many years for the movement to be clearly seen, but the takeover of the embassy in Tehran offered an early glimpse.  It was the first time America would hear itself called the Great Satan."

Now, most of us who were active in that time - I was a freshman congressman - this was such a vivid public event that Nightline was spawned by covering every single night ending with Night 444 of “America Held Hostage.”  And yet, intellectually, we couldn't come to grips with it.  We couldn't appreciate that this was in fact the mainstream of the Iranian regime, which is why those who seek moderates in Tehran among the current dictatorship are engaged in act of self delusion of a grand scale, much like looking for moderate Nazis or moderate communists in Moscow.

Now, I got engaged fairly early in this.  As Callista was pointing out, I've had a fairly long period of working with the military.  My dad was a career soldier.  I grew up among other places at Fort Riley when the intelligence school was there.  In 1984, I wrote the following in a small book called Window of Opportunity.  This is, again, not a this-year problem; this was 26 years ago.  "The long-term struggle against terrorism will be a dark and bloody one involving years of vigilant counterterrorism, a level of surveillance and spying that liberals will call intolerable, and a willingness to strike back with substantial force at the originators of the action rather than the foot soldiers of the terrorist movement."  That's 26 years ago.  So I come to speak to you today after having worried about this a long time.

Let us be clear.  This is not a war on terrorism.  Terrorism is an activity.  This is a struggle with radical Islamists in both their militant and their stealth form.  The militant form believes in using military power in one form or another.  The stealth form believes in using cultural, intellectual and political but their end goal is exactly the same.

The fight against Sharia and the madrassas in mosques which teach hatred and fanaticism is the heart of the enemy movement from which the terrorists spring forth.  It's time we had a national debate on this.  One of the things I'm going to suggest today is a federal law which says no court anywhere in the United States under any circumstance is allowed to consider Sharia as a replacement for American law.

Let me draw a sharp distinction between those Muslims who live in the modern world and those Muslims who would radically change the modern world.  Radical Islamists want to impose Sharia on all of us for legitimate reasons.  Let me be quite clear.  You can respect your adversary without agreeing or giving in.  They have profound, deeply held beliefs and one of the great challenges for secularists is they can't understand the level of passion that a belief which is derived from an underlying religious form leads one to have, which is why, frankly, deeply believing Christians and Jewish Americans have a much better understanding of what's going on than do secular intellectuals in deracinated universities looking out of their ivory tower or trying to wonder what it is that would lead people to kill themselves and having no comprehension of the emotions and the depth of passion engaged.

Stealth jihadis use political, cultural, societal, religious, intellectual tools; violent jihadis use violence.  But in fact they're both engaged in jihad and they're both seeking to impose the same end state which is to replace Western civilization with a radical imposition of Sharia.

Let me be quite clear, and I could not disagree more with Dean Kagan in accepting the Saudi money to have professors of Sharia at Harvard.  I couldn't disagree more with every university in America which teaches a transparently propagandistic version.  Sharia in its natural form has principles and punishments totally abhorrent to the Western world, and the underlying basic belief which is that law comes directly from God and is therefore imposed upon humans and no human can change the law without it being an act of apostasy is a fundamental violation of a tradition in the Western system which goes back to Rome, Athens and Jerusalem and which has evolved in giving us freedom across the planet on a scale we can hardly imagine and which is now directly threatened by those who would impose it.

So let me also be quite clear that the rules are radical and horrific.  I think again it's fascinating that even when people go out and do polling and they say to, for example, Muslims in general, do you believe in Sharia, they don’t then explain what Sharia is.  Sharia becomes like would you like to be a Rotarian and it sounds okay.  Let me give you an example that was on the news.  I was doing Fox & Friends this morning and coming across was that Iran in trying to appease world opinion, has graciously agreed that a woman who had been convicted of adultery would not be stoned to death, should be hung.  That was the moderation.  You can't make these things up.

I say to all of our friends on the left who believe in gay rights, the principle of Sharia is painful execution, not just death. Painful execution.  How we don’t have some kind of movement in this country on the left that understands that Sharia is a direct mortal threat to virtually every value that the left has is really one of the most interesting historical questions and will someday lead to many dissertations being written.

