The Daily Background

Today on NBC’s Meet The Press with Tim Russert, probable presidential hopeful Newt Gingirch suggested that the United States could somehow win an Iraqi civil war he said, “even if you accept that this is a civil war.”

Gingrich compared winning the Iraqi civil war to winning the American civil war, but convniently left out the fact that there was no occupying force in the United States during its civil war. His logic seemed to be a naiive “If we won our civil war, then we can win theirs too!”

Gingrich also used the opportunity to plug several of his books, saying at one point “I wrote three novels about winning the American civil war… I also just did a novel on Pearl Harbor.”

In perhaps his most inflamatory statement, Gingrich suggested that if today’s Democrats ran Congress during World War II, that the US would have surrendered or made a peace treaty with the imperial Japanese government.

Later, Gingrich said that Iraq-focused diplomacy with Iran would be “like asking Nazi Germany if they could help us with fascist Italy.”

Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT), appearing on the program with Gingrich later responded:

The idea that we’ll have no talks with people we disagree with—Ronald Reagan, who you’ll be talking about in a few moments here, he would call the Soviet Union “the evil Empire/” He’d meet in Reykjavik to talk about arms control. Richard Nixon, certainly as strong an anti-communist as existed in the latter half of the 20th century, would meet with Mao Tse Tung, not because of the end in itself, but to explore and to examine whether or not we can reach some commonalty of common interest here. The idea we don’t talk to the Syrians, we don’t talk to the Iranians in a moment like this, I think, is terribly naive and dangerous for the country, in my view.

Gingrich later continued his string of inept metaphors, saying that George Washington was like Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, and that the American Revolution was “exactly the same” as the current situation in Iraq.

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