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Tomorrow, former Speaker of the House and current American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Newt Gingrich will give a keynote address at an AEI event called, "America at Risk: Camus, National Security, and Afghanistan."
From the AEI website:
Almost nine years after the 9/11 attacks, the United States has yet to confront the threat posed by the extremist and irreconcilable wing of Islam. Former Speaker of the House and AEI senior fellow Newt Gingrich will warn that now is the time to awaken from self-deception about the nature of our enemies and rebuild a bipartisan commitment, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, to defend America. Drawing on the lessons of Camus and Orwell, Gingrich will describe the dangers of a wartime government that uses language and misleading labels to obscure reality. He will explain why we need a debate about this larger war against the irreconcilable wing of Islam—which mortally threatens America’s way of life, freedom, and rule of law—and how it relates to the nuclear threat from Iran and the various other risks posed to America’s very existence. Most importantly, Gingrich will argue that America will remain at risk until it confronts this willful blindness about the nature of its enemies and the nature of the war in which it is engaged.
Under normal circumstances, the biggest concern would have been what Camus was doing in a Gingrich speech. But after becoming so aggressive on the Islamic community center issue near Ground Zero, a number of those at think tanks and in the blogosphere are on high alert for Gingrich's Thursday speech.
It has it's place in the Republican divide on security issues, according to Brian Katulis:
The WikiLeaks release this week of thousands of classified documents on the war in Afghanistan has reignited the political debate over the direction of the war and overall U.S. national security, an issue that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is due to tackle Thursday in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute. Gingrich weighs in at a moment when the Republican Party is more divided on national security than it has been in decades.
Andrew Sullivan writes at the Daily Dish:
No word, one supposes, of "enhanced interrogation techniques". No grasp that fighting Jihadist terror may take more than polarizing rhetoric - or that polarizing rhetoric might actually make things worse. Notice too the "wilfull" blindness. That means the president is knowingly aiding and abetting the enemy. You can see the crude Cheneyism of all this: set up a fall campaign premised on the absurdity that the Obama administration is targeting white Americans for discrimination, run against the mosque blocks away from Ground Zero, and then accuse the president in code of being a traitor to his country.
It's all so Weimar, isn't it?
And Zaid Jilani over at Think Progress sees the absurdity in using Camus and Orwell.
The irony here is that both French philosopher Albert Camus and British author George Orwell subscribed to political ideologies that Gingrich, who recently wrote “To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine,” would find anathema. Camus was an avowed atheist and one of the founders of humanist existentialism. He also was a member of several left-wing socialist and communist parties, including the French Communist Party, and wrote a famous essay calling for the unequivocal abolition of the death penalty. Later in his life, he became a noted anti-war activist advocating for peace between Algerian independence fighters and the French government. Meanwhile, Orwell moved to Spain specifically to fight in its civil war on behalf of the Workers Party of Marxist Unification, and his most famous book, 1984, warned about the dangers of a government that is always at war. Previously, Gingrich has cited Orwell and Camus to lecture about issues like financial bubbles and how radical the Obama administration supposedly is. Given his choice of role models, one has to wonder whether Gingrich is speaking out against anti-war secular socialists or endorsing them.
But the real question, though, is: how will this all play out on Gingrich Productions?
At Politico today, Center for American Progress senior fellow, Brian Katulis, argues that recent events have shown exactly how divided Republicans are over security issues.
The recent intraparty battering of Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele — after his comments that characterized Afghanistan as virtually hopeless and called it “a war of Obama’s choosing” — was really only a sideshow to this bigger story. The last time Republicans were so sharply at odds was the party’s debate with its isolationist wing before World War II.
Dissension in the Republican ranks was on full display in the conservative reactions to the Obama administration’s National Security Strategy this spring. Conservative foreign policy analysts couldn’t decide whether to accuse the Obama administration of plagiarism or treason. Some praised the strategy as a continuation of the Bush administration’s approach; others condemned it as a recipe for weakness and an appeasement of America’s enemies.
Brookings' Michael O'Hanlon Answers Questions on Afghanistan
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