that former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich has called for a major overhaul of the State Department in order "to enable it to explain Washington's policies more effectively in a world of rising anti-American feelings." He has criticized it before, but now is calling for a "comprehensive reform", and an expansion of it by 40%.
He said that American statecraft had become stodgy and "too narrow" for modern times, that better communications with the world were desperately needed but "literally beyond the capacity of the current system," and that the Foreign Service culture favored "politeness and accommodation" at times when a tougher approach was warranted.
The State Department should not have been caught off-guard by French opposition to the war, Mr. Gingrich said, reflecting a commonly heard conservative criticism. And he said the failure to win full Turkish support for the Iraq war was not "trivial."
The White House defended Mr. Powell following Mr. Gingrich's earlier comments, but Mr. Gingrich suggested today that the State Department was wrongly diluting President Bush's more muscular messages on American foreign policy.
His article in
Foreign Policy magazine calls for a new "global communication strategy" that would much more actively seek acceptance of American policies, and where that failed, at least clearly inform the world of American plans.
... Mr. Gingrich was not apologetic about wanting to spread American values robustly. If other countries failed to support "core values" important to the United States Ð free speech, free markets, free elections, equality of women, racial equality and other values Ð then "it is hard to imagine a world in which U.S. safety can be secured."
"I don't actually call for us to be liked," he said. But, he added, "there has to be an understanding of what we're doing."
Like most right wingers he's really looking to make the government, in this case the State Department, a tool of his own private agenda. His idea of "reform" is to make the government do conservative bidding. For instance, he's not calling for greater freedom of the press, but for pressuring the foreign press to represent the American viewpoint, whether they like it or not. The headline in the article in Foreign Policy itself makes it a bit clearer.
Why is anti-American sentiment rising unabated around the globe? Try the U.S. State Department, which has abdicated values and principle in favor of accommodation and passivity. Only a top-to-bottom reform and culture shock will transform the State Department into an effective communicator of President George W. Bush's foreign policy.
This clearly seems to be a veiled criticism of Secretary Powell, expressing conservative dissatisfaction that he is not as militaristic as most of the rest of the Republicans. But blaming the State Department for anti-American sentiment is rather foolish. It's clearly the President himself and the Defense Department that are the most responsible. Muzzling the only part of the administration that seems to make sense to the rest of the world certainly won't help things.
The rest of the world, and the majority of the American people as well, are not against American policies because they don't understand them. But rather because they understand them all too well, and realize just how wrong and misguided and ineffective they really are.