So I think we are faced -- when you recognize for example that Sharia requires four male witnesses to rape.  In the absence of four male witnesses, the complainant is herself guilty.  There's a case in the last year in Saudi Arabia of a woman who was gang raped had no witnesses and has since been beaten for having engaged in inappropriate behavior.  If you think I'm making this up, one of the things we're going to post at my personal scholar site at American Enterprise, which is aei.org.  It's a case in New Jersey which is an -- I mean I ran across this in preparing this speech and I was so astounded I didn't believe it and Brady got the actual Appeals Court ruling which we're going to post.

A woman files for a restraint against her husband who has been beating her, torturing her and raping her for hours at a time.  The judge rules at the district, at the entry level, that he is not guilty of any criminal actions because in fact in his interpretation of Sharia, those are his rights and therefore will be an imposition on his religion to apply to him American law.  The appeals court came back and cited the 1878 case involving polygamy and said this is nonsense, we have a clear long tradition in this country that you can't in fact interpose religion to commit criminal acts and claim that it was because your religion made you do it.  But when you read the case -- and I believe this man was sincere, this is not an evil man.  This is a person who has found a rationale for a behavior system which is horrific and which we would never tolerate.  And yet, here is an American judge so confused by secular situation ethics that he was unwilling to impose American law on somebody who's clearly abusing somebody.

Now, there are much less horrific examples of this.  I would cite to you for example the case in Minnesota where a blind student was exempted from a course and given credit without attending because his seeing-eye dog offended Muslim students.  The fact that the college didn't have the nerve to say under the Americans with Disabilities Act, the blind student stays and if you want to leave that's your prerogative.  If you want to know what appeasement is like in America, if you want to know why this is a problem here at home, this is the kind of stuff that's going on because nobody in our secular elites is prepared to stand up and defend Western civilization against the routine steady erosion.

Now, this is, I know, by the standards of the Administration radical language and people say you shouldn’t talk like this, but here's what a 2008 U.S. Central Command Red Team report said.  It concluded that we're only doing ourselves a disservice when we ignore the theological foundations of many violent concepts including jihad.  "The U.S. government should resist the urge to consider itself capable of managing the emotional responses of those whom we engage either militarily or diplomatically on issues as serious as the Islamic concept of jihad misunderstood or not.  We must not avoid criticism of the topic if the intent is only to assuage the sensibilities of nonviolent Muslims who will remain nonviolent in the face of an intellectual examination and critique of the theological underpinnings and/or assertions of jihad.”  This is in bold in their writing, “We should avoid readily accepting the notion that criticism or notice of an Islamic tenet such as jihad by the U.S. government is tantamount to the demonization of all Muslims or Islam."

So in the tradition of the Red Team at the U.S. Central Command, and I've served on the transformation advisory group at the U.S. Joint Forces Command, let me just say I believe that it is very important to draw a distinction between radical jihadis, which I define simply those people who seek to impose Sharia, and those Muslims who seek to practice their religion within a framework of the modern world.  I would allow each Muslim to define themselves in that sense, but I would be unequivocal about the fact that radical Islamists are not compatible with the modern world and not compatible with civilization as we know it and therefore we are engaged in a long struggle.

Now, you can see the confusion, the notion that two plus two must equal something other than four.  When you read, for example, Army Chief of Staff George Casey's comment about the terrorist in Fort Hood, this is what he said.  This is, again, chief of staff of the Army and a smart man and a man who served ably and patriotically in Iraq, but a man who clearly has been captured at least for the moment by the forces of political correctness.  "We have to be careful because we can't jump to conclusions now based on little snippets of information that come out.  Frankly, I'm worried -- not worried but I'm concerned about this increased speculation."

Now, they were dealing with somebody and ironically, you later have a letter from Senators Lieberman and Collins saying to them, why did you not notice the degree to which this person was a radicalized Islamist?  This is a man who's carrying a card in his wallet that says he's a soldier of Islam.  Well, we wouldn't want to jump to conclusions.  If you watch the Administration every time there's a new problem, we don’t know the motivation.  I mean, how often can you say this?  I'm going to bring you back to that later because there have been 54 people arrested in this country - not overseas, in this country - since Obama became president.  Each of which the Administration said, with new found ignorance and wonder, I wonder why they're doing this.

