In the past, former Speaker Newt Gingrich has been a hispandering hustler when shopping for diverse votes, but these days he does speak plainly about the threat of hostile Islam in its current incarnation. For that he is to be congratulated.
Jihadists are pumped up about recent events, which are going their way because nobody, particularly the United States or neighboring Middle Eastern states, is doing much of anything to stop them.
Today for example, jihadists have taken hundreds of Yazidi women as captives who presumably are now slaves, just as hundreds of Nigerian schoolgirls were kidnapped and enslaved in April by Boko Haram, another Islam group.
Unlike the administration, Gingrich has a reasonable strategy against an enemy that kills everyone who won’t convert to Islam: destroy them. Too bad he didn’t mention ending Muslim immigration to America.
Below, ISIS mass murders Iraqi soldiers. The group is particularly bloodthirsty, even for jihadists, and posts pictures of its atrocities on the internet.
Gingrich appeared on the CNN show New Day on Friday and didn’t pull any punches about the Religion of Slaughter.
CNN helpfully posts transcripts of all its shows. Here’s the segment from above:
CNN, New Day, August 8, 2014
KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: The United States has already dropped some, some food and water to tens of thousands of Iraqis trapped at the top of a mountain who had to flee the militants, so can the United States stop ISIS before the militants completely overrun Iraq? And most importantly from this perspective, what should the U.S. role be here?
Joining us to discuss, CNN’s “CROSSFIRE” host Newt Gingrich. So, Newt, I really am interested in getting your take on not only the president’s statement but also the action that the president decided to take last night.
NEWT GINGRICH, CNN HOST, “CROSSFIRE”: Well, let’s start with his statement, which is frankly a little confusing.
BOLDUAN: Why?
GINGRICH: Well, if he doesn’t want to risk American lives, he can pull them out of Erbil. I mean, there’s no obligation to sit in Erbil, so he’s trying to find a hometown “gosh, I have to do this, all of us patriots have to rally together. We’re not going to risk American lives.”
The tragedy of where we are — and this is not about President Obama. This is about President Bush. It’s about President Clinton. It’s about where the country has been now about radical Islamism probably for — probably since 1979 when the Iranians seized the American embassy. Nobody wants to tell the truth.
The truth is this is a radical Islamist group. They say openly if you don’t convert, we’ll kill you. It turns out they actually mean it. There’s no complexity. They’re exactly like Hamas. Hamas says openly we’re going to kill every Jew; that’s a direct quote from two weeks. We will kill every Jew. The difference is that is ISIS gaining power and they’re doing exactly what they said they would do.
And I think this, if you go from Boko Haram in Nigeria all the way across region, what you see is a radical Islamist force. Nobody in the American State Department, nobody in the White House, not just Obama, but for three or four administrations, we have not had the courage to confront how bad this is, and it’s getting worse.
By the way, yesterday there were — there were ISIS forces in Lebanon occupying a town in the middle of a fight with the Lebanese army in northern Lebanon. They’re in Syria. They are recruiting people in Europe and the United States. They see themselves as a worldwide fight, and so the president says we’re going to stop them from getting to Erbil. Well, what does that accomplish?
BOLDUAN: Well then, what is your prescription? That’s — you want to — do you want to see combat troops on the ground? What are you saying?
GINGRICH: No. I think that we should be arming and training the Kurds, who are very reliable. We should be arming the traditional tribes with whom we had very good relations back when we were in Iraq. We should be providing air power in a massive way. We should be hunting down ISIS anywhere it exists, whether it’s in northern Syria, it’s in Lebanon or it’s in Iraq.
But our goal shouldn’t be to stop ISIS; our goal should be to destroy ISIS. This is a radical anti-human organization.
BOLDUAN: Do you not think, Newt, that you can accomplish that with — if you went really big on air strikes, that you can accomplish that, taking them out?
GINGRICH: I think if you train and equip Kurds and you train and equip traditional Sunni tribes and you ally yourself with everybody who wants to defeat ISIS, you will in fact defeat ISIS. But the goal should be clear, just as it should be in Gaza. The goal in Gaza should be the defeat of Hamas. Because Hamas means what it says. It wants to kill every Jew. ISIS means what it says. Well, you can’t co-exist with a neighbor whose stated public goal is to wipe your family out.
