Newt Gingrich and his wife celebrate his win in South Carolina Saturday night (Photo: Matt Rourke/AP/Via Bangor Daily News).
Newt Gingrich’s South Carolina win in the Republican primary thrusts the former speaker, and his benefactor Sheldon Adelson, back into the heart of the political discussion. And while much has been made of Gingrich’s comments on Palestinians–they’re “terrorists,” an “invented people”–less attention has been paid to Gingrich’s evolving positions on Iran and Adelson’s influence on the shift.
Wired‘s Spencer Ackerman has a comic, if scary, look at Gingrich’s proposed plans to overthrow the Iranian regime. But he also notes Gingrich’s past, less hawkish position on Iran:
The irony is that Gingrich wasn’t always so bellicose. Back in 2002, he predicted that the Islamic Republic’s days were numbered, and outright dismissed the prospect of bombing. All it would take is a little diplomatic outreach to inspire Iran’s natural pro-American tendencies, he told an audience in Melbourne. “I believe you are likely to have a modernizing, democratic Iranian regime within a year or two,” he said. Call it an evolving position.
So what happened between 2002 and now? Sheldon Adelson. Beginning in 2006, the wealthy Greater Israel advocate began to pour millions of dollars into a Gingrich PAC. Acclaimed investigative journalist Wayne Barrett has more in The Daily Beast:
Gingrich also referred in the 2005 article to the threat of a nuclear Iran, but without urging any immediate American or Israeli action. While there’s no doubt this is a graver concern than it was six years ago, Gingrich said then that Iran was “believed by many countries to be secretly developing nuclear weapons.” He put this in the broader context of North Korea and Pakistan already having nukes, and Gingrich calling them and a chemical-weapon-armed Syria “hostile to Israel’s existence.” But he clearly saw it as a future threat, concluding that “another generation of continuing hatred and violence could culminate in a devastating attack” on Israel. No presidential candidate now, however, has done more saber rattling against Iran, another Adelson echo.
In Connie Bruck’s extraordinary New Yorker profile of Adelson, she reported that as early as June 2007, Adelson was so ready for war with Iran that he separated the men from the boys on the basis of their willingness to strike Iran. At a conference in Prague sponsored by his own Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies, he dismissed the son of the former shah because, he told one participant, “he doesn’t want to attack Iran.” He said he liked another Iranian dissident at the conference “because he says that if we attack, the Iranian people will be ecstatic.” He attributed his own lust for an attack to his love of Israel, adding that he didn’t care what happened in Iran.
Another U.S. group Adelson bankrolled, the now defunct Freedom’s Watch, listed Iran as one of its two top concerns on its website, and enlisted Gingrich as one of its prime defenders in 2008 when NBC refused to air its ads the network branded “too political.” Gingrich went on Fox calling for an NBC boycott. In addition, Israel Hayom, the Adelson-owned newspaper in Israel that’s become its largest daily, is simultaneously beating the drums for an Iranian attack and a Gingrich nomination. In an interview with its editor, Gingrich called a possible Israeli attack on Iran “an act of self defense.”
Gingrich has become a fount of anti-Iranian ideas—sabotaging their oil supply, funding every dissident group, and even assassinating their nuclear scientists, which he proposed way back in November, long before the recent murder in the streets of Tehran.
It’s true that, even without Adelson’s millions, Gingrich would have plenty of reasons to saber-rattle at Iran, like the fact that the Republican base contains some fervent Christian Zionists licking their lips at the thought of an Iran war. But as Barrett’s piece shows, Gingrich has followed Adelson’s line on Israel and Iran after the cash the speaker received. Expect more of that hawkish line as the campaign rolls on and Adelson’s millions continue to shape the outcome.
I think Ol Shelly believes Newt will be the nominee and doesnt want to get left out in the cold….. And he’s probably right in his predictions.
Newt has also promised that his first act as POTUS would be to make Jerusalem officially a Jewish city, and our embassy would be moved there ASAP.
So what happened between 2002 and now?
Khatami was defeated . And Israel followed Sharon.
Sharon is brain dead but Adelson must be too if he wants Israel to go to war with Iran.
Did the Baal Shem Tov ever imagine what the return to Jerusalem would actually mean? Depleted uranium and eternal war.