Now, the more amazing case and the clearest proof of the willful blindness of the Obama Administration is the Detroit Christmas Day bomber.  When his father in Nigeria reported concern over his son's radicalization, again, his father goes in to see the CIA, and his father is a well-known and respected banker who cares enough about the United States to try to help us.  He says that his son had been radicalized and he was afraid he had disappeared and he thought he might have gone off to a terrorist training camp and he recommended that the U.S. government not give him a visa.  You would think 31 years after Tehran, nine years after 9/11, all the money we spent, all the reports, the 9/11 Commission, the director of national intelligence, the creation of the Homeland Security Department, somewhere in that process they would have said, you know, if somebody's dad says they’re a terrorist maybe the burden of proof ought to be on them.

But ah, that would violate the Attorney General's principle that American criminal law applies to everybody on the planet and therefore the burden is on the American government.  You'll see how this works out in a minute.  So the young man's name was added to the half million names in a computer database in McLean and "largely forgotten."  This is the Washington Post.  "The lack of attention was not unusual according to U.S. intelligence officials."  That's the Post's version.

Now, it's pointed out after the passengers have figured out he's a bomber, after he's arrested, after they read him his Miranda Rights which he doesn't have.  No foreigner has Miranda Rights and no combatant against the United States including American citizens has Miranda Rights.  If you're combatant against the United States, you're by definition a traitor and therefore you are not covered under Miranda.  This is one of the great falsehoods of the Holder Justice Department and the Obama Administration.

John Brennan, the President’s senior advisor on Homeland Security goes on television and says the following, "Well, first of all, there was no single piece of intelligence a smoking gun, if you will, that said he was going to carry out his attack against that aircraft."  You want to say to Brennan, if his father came in to see the CIA because he was worried his son was a terrorist, what more do you need?  Of course, it's like the other cases I told you about.  There will never be enough evidence for Brennan to believe it, just as there will never be enough evidence for Holder to decide that these are enemies and not merely innocent victims somehow trapped in the American system.

Senators Lieberman and Collins wrote -- this is to the Department of Justice I believe and the Department of Defense.  This is the letter they sent, "We have repeatedly sought your department's cooperation for more than five months.  Our efforts have been met with delay, the production of little that was not already publicly available and shifting reasons for why the departments are withholding the documents and witnesses that we have requested."  This is about Fort Hood.  "Given the warnings about Major Nidal Malik Hasan's extreme radicalism, why was he not stopped before he took 13 American lives?"  That was Lieberman and Collins.

Now, I want to compare the total confusion of the Obama Administration and their senior appointees who are shocked anew every time there's a crisis with the clarity of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in World War II.  On D-Day, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as our troops were landing in Normandy went on national radio at 10 o'clock at night and actually led the nation in six and a half minutes of prayer, something very few modern liberals appreciate.  This is part of what he said, "Our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set up on a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity."  This was not a man who was confused about what the stakes were, nor was he confused about what the goal was.

In the 1940 campaign speech in Brooklyn, President Roosevelt said the following, "We must remember what the collaborative understanding between Communism and Nazism has done to the processes of democracy abroad.  Those forces hate democracy and Christianity as two phases of the same civilization.  They oppose democracy because it is Christian.  They oppose Christianity because it preaches democracy.  Their objective is to prevent democracy from becoming strong."  Again, this is hardly a man who's confused about what's at stake.

Winston Churchill at the very peak of the Battle of Britain said, "Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization."  Now, twice in the 20th century with the Nazis and then with the Soviets, we had to do what it took in the first case in a violent short war of enormous proportions; in the second case, in a 44-year long campaign which was overwhelmingly not violent, but we did what it took to preserve our civilization and to confront our enemies. 

I would argue that because we are unclear about the war, we are unclear about how to focus our energies.  It's interesting.  Candidate Obama in the Democratic debate, August 6th 2007, says, "As president, I want us to fight on the right battlefield and what that means is getting out of Iraq and refocusing our attention on the war that can be won in Afghanistan."  Just a useful reminder as he seeks to figure out a way to avoid staying for victory.

