Along the way he has had a hand in shaping some of the most important decisions of our time. Although he is a historian by training he has spent as much time making history as he has studying it. I’ll give you a few highlights.

 

Dr. Gingrich began his career as a Professor of History and Geography at the University of West Georgia. In 1978 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives where he represented Georgia’s Sixth District which he did for more than twenty (20) years. He became an early and reliable ally to the Ronald Reagan Whitehouse and an architect of the contemporary conservative movement.

Beginning in 1989 he served as House Minority Whip and in 1994 he coauthored “A Contract With America” and led the Republican Party into the majority for the first time in four decades. As Speaker of the House he pushed through major legislation that resulted in welfare reform and tax cuts and a balanced budget. The Washington Times called him an “indispensable leader” and in 1995 Time magazine named him their Man of the Year. In bestowing this honor they wrote “leaders make things possible, exceptional leaders make things inevitable. Gingrich belongs in the category of the exceptional.

Speaker Newt Gingrich:  Thank you very very much. I always worry about introductions of that scale because about half way through them I start to get excited about listening to the person being described then I realize it’s me and I don’t think I can live up to it. It’s a great honor to be here and I really think this is a remarkable time and I appreciate very much the opportunity to chat with you today.

I am going to take questions in a little while but first I want to lay out a framework of thought and I really want to talk about the challenge of morality and reality in democratic societies. This relates directly to the quandary we find ourselves in and the difficulty we are having, for example with the State Department and I want to take two examples; Stanly Baldwin in the 1930s and Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s.

Baldwin was a very very popular British politician and he came to the conclusion, Britain was in the middle of the Great Depression and things were very difficult, and he came to the conclusion that he could not tell the British people the truth about the rise of Adolf Hitler because they would not accept the potential burden of rearmament. So he clearly and deliberately misled the people of Britain about the rate at which the Third Reich was rebuilding its military capabilities.

Now, Churchill who was generally a very generous person when he was a war time Prime Minister in 1945, was approached by his staff who reminded him that it was Stanly Baldwin’s ninetieth birthday and they said, “don’t you want to send him a birthday greeting?” and he said “I can’t, millions of people died because he refused to tell the truth.”

Now that is a pretty harsh judgment from a man in the very same period had been vilified and attacked by the news media for telling the truth. If you go back and look in the 1930s it is as much the British news media as it is the British politicians who are determined to avoid reality. As late as the spring of 1940, after the war had been going on since September, 1939 the British Newspapers were advised by the government to not be too aggressive in describing the German people in a negative way because they did not want to make the hostility worse. This was before the collapse of France and before the bombing campaign.

You had this whole mindset saying can’t we find some way to accommodate the un-accommodate-able? Can’t we find some way to avoid facts that frighten us? Can’t we find some way to pretend it will all work out?

By contrast, a favorite series from which I learned a great deal, a set of novels about Horatio Hornblower, who is a fictional naval character in the Napoleonic Wars. They were written by a man who was about to go on a cruise. That morning he noticed in the newspaper in 1936 that Hitler had reoccupied the Rhineland and that neither France nor Britain was going to do anything. He said later, he concluded that that meant war would come and that meant France would fall and that meant Britain would be alone once again as it was against Napoleon.

So literally in 1936 he began writing this series of novels about a heroic British naval captain fighting Napoleon when Britain was alone because he wanted to communicate the idea that we will survive and we will be able to defeat the enemy.

So you had this gap. Those who saw had no power and those who had power were afraid to see. I think if you look at the current situation with the Iranian dictatorship you see almost exactly the same thing.

The other example is Reagan and Reagan tells you a little about, and we were talking about this at lunch about why you have trouble with the State Department. Reagan represented a profound shift in foreign policy. The national establishment of both parties had concluded that the Soviet Union was real, that the Soviet Union was dangerous and you had to find a way to accommodate them.