BOLDUAN: Well, we’re talking about how to accomplish —
GINGRICH: Right.
BOLDUAN: — what to do to accomplish that goal on the ground. But then you also have a problem here at home. You’ve got lawmakers last night, by and large, came out supporting president’s move, some saying it is not enough, as I’m hearing from you.
But you also have an American public, and we’ve talked about this before, Newt. They are war weary. They have no appetite to be going back in, to be throwing everything at it, to take on — to start — they’re not staying they’re going to start nation-building again, but they don’t want to go back in. What do you say to the American public?
GINGRICH: I don’t blame them. We’ve just had 12 years of war that accomplished almost nothing. You’re seeing that in Iraq right now; you’re seeing that with Hamas right now. Until we have a national strategy and we have an open, honest conversation — the president couldn’t even honestly describe ISIS last night because it goes against his ideology.
BOLDUAN: What do you mean? How was he misdescribing it last night?
GINGRICH: ISIS is a radical Islamist organization dedicated to wiping out everybody who is not prepared to convert to Islam. It has a very clear religious background, just as Hamas does, just as Boko Haram does. There is a war against Christians across the region, and the fact is that we have got to be prepared to be honest about this. We should be the ally of every rational moderate Muslim.
But we have to understand, with people like ISIS, this is going to end up sooner or later being war to the death. And what the American people deserve is a coherent strategy that gets us to a decisive victory and the minimum use of American troops and the maximum use of other kinds of American assets.
BOLDUAN: One thing that, of course, comes up is the question of is this mission creep? Or looking at it from the other side, is this not enough?
In answering those questions and kind of exploring that, you also, when you commit to something like this, you need to be prepared to answer the question, “Then what?” Has the president answered that.
GINGRICH: No. There’s a passion for some reason, particularly on the left, with this idea of targeted strikes. I remember doing this at one point in the Balkans when I was Speaker, and so I don’t understand what the term “targeted strikes” means. If ISIS is as evil as I’m describing, and I think it is, as the Pope has described in calling for humanitarian intervention, as everybody seems to describe in looking at what it’s doing, then we should be trying to defeat it everywhere, not saying, as the president said last night, boy, if you send a truck towards Erbil, we might kill it.
Well, what about the truck sitting two miles away with its engine idling waiting for us to not pay attention? I think either this is serious and we should figure out how to win, or this is not serious and we should figure out how to get out. And as I pointed out, he could pull the troops out of Erbil and he just eliminated one of his two excuses. There’s no reason we have to be there unless it’s part of a strategic purpose.
BOLDUAN: How does the political turmoil that’s also happening on ground in Iraq, how does that play into this? Because there is a possibility that we’re hearing — that they could get a new prime minister in the coming days. Does that change anything in your opinion in how the U.S. approaches this?
GINGRICH: Yes, look, I think Maliki has been a disaster, just as Karzai’s been a disaster in Afghanistan, and I think that’s the reality sometimes of going into countries like this, that you end up with a leader who is either very corrupt, very dishonest, trying to do — make sure his faction wins at the cost of everybody else.
We don’t have a very good doctrine, frankly, at the State Department for figuring out how you cope with people like that. Maliki has been a major problem for the last three or four years. Hopefully, he’ll be gone, but that won’t solve the problem. You now have an ISIS, a cancer that is spreading in the region, and a cancer that is recruiting in Europe and the United States.
BOLDUAN: But do you agree with the president’s statement though — and he said this to me when we sat down early on in this latest crisis, when we talked about this, and he said it again last night — there is no American military solution to the larger crisis in Iraq. Do you agree with him on that?
GINGRICH: No, and the reason I don’t agree with him is that his idea — the political solution is a fantasy. That’s my point. How are we going to have a political solution with Hamas who wants to kill every Jew? How are we going to have a political solution with ISIS, which wants to kill everybody who refuses to become Muslim? Ultimately, these are forces just like Nazi Germany that you end up defeating —
BOLDUAN: But he’s saying it’s Iraq — they need to be the ones who deal with this ultimately.
GINGRICH: Look, ISIS is now in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. It is recruiting in Europe and the United States. That’s my whole point. You’ve got to see this as a worldwide fight, not a locality by locality neighborhood brawl.
BOLDUAN: Newt, it’s great to see you. Thanks for coming on.
GINGRICH: Good to see you. Thank you.