He talked at one point about Afghanistan being the central front in the fight against tyranny.  I think that's wrong, and I want to propose a very bold difference.  I think that there are three fronts in the current conflict that are decisive.  The central front is the United States.  If we do not secure this country, we will in fact lose.  The second front is Europe, precisely the model of the Cold War.  If we do not help reassert civilization in Europe and insist on the defeat of radical Islamists in Europe, we will in the long run lose.  The third front is the Middle East.  But even in the Middle East, I want to suggest to you that it is a little bit different than you might expect.

Let me start with the United States just for a minute.  Since President Obama has been in office - and we'll post all of these at aei.org on the Newt Gingrich scholar site - there have been 54 individuals arrested in this country.  This is not stealth jihad, the use of propaganda, politics, et cetera.  This is violent jihad.  When you have Americans being recruited over and over again and showing up, and I think of the 54 cases, 51 or 52 are radical Islamists.  So despite every effort on the part of the elites, there's a clear pattern and it's a dangerous pattern and it's an expanding pattern.  There's no reason to believe we're winning.  There's every reason to believe that we have not yet even begun to fight; that we do not yet even understand what the campaign is about.

So I would start with that.  I'm not going to read them because of length, but I would urge you if you have any doubt about either the New Jersey case or the other Sharia cases or the number of arrests in the U.S., feel free to go to my Web site at aei.org and take a look at it. 

Now, I got engaged recently -- did we give out the newsletter from yesterday here?  It's outside available for all of you if you'd like it.  I do a weekly newsletter which is available at newt.org for free.  This week, I did it on the World Trade Center mosque proposal, and I seem to have rattled some of our elites and even confused some of our conservative friends.  So let me be quite clear what my reasoning is. 

The World Trade Center site should be a battlefield memorial because it's a battlefield.  This was an act of war.  This was an effort to cripple America.  I believe we should rebuild the World Trade Center exactly as it was the minute before it was attacked, and in World War II there would have been zero confusion about this.  We would have rebuilt it in 18 months because back then, we understood how to do things.  Imagine the psychology if we had just said that day, it will go back as it was and it will go back as it was as rapidly as possible.  It's a different psychological attitude, but here we are trapped in our own litigation, our own regulation, our own confusion, our own political incompetence so in nine years, we can't rebuild it and now we're being told that several blocks away what we should have is a 13-story-tall mosque and community center, which I regard as a political act, not a religious act.

Now, let me make this quite clear because a number of people seemed to be confused when I first raised this issue.  There are over 100 mosques in New York City.  If they wanted to build their mosque and community center in the South Bronx, I'd be all for it; they need the employment.  If they wanted a genuine interfaith center, a building that had a church, a synagogue and a mosque with an interfaith board that would at least be interesting.  But to suggest that a few blocks from a site in which Islamist extremists killed nearly 3,000 Americans that we should tolerate an act of triumphalism.  Anybody who knew anything of history knew it was an act of triumphalism from the original name; it was going to be called the Cordoba House.  Well, Cordoba is the city in Spain where a conquering Muslim army built a mosque on top of a church.

Do you think they happened to randomly pick that because they're sitting around one evening and go, gosh, what will be a good name in New York?  What they're relying on was that half of us are too ignorant and the other half are too timid to stand up and say “Baloney, this is nonsense!”

Now, the Congress can declare the area a national battlefield memorial and control what's built there.  The Attorney General of New York if he wanted to, Andrew Cuomo, could intervene and apply a variety -- he's quite capable of messing up any native American who wants to do something.  He could find a way to drag this out 25 years if he wanted to.  The City of New York had decided it was an unwise use, but I think it is stunningly outrageous.  I'm frankly very tired of being lectured about religious liberty, but the comparison I drew which confused some people was to Saudi Arabia.  But I don’t see any of the people who advocate the interfaith that the mosque next to the World Trade Center jumping up and saying, you know, and the Saudi king should build a church and a synagogue in Riyadh.  There are none in the entire country - none, zero.  Or, they could say, why don’t we have an interfaith conference on learning to communicate with each other in Mecca where it is of course illegal for a Christian or Jew to even walk in the city.  And over half of the mosques in the United States have mortgages held by Saudi Arabia. 