The favorite language of the 1970s was that you were going to have Détente, a French word meaning “understanding”, and somehow we would work everything out. We had gone through such successful Détente that they had invaded Afghanistan, that they had proxy forces in Grenada, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Angola and El Salvador, they thought they were on offense everywhere and they thought the correlation of forces was shifting and they thought that they were going to win.

A French intellectual wrote a book called “The Death of Democracy”; Western intellectuals were generally in despair, and along comes this guy who had made movies, including two with a chimpanzee, but someone who, starting in 1947 had a remarkably clear understanding of the enemy.

There is a new book coming out about Reagan in Hollywood that takes you step by step through the communists who were in the various unions in Hollywood and his encounters with them and his realization that they were sincere.

I would argue that the people who represent the current Iranian dictatorship are sincere. They want to defeat us. They want to drive us out of the Middle East. They want to in fact create a world in which they are a dominant power. They are prepared to use state terrorism in order to achieve it and they are pretty open about what they are doing and I think they believe it. I don’t think these are people who are being hypocritical.

When I hear [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad talk I have the sense that he is quite sincere in his desire to use nuclear weapons. In my experience with history, when dictators tell you they will do something it is useful to believe them. It’s not just bluster.

So Reagan comes along and one of the really historic moments, a reporter says to Reagan in 1980, “What’s your vision of the Cold War?”And he says four words that change the history of the human race, he says “we win, they lose”. Now everyone in Washington said this was crazy. What do you mean we win? How could you possibly thing the Soviet Empire will lose? This is a period when American intellectuals were impressed and to some extent intimidated by the Soviet Union. You had economists writing that the Soviet economy was better than ours. You had the CIA grossly overestimating the strength of the East German economy. There was the sense that these people were massive and powerful.

When Reagan became president, he began to implement calmly and methodically a grand strategy for the defeat of the Soviet Empire. Now, in terms of my comment about the State Department, Reagan decides that he wants to give a speech in which he is going to say in Berlin, “Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall.” Now Reagan, back in 1967 had gone to Berlin as Governor and he had a throwaway line, he looked at the wall and said “that wall sure is ugly, they ought to tear it down.”

In the back of his head, he had this idea. Secretary of State Schultz told me this story. Reagan sent over a copy of the speech to the State Department to edit and it came back and they had taken out the line. They said it will offend Gorbachev and we know it’s not going to happen. You should not set yourself up to be ridiculed. Reagan put it back in and sent it back over a second time. It came back a second time. They had taken it out. Secretary Schultz told me, he gets the third copy in Reagan’s handwriting saying “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” And he gets a phone call, remember Reagan had won reelection carrying forty-nine (49) states. The phone call is the President. You need to tell your editor that I’m the President, he isn’t.

I didn’t know this story until recently, they then get to Berlin and they have this in the text, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. At breakfast that morning every member of the Senior Staff, representatives of the CIA, State Department, National Security Council, all of them begged Reagan to take the line out. They said, it’s just going to irritate Gorbachev, the wall is going to be there for thirty (30) more years, [and] you are going to look foolish. Of course, as all of you know, the wall collapsed two years later.

Reagan was interviewed that night by Sam Donaldson and some of you may remember this, you had the Germans crossing the wall, people are excited, they are demonstrating and they are all happy and Donaldson asked are you surprised. In classically Reagan model he said, “Actually Sam, I always thought they were Germans on both sides so it never occurred to me that they would mind getting rid of the wall.” It was that simple. It was just over.

Now I am telling you that story because we are in a period, and I wish this were a much bigger part of the presidential campaign. We are in a period where we need to have a very serious conversation about morality and reality, which when done correctly, come together. Reagan’s policy of defeating the Soviet Empire was both morally correct and very realistic. Churchill’s position of understanding who Hitler was both morally correct and if implemented in 1935 would have save millions of lives. So it was actually very realistic.

We are in a period of total confusion in this city. Let me just give you the most recent example. This is something they were reminding me of. If you check my career I have been around a long time. As Reagan once said, “I knew Thomas Jefferson” and Thomas Jefferson would have been against the Iranian dictatorship.  

