Dave Weigel points to a memo sent to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld outlining some Newt Gingrich‘s “seven strategic necessities.” Gingrich observes that the military is great at eliminating bad guys (the first campaign) but less effective at building societies after whole cloths afterwards (the second campaign). In this vein,Gingrich seems to contemplate “total war” in Palestine. A “total war” that will be fought by American troops:
The only hope for peace between Israel and the Palestinian people is for the United Statesto overtly ally with those Palestinians who will accept Israel if they have safety, health,prosperity and freedom and in this alliance defeat and ultimately eliminate the threat ofthe terrorists
Victory in the Israel-Palestinian conflict thus inherently means victory both in a campaign against terrorists and in a campaign to build a safe, healthy, prosperous, free Palestinian society.
In this case victory in a total war surrounded by civilians requires waging the first and second campaigns concurrently.
The specialists at Quantico, Fort Benning and Fort Bragg should be assigned the job of developing in detail a doctrine, strategy and structure for winning this total war on behalf of the Palestinian people against the terrorists. The intelligence community should be involved for its knowledge but the doctrine for war winning should come from specialists in policing, urban warfare, and guerrilla operations in the military.
The goal is to give the President the instruments he needs to be able to win if the forces of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, AI Fatah, etc insist on total war.
This is sort of wrapped in the language of counterinsurgency, but it doesn’t take much imagination to contemplate what a disaster this would be for Palestinians, or for the U.S. strategic interests in general. Keep in mind that this was June 2003, not that long after the invasion of Iraq, and Gingrich was already contemplating “total war” in Palestine. How many wars is the U.S. supposed to fight at once?