So we get this totally one-sided hypocritical lecture about political correctness and the need to worry about religious liberty from people who in fact are funded by and -- I'm not talking about this specific mosque, I'm talking about the general pattern.  I just think it's time that we in the West had the temerity to stand up and say, you know, enough.  We don’t need to be lectured by people who represent a totalitarian system, and we don’t need to be lectured by people who've been funding those who had killed us, and we don’t need to be lectured by people who print textbooks that encourage the killing of Jews and Christians.

Let's go head to head and let's have a real debate and let's talk about the future of this country and the future of the world and it ought to be future -- look around, by the way.  Sharia is not just a tiny thing.  The largest provider of Sharia financing in the world is a government-owned institution, AIG.  The state of Minnesota provides Sharia funding for housing.  I mean you turn around and step again and again and again and what you have is a steady infiltration of truly destructive ideas.  And in the long run, it has a very serious threat.

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said in February of 2008, "It seems unavoidable.  Indeed as a matter of fact, certain provisions of Sharia are already recognized in our society and under our laws so it's not as if we're bringing in an alien and a rival system.  We already have in this country a number of situations in which the law, the internal law of religious communities is recognized by the law of the land as justified, conscientious objections in certain circumstances in providing certain kinds of social relations.  So I think we need to look at this with a clearer eye and not imagine either we know exactly what we mean by Sharia and not just associate it with what we read about Saudi Arabia or wherever."  This is the Archbishop of Canterbury.  And it's why I think teaching about Sharia financing is dangerous, because it is the first step towards the normalization of Sharia and I believe Sharia is a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and in the world as we know it.  I think it's that straightforward and that real.

So now you turn to we have to win in the United States, we have to win in Europe and then there's the Middle East.  I would propose if we think of the Middle East as a theater that there are actually seven fronts to be worried about.  The most important is Iran.  Iran is a huge country.  It is the most active funder of violent terrorism on the planet.  If the Saudis are the most active funder of stealth jihad, the Iranians are the most active funder of violent jihad and is trying to get nuclear weapons.

The second most important country in the region is Saudi Arabia which is the largest funder of wahhabism and of the spread of militant mosques and madrasahs.

The third is Pakistan.  It's a huge country.  It's a country with nuclear weapons.  It's a country that we have to take much more seriously than we have.

The fourth is Afghanistan.  Let me be clear and I'll come back to this.  We cannot afford defeat in Afghanistan.  The moral effects around the planet, the increase in morale of the radical jihadis and the damage to Western civilization will be incalculable.  Great powers should be careful about starting but once they start, they should be relentless and implacable about winning and it is very dangerous for us to talk about how we're going to somehow have a magic date at which we leave no matter the consequences because that means we're not thinking about the consequences.  They would be horrendous.  That doesn’t mean we don’t need a better strategy.  It doesn’t mean we don’t need new ways of thinking about it, but this is a serious long-term problem with enormous worldwide implications.

The fifth, I think, center is Iraq where we have to continue the process of trying to move the country towards the modern world.

The sixth is Egypt where, frankly, if a post-Mubarak regime collapses, we have an enormous problem.  Egypt is a very, very important country in the Arab world.

The seventh is the Israeli borderlands which I lump together because whether the problems are in Gaza or the West Bank or in South Lebanon, they're there and they're continuing.  But frankly, if you go down the list, if you solve Iran, the Israelis would not worry nearly as much about their borderlands.  If you work your way through this list, you can begin to see solutions.

I think we have to recognize within this framework that as I said at the beginning, we have to cope with and defeat the radical Islamists, we have to develop a strategy for competing successfully with China and India, and we have to figure out a way to get our secular socialist intellectuals and bureaucrats to understand that they have to change both in clarity towards radical Islam and in the willingness to change reactionary and obsolete institutions to compete with China and India.