Gingrich’s life is a monument to shoddiness, personal and political. Glib he is, though, and he’s got the X’tian crazies in his pocket, too, which is hard to believe given his background. Time to leave the US permanently if this moron becomes President.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/feb/09/republican-nightmare/
“Many politicians of course suffer from an excess of energy and a convenient attitude toward truth, but the emerging consensus on Gingrich was: he can’t control his instability even for selfish purposes (let alone for the common good). “He is a human hand grenade,” wrote Peggy Noonan, “who walks around with his hand on the pin, saying, ‘Watch this!’” But it was Joe Scarborough, the morning talk-show host familiar with Gingrich as a fellow member of Congress in the 1990s, who found the simplest formulation: “If Newt Gingrich is the smartest guy in the room, leave that room.”
Politically, Gingrich’s weakest point was doubtless his having taken $1.6 million from Freddie Mac—for work (he said) as a historical consultant. That association could do real harm to a cherished Republican fable: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are alleged to be the root of the evil behind the financial collapse of 2007–2008. Many of the party’s leaders, and most of the prominent right-wing talkers who are in effect the party’s coaches, have placed the FMs in a completely different category from Goldman Sachs, AIG, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and other unregulated banks and financial firms. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are routinely denounced as a mortgage scam for welfare queens—an invention of Jimmy Carter and affirmative action that finally brought down the American economy. The renewable memory of Gingrich snuffling at that trough would rob the party of a magnetic issue before the general campaign got off its first antigovernment squibs and pinwheels.
A larger question set the Washington press corps to work. What had Newt been doing for the last fifteen years? What prospects remain, after all, for an ambitious freelance Republican after he is publicly disgraced? The answer was: plenty. Saving Lives & Saving Money (2003), Gingrich’s proposal for health care reform, in fact, shared many features of the Obama legislation—but it gave more emphasis to “predatory trial-lawyer behavior,” and took a singular interest in diabetes management. Two series of novels by Gingrich, about the War of Independence and the Civil War respectively, have moved further along in their trajectory. His most recent political seller, To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine (2011), turns out to be a religiose revision of To Renew America (1995), the bumptious manifesto that explained the rationale of the Contract with America of 1994. A more recent publication, Rediscovering God in America (2009), “Featuring the Photography of Callista Gingrich,” is a guide to D.C. heritage sites, from the Capitol and the White House to the National Archives to the war memorials and presidential monuments—an item meant to be sold in the gift shops on the Mall as a sort of earphone substitute and eventual souvenir.
Gingrich arrived in Congress in 1979 just as C-SPAN arrived; and in those days (the earliest memories of him, for many of us) he often stood alongside Trent Lott, in a chamber otherwise empty of every entity save the camera, and exchanged remarks on the public weal and scandals of mismanagement. Gingrich was always in command, and he was tireless. He could speak at sight on all subjects. It is a voice you can tune out, but tune back in with ease; it bobs along in bite-sized clauses of nine or ten words, the informality improved and not stiffened by a decent grammatical connective tissue. He has the air of a respected first-year college teacher, giving you some of his time, and he lets you stay on after office hours. Though Gingrich’s partisan animus was never in question, his penchant for covering all bets (knowledge-wise) with extreme statements on every side of a given question ensured against the tedium of moderation. He has the cocksureness, the insularity, and the continuous need of an audience of the born autodidact.
But Gingrich, as his supporters like to point out, is a licensed scholar. His MA thesis at Tulane on the effects of the Russian Revolution on French diplomacy (1968) ran 184 pages; his Ph.D. dissertation on postwar Belgian education policy in the Congo was nearly twice as long and relied on sources in French. The latter production comes to its first aimless but provocative paradox at the start of the third paragraph: “It would be just as misleading to speak in generalities of ‘white exploitation’ as it once was to talk about ‘native backwardness.’ We need to know what kind of exploitation, for what reasons, and at what price.” The pompous show of evenhandedness is nicely geared to approximate the thoughtless person’s idea of a thinking man.
To Save America is replete with the phraseology of “secular oppression”; its oppressors do not merely violate the spirit of the Founders, they are “holding the Constitution hostage.” The utilitarian dispensary seems truer to Gingrich’s nature than such simulated paranoia, and besides, this is a beast with laws of its own. “Who rides the tiger can never dismount”: but it must be added that the most perilous aspect of Gingrich’s temperament is doubtless the very thing that appeals most warmly to the people who are drawn to him. He loves the speed of the ride. “