So I’ve done this a long time. I first became concerned about the Iranian dictatorship in 1979, for fairly obvious reasons. Any dictatorship that sponsors the violation of international law to hold Americans hostage for 440 days is a regime that has enormous potential to be dangerous.

There is a new book out by Bob Kaplan in which he talks about the pattern of Geography and long term historical facts. Iran is a big country. Iran is a country with enormous resources. Iran is a country with a culture that is very dynamic and very proud and very energetic. The idea that you could allow a fanatic dictatorship to isolate itself from the world and not watch great danger emerge requires repudiating everything we know about thousands of years of history on the Iranian plateau.

It makes no sense at all. If you look at the geography of the region Iran ultimately has an impact everywhere, from the Persian Gulf to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Central Asia. The fact is, this is a country with whom any serious world leader has to be aware and has to take into account and has to think about on a regular basis.

As a former historian… I guess you are always an historian once you’re a historian. As a former practicing historian, as early as 1979 I was concerned about the dictatorship. In the 1980s watching them in Lebanon, it was clear they had become a very sophisticated exporter of terrorism. There is nothing that has changed in the current dictatorship. It is a fanatic imposition on the people of Iran by a power structure determined to create a future unacceptable to the United States.

The reality part about this ought to be pretty straight forward. These are people who are not going to change. They did not seize power over thirty years ago in order to be negotiated with by our State Department and give up their identity. You have to start with, what are the negotiations going to be like. They will be drawn out. They will be dishonest. They will involve all sorts of placating comments as long as they have no meaning.

There are two problems with the current strategy. One that we think they are going to give in, and two that we think you can indirectly threaten them enough to get them to change their fundamental nature. I don’t believe that is going to happen. If you look at the recent meeting in Tehran, of the Non-Aligned nations, which in many ways is a meeting of people who would like to criticize the United States. There were one hundred twenty (120) countries represented. This is after we’ve spent years isolating the regime. You have the Secretary General of the United Nations there.

At what level does the Washington establishment have to lie to itself to live through stuff like this and say, “that’s not working.” And that’s where we are. It’s a very serious very long term problem. Now I believe there are two unacceptable futures an only one acceptable future. One unacceptable future is the current dictatorship getting nuclear weapons. I believe that is an enormous threat. I will also say in passing that if you are worried about weapons of mass destruction, the degree to which we are in danger, the Israelis are in danger, and frankly almost everybody is in danger from the Syrians losing control of their chemical warfare stock is a very very immediate problem and one that I think this Administration has greatly underestimated.

The Syrians have an enormous supply of chemical weapons and there is a very grave danger that they are going to fall into the hands of people who are very eager to use them in ways that could be very bad. That’s an immediate short term problem. Of course Syria is an ally of Iran and there is no question the Assad regime is desperately dependant on the Tehran Regime for weapons, for money, for moral support. We should have a strategy of blocking all of the airplane flights and eliminating the ability of the Iranian regime getting equipment and supplies to Assad which would accelerate the end of the fight in Syria.

So, one future is, we keep playing diplomatic games, they keep lying to us and one morning they have nuclear weapons and I think there is a very real danger they will use them. I also think there is a very real danger that they will just lose one or two. One morning they announce “Oh, we’re shocked” We don’t know what to do, if it shows up somewhere in the world it will be despite our best efforts.  

I think that’s a very dangerous, remember, just because we’re sophisticated and we believe in very expensive solutions and so we build ICBM’s doesn’t mean you have to deliver a weapon that way. You can deliver a nuclear weapon in a container, in fact there has been a RAND study on what would happen if a nuclear weapon went off in Long Beach, in a container ship, and it’s pretty horrifying. This is not a game, this is not even 9/11, add 2 zeroes, and you begin to have some idea of what could be at stake here. So one totally unacceptable future should be, an Iranian nuclear weapon. This dictatorship, I mean we’ve lived with a number of countries having nuclear weapons, we haven’t had a country which was an aggressively determined country that publicly says it wants to use them, get nuclear weapons.