Now, Afghanistan I think in that sense is a very important battlefield, but if you go through what I've just walked you through, you also begin to realize that the problems in Afghanistan are probably 90 percent nonmilitary.  This is not a military campaign.  This is a campaign which has a significant military component but if you were to look today - and this is not just to comment on Obama, it's not just to comment on George W. Bush, it's a comment on the entire American bureaucracy and the way we've approached this - the fact that we have been in this country for seven years, almost eight years, and we have not flooded the country with highways, we haven't guaranteed that every Afghan has a cell phone, we haven't undertaken the logical steps towards fundamentally modernizing their society, we haven’t developed a program to help farmers get off of growing drugs.

I mean, just go down the list and say to yourself in the model of World War II or in the model of George Catlett Marshall, the Marshall Plan, NATO, think about the scale of what we did after 1947.  We said all right, we're faced with a genuine worldwide Soviet threat, all right, invent the Central Intelligence Agency, the Strategic Air Command, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, rebuild our military capabilities, send aid around the planet, rebuild Europe through the Marshall Plan, create a momentum of scientific, technological, economic and political change so that the Soviet Union is isolated and incapable of competing.  It took 40 years.  The planet got richer and it got freer and it became more working together and greater world trade and the largest middle class in the history of human beings.  In the process, we contained the Soviet empire till it collapsed.  That was the right scale.

I'm not saying that tomorrow morning you win, but the fact that we haven't figured out probably the most important military units we could have sent into Afghanistan were military engineer battalions.  If we had mobilized every National Guard engineer battalion and rotated them in there building roads and just build as many roads as possible, to make as many commercial trucks as possible in order to get people traveling back and forth to break up the isolation, we would have done more in the last 600 tours by people who were policing because we're policing the same community that isn't changing.  You need a vastly deeper focus on creating a modern Afghanistan of which there's a security component.

It's a very problem from Iraq.  Iraq was a largely modern country with a bad dictatorship but it was the Arab country with the most women employed in public life.  It's an Arab country with huge engineering capability.  It's an Arab country that had an enormous amount of oil wealth.  The problems in Iraq are utterly profoundly different from Afghanistan, and they required fundamental -- but by the way, that would've required overhauling both at the Defense Department, the State Department and AID; none of whom are capable of mounting the campaign I just described.  And of course in World War II that's what we did.  We overhauled any institution we had to.  That's what we did in the early days of the Cold War.  It's what Reagan did again in the late days of the Cold War - fundamental change.  And it can be done.

Now, the thing that most worried me and I first began speaking about this was when the president began talking about a July 2011 withdrawal.  It was I think in the great tradition of American politicians who live in a very benign world and who are allowed to say truly dumb things in a routine basis, I mean the Vice President has established close to a world record for randomly saying things that have no meaning. 

Most American politicians do not understand - and this is by the way is also what's wrong with the leak of these documents - people don't understand the consequence in a world that isn't a benign, middle class, law-abiding society.  When the president says well, we got to start withdrawing in July of 2011, the first two signals that went out were if you're on our side, you better figure out what to do when we sell out, the Saigon complex.  So don’t tell me it's not possible.  And if you're on their side, you figure out, how do I hang on for one more year?  That signal is instant, the moment an American politician says that.

Similarly, I would say to you, the number one damage from the leak of all these documents is everybody in the planet learns not to trust the Americans.  I personally believe the person who leaked these documents should go to jail for the rest of their life with no parole.  This is a devastating attack on the United States, and it is going to get a lot of people killed because the documents that were released had names.  It had the names of Afghans and Pakistanis who were cooperating with the United States.  Think about it.  We'd done this twice before in the last 40 years and both times, left-wing ideologues who've been prepared to break American security have caused enormous damage to our intelligence capabilities and have taught people around the planet not to cooperate with us because we are so unreliable.

This is not a small thing.  This isn't about freedom of the press.  It's about human beings getting killed by people who are either thoughtless or who are opposed to the United States.  Frankly, if you're opposed to the United States in wartime, you should lose.  I'm very clear about this.  We should all be very clear about this.

