This has to be one of the more dangerous new NeoCon lines of thinking to come out of the mouths of the All War, All the Time republicans. I don't know why Gingrich wasted so much space in the Post, he could have just cut the whole column down to this "USA USA USA" and had a picture of himself with one of those big foam fingers.

...an Iran armed with nuclear weapons is a mortal threat to American, Israeli and European cities. If a nonnuclear Iran is prepared to finance, arm and train Hezbollah, sustain a war against Israel from southern Lebanon and, in Holbrooke's own words, "support actions against U.S. forces in Iraq," then what would a nuclear Iran be likely to do? Remember, Iranian officials were present at North Korea's missile launches on our Fourth of July, and it is noteworthy that Venezuela's anti-American dictator, Hugo Chávez, has visited Iran five times.

Even assuming that Iran were so irrational as to launch a nuclear strike on Israel, there is no guarantee that Iran or its neighbors would survive a first strike. Talking in absolute terms of such a strike and discounting diplomacy is exactly what the hardliners in the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Nixon adminstrations wanted when dealing with the Soviets.

What Gingrich apparently wants is a preemptive third world war, to settle the fact of American primacy in global affairs into the new millenium. Yeah, that's worked out so well in Iraq, hasn't it?

Eschewing diplomacy for direct military action is hardly a solution, and certainly not one when we have most of the active forces of the Army committed to either being in Iraq or in transit one way or the other for another tour there. The NeoCon fantasy of "shock and awe" air power is not a practical reality either. An educated guess would be that after GWI, most countries that had anything to hide put it in places where conventional munitions dropped from attack aircraft or targeted by cruise missles would do little to no damage.

As a goal this is precisely wrong. Defeating the terrorists and thwarting efforts by Iran and North Korea to gain nuclear and biological weapons must be the first goal of American policy. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, if violence is necessary to defeat the terrorists, the Iranians and the North Koreans, then it is regrettably necessary. If they can be disarmed with less violence, then that is desirable. But a nonviolent solution that allows the terrorists to become better trained, better organized, more numerous and better armed is a defeat. A nonviolent solution that leads to North Korean and Iranian nuclear weapons threatening us across the planet is a defeat.
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Holbrooke represents the diplomacy first-diplomacy always school. We saw its workings throughout the 1990s, as Syria was visited again and again by secretaries of state who achieved absolutely nothing. Even a secretary of state dancing with Kim Jong Il (arguably a low point in American diplomatic efforts) produced no results; such niceties never do in dealing with vicious dictators.

Or maybe I misread the whole thing, and Gingrich is just going to "fight the war of ideas" with these states from his air-conditined office. The dying will be left to someone elses father/mother/son/daughter/wife/husband.