The other, I think unacceptable future, is a preemptive nuclear attack. I am very dubious that anybody can put together, whether the Israeli’s, United States, anybody, can put together a preemptive attack which can get at enough of the nuclear program to stop it. I think, first of all, the way the Iranian dictatorship has put its nuclear facilities they would have huge civilian collateral damage, and the world would be appalled at the cost. Second, they’d rebuild it. I mean, if you have the same dictatorship there a week after the bombing campaign, why would you think they’re going to back off? And so I think, that’s frankly, that’s not as undesirable a future as them having a nuclear weapon, but I think it’s a pretty darn undesirable future, I think we should be doing right now, everything we can to avoid both of these futures.

And this is when we get around to what brings all of you here. Think about what you’re living through. In Libya, a large number of people, many of whom we know, actually fought against the Americans in Iraq, get weapons, and run around killing Ghaddafi’s people, and do we list them as a terrorist organization? Do we say, “no no, these are untouchables.”? No, we end up covertly helping them, and ultimately end up overtly helping them. In Syria, there are all sorts of people we don’t know, that are running around killing Assad’s government. Do we say this is clearly inappropriate behavior? No, we are providing all sorts of covert support, and I think we clearly now hope that Assad will disappear.

Yet faced with a dramatically …  Libya was not a threat to us. Truth is Syria is not… they’re a little bit of a threat to Israel; they’re not a threat to the United States. Faced with a dictatorship which is a threat to us, what do we do? We isolate the most effective ally we had in the Iranian people and decide they are unacceptable and this is why I started with the Reagan story about the State Department and the speech he gave. We have had a history in our State Department of finding every plausible excuse to avoid being effective. This is not new; I gave a speech on this in 2002 at the American Enterprise Institute and said we needed a fundamental, thorough overhaul of the culture of Foreign Services because this makes no sense at all. An America that understood how dangerous the dictatorship it would be actively working with the MEK and would be actively candidly working with every possible group that showed up I mean every ethnic group and as all of you know Iran has a very wide range of ethnic groups; every student group, every unionized group, I mean you name it, if it was bus drivers for freedom I’d be for helping them. Now I feel this particularly because Callista and I did two movies, we did a movie about Reagan called, “Rendezvous with Destiny,” and then we did a movie about John Paul the Second going back to Poland called, “Nine Days that Changed the World.” Now we were faced with a Soviet Empire that was massive, totalitarian and very, very dangerous with thousands of nuclear weapons. The Pope, Prime Minister Thatcher, and President Reagan We end up covertly helping them, and ultimately end up overtly helping them. In Syria there are all sorts of people we don’t know who are running around killing Assad’s government. Do we say this is clearly inappropriate behavior? No. We’re providing all sorts of covert support and I think we clearly now hope that Assad will disappear. Yet faced with a dramatically…Libya was not a threat to us. Truth is Syria is not…they’re a little bit of a threat to Israel; they’re not a threat to the United States. Faced with a dictatorship which is a threat to us, what do we do? We isolate the most effective ally we had in the Iranian people and decide they are unacceptable and this is why I started with the Regan story about the State Department and the speech he gave. We have had a history in our State Department of finding every plausible excuse to avoid being effective. This is not new; I gave a speech on this in 2002 at the American Enterprise Institute and said we needed a fundamental, thorough overhaul of the culture of Foreign Services because this makes no sense at all. An America that understood how dangerous the dictatorship it would be actively working with the MEK and would be actively candidly working with every possible group that showed up I mean every ethnic group and as all of you know Iran has a very wide range of ethnic groups; every student group, every unionized group, I mean you name it, if it was bus drivers for freedom I’d be for helping them. Now I feel this particularly because Callista and I did two movies, we did a movie about Regan called, “Rendezvous with Destiny,” and then we did a movie about John Paul the Second going back to Poland called, “Nine Days that Changed the World.”