Now, I think that it's important to recognize that the very act of stating a date for withdrawal has a frightening potential.  It encourages our enemies to hang on.  It encourages our allies to leave and to fear that we will cut and run and it courts a disastrous defeat which I believe will have worldwide repercussions because of the morale effect on radical Islamists.  Yet you have to recognize that victory over radical Islamism is a long process.  This will be a long struggle.  It doesn’t fit our model of a span of war of two or three or four years; really pay attention, get it over with.  That's why I used the Cold War as one of the analogies.  It took 44 years, most of it was nonviolent but very tense and with enormous preparation.

I think that in a sense, President Bush came very close to defining this twice.  First was in the “Axis of Evil” speech, January 29, 2002, in the State of the Union, where essentially I believe he was right but in fact could not operationalize what he said.  That is, it was an axis of evil; Iran, Iraq, North Korea.  Well, we're one out of three.  People ought to think about that.  If Bush was right in January of 2002 - and by the way, virtually the entire Congress gave him a standing ovation when he said it - then why is it that the other two parts of the axis of evil are still visibly cheerfully making nuclear weapons?  That's because we stood at the brink, and looked over, and thought too big a problem. 

If Harry Truman had done that, the world today would be communist.  If Franklin Roosevelt had done that in '41, either the Japanese or the Germans would have won.  If Lincoln had done that, we would've become two and then multiple countries.  I mean there are moments in history when you have to stand up and say, okay, tell me the size of the problem, I'll go get a solution of same size.  I will overmatch the problem.  That's what Americans are all about; we overmatch problems with energy, creativity and drive.

President Bush was also I think largely right in his second Inaugural.  I want to remind you what he said in January of 2005.  "For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny - prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder - violence will gather and multiply in destructive power and cross the most defended borders and raise a mortal threat.  There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment and expose the pretensions of tyrants and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant and that is the force of human freedom.  We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.  The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world."

I think President Bush in an almost Reaganite phrase - Callista and I were there that day - caught it just about exactly right in the second Inaugural.  The challenge was they needed a strategy and a system to implement a vision on this scale and the current State Department and the current national security apparatus and the current Defense Department are utterly incapable of that level of creativity.  That's why I think where we are today and I think it's ironic that we are literally today 31 years after the Ayatollah launched the first phase of the war against America.  We're actually where the great leaders of World War II found themselves in 1947.

I want to take just a minute to remind you of how we did this once before because I think it's directly relevant.  This speech is not going to give you an end.  This speech is the beginning, just as we didn’t figure out the entire Cold War in one or two speeches but it took a great deal of thought and debate and argument.  In February 22, 1946, George Kennan sent what is called the “Long Telegram.”  He's the number two person in Moscow and a senior analyst.  He says, "It is clear that the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.  It is clear that the United States cannot expect in the foreseeable future to enjoy political intimacy with the Soviet regime.  It must continue to regard the Soviet regime as a rival, not a partner, in the political arena."  This is February 22, 1946, less than a year after the end of the war, a time when we have been allies for four years and here is a very senior and frankly fairly liberal member of the State Department saying we have no choice, they’re that great a threat.

Harry Truman in a series of truly historic steps in 1947 gives a speech where we take over for the British in Greece and Turkey and launches what's called Point Four.  Dean Acheson gives a tremendous speech on the importance of America filling the gap that's been left by the exhaustion of the British and George Marshall goes to Harvard and launches the Marshall Plan to resurrect Europe and begin to reestablish our capacity to lead.  Then, Truman is faced at Christmas of 1949 with an enormous decision.  The Soviets have gotten an atomic bomb years earlier - a warning about Iran.  The Soviets have gotten an atomic bomb years earlier than the CIA thought they could, or the intelligence community back then - the CIA didn't exist for another year.

Truman at Christmas makes the decision that we need to build a hydrogen bomb.  Dean Acheson goes to him as secretary of state and says, you know, if you think the world is so dangerous we have to build a bomb whose only purpose is wiping out whole cities, maybe we'd better design a strategy to minimize its use.  Truman said that's a pretty logical step.  So they assigned Paul Nitze at the State Department to begin developing what became NSC-68 which is I think the most important single document in the Cold War.  It's a document of long-term thoughtful preparation. 

