Today's Reading Assignment

Newt Gingrich, in the Washington Times, on the "Warnings From Gaza."

A couple of salient paragraphs are excerpted below. Mr. Gingrich's critique is hardly new, but it is certainly relevant:

The tragedy of the current debate in Washington is that while the inarticulateness and the failing performance of the Bush administration have led the American people to desire a new direction, the politics of the left insists that the new direction be less than President Bush. Yet the lessons of Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, New Jersey, the JFK plot, the Algerian bombings, the Iranian nuclear program, the conflict in Lebanon and now the defeat in Gaza all point to the need for a war policy that is substantially bigger and more robust than Mr. Bush.

As the forces of modernity are being ground up by terrorism, our political process is not producing a Churchill or Roosevelt to rally the democracies but instead embracing advocates of surrender withdrawal and defeat. As women are being oppressed, we remain silent. Faced with the weakness, vacillation and inarticulateness of the leaders of Israel and America, the people see the violence as senseless, the bloodshed as repugnant and the current strategies as too flawed to continue to invest in them.

At the end of his op-ed, Speaker Gingrich lists the "hard realities" that the west must confront in order to defeat the terrorists. Sadly, he notes, "the gap between our current pathetic reaction to the Hamas victory and the requirements of victory give some indication of how far the West has to go before it starts winning."

That's assuming, of course, that we actually want to win (see following post).