Now we were faced with a Soviet Empire that was massive, totalitarian and very, very dangerous with thousands of nuclear weapons. The Pope, Prime Minister Thatcher, and President Reagan designed a strategy to replace the regime and it took a decade of struggle but they literally broke the Soviet Empire. 

Now the idea that we could not design a strategy against a dictatorship in Tehran; a dictatorship which can’t deliver economically, oppresses its people, based on everything I’ve seen has lost the overwhelming majority of people under 40 who now want change, and the fact that we can’t all come together and say we should all be on the same side makes no sense at all.  And this is why I think on a bipartisan basis you now see 90 people in the House sponsoring a resolution to recognize that the MEK is in fact an ally of ours against a regime that we cannot tolerate. And I think what you’ve also seen in the Senate for example, the Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, the Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee speaking out. These are both Democrats, and in one case a former presidential candidate. To be fair, and I’m a partisan Republican, to be fair this policy has been going on now for three administrations, starting with Clinton and continuing through George W. Bush into Obama so it is an institutional policy of the State Department and I believe that it makes no sense at all. And I think that, I have two pieces of advice that I just want to share with you and then I’m going to take questions.

thinking about how to solve this and I’ve tried to spend most of my career figuring out solutions not problems and trying to understand what we could do next. I have two specific suggestions; one is that you put together a project to humanize the people who are currently being moved to Camp Liberty, so that people in the United States understand how many American ties there are. As we did here today when I was talking to several different people, you know you start talking to people who have a cousin or a niece or a relative or a sister I mean all of a sudden it becomes a different story, and it becomes a story which normal Americans understand how they would feel if it was their niece or their sister or their cousin and I think it’s very important to humanize the story and don’t just let it remain a political story.

The second point I’d make is, and this goes to the whole naivety of where we are in dealing frankly with both with radical Islamism and dealing with the dictatorship in Iran. We really need to understand we need to have much more public information, much more methodical information about the level of the disinformation campaign that the Iranian dictatorship is running.  I mean when I see certain articles and I see certain people quoted I’m virtually convinced, I don’t have proof right now and this is why we need help, but I’m virtually convinced that there are things that are planted by the dictatorship; and I think we really underestimate as a free society which is as open as we are, we have this permanent challenge that totalitarian regimes and dictatorships have an ability to mass resources over time and have an ability to try to (make changes?)

I think if we run and look for example at some of the apologists for Tehran, you’d find they have very direct ties to Iran. And I noticed the same thing candidly with the Saudis, that you’d start finding University professorships that happened out of a ten million dollar endowment and they are permanently apologizing and it makes you wonder about the pattern. And in some cases you now have people, when you find people who are apologists for the regime, I think it’s very important to ask yourself, why are they apologists and where did that information come from?  And I think that we are very naive to allow ourselves to be manipulated by our enemies on the scale that we are.

So I look forward to your questions, I think that this is a long difficult struggle, and I know for some of you you’ve been at it a good while. I wish it could be faster and simpler all I can report in closing is, this probably won’t make you all feel all that much better but Regan encounters genuine Communists in Hollywood in 1947, the Soviet Empire disappears Christmas of 1991. I mean this was a long campaign, but we won, and we won because the American people came to understand reality and we came to sustain an effort and we sustained it for a long time and we did it because it was no practical alternative; not because it was fun not because we were particularly aggressive but because we had no choice. I would say the same thing here. We have a dictatorship which in its mind, has been at war with us since 1979 and we keep trying to find some way to be nice to them while they figure out new ways to be at war with us. And I think we need to find a way to educate the American people that there is an absolute congruence between morality and reality and that we need a policy which has the right intensity the right focus which unifies every element of Iranian society which is opposed to the dictatorship and which has the active support of the United States which is for replacing the regime not for negotiating with it so I look forward to your questions.