He writes, "The Soviet Union unlike previous aspirants to hegemony is animated by a new fanatic faith antithetical to our own and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world.  Conflict has therefore become endemic and is waged on the part of the Soviet Union by violent or non-violent methods in accordance with the dictates of expediency.  The whole success of the proposed program hangs ultimately in recognition by this government, the American people and all free peoples that the Cold War is in fact a real war in which the survival of the free world is at stake.  Essential prerequisites to success are consultations with congressional leaders designed to make the program the object of non-partisan legislative support, and a presentation to the public of a full explanation of the facts and implications of the present international situation.  The prosecution of the program will require of us all the ingenuity, sacrifice and unity demanded by the vital importance of the issue and the tenacity to persevere until our national objectives have been attained."  This was issued by Harry Truman, April 14, 1950.

In 1991 at Christmas, the Soviet Union disappears.  Despite Democrat or Republican, despite all sort of problems, we sustained for longer than a generation the forces of freedom to contain the forces of tyranny.

Now, I believe we have to understand that the struggle -military, political, societal, economic, cultural, intellectual - with radical Islamists may well last several generations, may well last longer than the Cold War because it's a much more fundamental, I think much more difficult struggle requiring far more change.  But I think that there are key moments in history that we've frankly lived through before.  We understand how to do this.  And if you'll bear with me for just a moment or two more, I want to place in context where we are to remind us that we're Americans; that we've been here before and we've been here in harder times.

I wrote a book with Bill Forstchen called To Try Men's Souls.  This is about Washington's crossing of the Delaware when his army had declined to 2,500 men of whom one-third did not have boots.  They marched nine miles in the snow and ice leaving a trail of blood with their feet wrapped in burlap bags.  They marched all night in a snowstorm so intense that the Germans at Trenton did not put out any guards, and they marched having crossed an icy river in the middle of the night during the snowstorm.  Their password that night was “Victory or Death.”

As they got on the boats that night to cross the river, Washington who had requested Thomas Paine to write a new pamphlet had his officers read the following which had originally been published on December 23rd and is being read on the night of December 25th.  The pamphlet itself is worth your reading but this is the opening paragraph.  "These are the times that try men's souls.  The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country, but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman." 

That small band won a victory.  The victory raised the morale of the Americans and two weeks later, Washington had 15,000 volunteers and drove the British across northern New Jersey and the revolution was preserved to fight on.  Washington spent eight years in the field with one week at home in Mount Vernon.  That's what freedom was worth to Washington.

A period a few years later, actually captured as four score and seven years after Washington crossed the Delaware, Lincoln said the following, and probably the most famous short speech in American history, at Gettysburg dedicating the national military cemetery, having written under God into his speech while sitting, looking out over the cemetery which makes, frankly, the Ninth Circuit Court decision in 2002 so infuriatingly anti-American.  "It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.  It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave their last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people -- by the people -- for the people -- shall not perish from the earth."  I would argue that the victory of Sharia would clearly mean the end of the government Lincoln was describing.

However, for President Obama, I think it might be useful to quote a Democrat and to wrap this up with a Democrat.  So let me take you to one of the most extraordinary speeches, which is worth reading in toto but I'm only going to give you a few excerpts.  In January 20, 1961 at the peak of the Cold War, it begins with:

“The same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe -- the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God. 

We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution.  Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.  Born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world. 

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty. 

All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days, nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet.  But let us begin. 

In your hands, my fellow citizens, more than mine, will rest the final success or failure of our course.  Since this country was founded, each generation of Americans has been summoned to give testimony to its national loyalty.  The graves of young Americans who answered the call to service surround the globe.  Now the trumpet summons us again -- not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need -- not as a call to battle, though embattled we are -- but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out.”

I simply want to say as an American these are difficult times.  It requires us to tell the truth.  It requires us to think carefully and long about a grand national strategy.  It requires us to recommit ourselves to freedom, but it requires us also to say to the radical Islamists, as we said to the British government, as we said at a time of disunion, as we said to Nazi Germany, as we said to the Soviet Union, freedom will prevail.  Thank you.  Thank you all.