Co-opting the Anti-Christ in a Fourth World War Against Terrorism

by Dr. Robert D. Crane  

  Grand strategy requires the consideration of all options for the future.  One grand strategy for Muslims in the pursuit of justice during the current Obama Administration might call for support of a default candidate as leader of a resurgent Republican Party?  This candidate, if only because Jindal and Palin may not be warlike enough, is Newt Gingrich.  Arguably he has long been the most controversial politician in America.

  If Republicans are to survive as a major party, they must seek a hard charger to reinvigorate the party, someone who claims to inherit the mantle of Ronald Reagan.  In my articles over the years, I have predicted that Newt Gingrich will win his party’s support by default when the right time comes.  He narrowly decided not to run in the primaries this year, but he is the best long-range political organizer in America and has been preparing for the presidency all his life.

  Thanks to Gingrich’s development of a whole generation of new-breed politicians, the Republicans staged a big gain in Clinton’s first midterm, 1994.  Gingrich consolidated this through his Contract with America and masterminded the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives in 1996, whereupon he ousted the Old Guard in his own party and became the first Republican Speaker in forty years, a post that the Founders of America considered to be more important than the presidency.

  Some of his critics say that within a year his drive for personal power, his totalitarian management style, and his readiness to compromise on his own principles cost him support even among his own followers.  One critic even called him ‘‘the closest thing we have to the Anti-Christ.’’  Students of the Neo-Conservative phenomenon recall that in 1995 as the most powerful Republican in America he was the first to introduce Islamophobia into American politics by publicly calling for a global war against ‘‘Islamic totalitarianism’‘

  When the Republicans had a bad showing two years later in 1998, Gingrich immediately quit his congressional seat and began preparing to transform America the way he had transformed the Republican Party.  He focused instead on his own thinktank, which, as I remember, was called the Progressive Policy Institute.  This was designed to prepare for greater things than mere leadership in Congressional politics.

  Newt Gingrich is a seminal NeoCon thinker, earned a doctorate at Tulane University in Modern European History, and was the first to recommend the creation, even before 9/11, of a Department of Homeland Security.  He is a fellow at both the AEI (American Enterprise Institute) and Stanford’s Hoover Institution, serves on the Terrorism Task Force of the Council on Foreign Relations, and has been influential in developing the entire counter-terrorism industry over the past decade.

  Gingrich has published 18 books, ten of them New York Times best sellers, and has long had a weekly newsletter.  His books include Winning the Future: A 21st Century Contract with America; To Renew America: Lessons Learned the Hard Way; and The Art of Transformation.  He also has produced influential film documentaries, especially We Have the Power and Rediscovering God in America, and is now producing a film, with the subliminal title, Ronald Reagan: Rendezvous with Destiny.

  Since I have been a student of the NeoConservative ideology for half a century, my assessment is that Newt Gingrich may become the NeoCons’ behind-the-scenes leader to take over the Republican Party, while others focus on doing the same in an Obama presidency.  These two branches of Neo-Conservatism represent two different mutations of the original movement founded by Robert Strausz Hupe in 1957.  Gingrich is much the most erudite NeoCon ideologician and may, in fact, constitute the winning permutation of this ideology for either good or bad in shaping the future of America and the world. 

  How might Muslims rescue Newt Gingrich from his past as an ally for the future.  One way is for Muslims to support a third party designed to introduce the seminal but never implemented ideas of Ronald Reagan on justice into the American national discussion.  One such ‘‘third party’’ already exists.  Its homepage, which calls for a Just Third Way to economic and political justice, can be accessed at http://www.americanrevolutionaryparty.us.  If Newt Gingrich can overcome the ‘‘not invented here’’ syndrome and embrace a policy paradigm of economic and political justice, he will finally have found America’s intellectual H-bomb in a Fourth World War against terrorism, which, in turn, could be the surest path to the presidency.

  There are other options in the search for peace, prosperity, and freedom through compassionate justice.  Joining the bandwagen of Newt Gingrich may appear to be the most unlikely one of them all, but, as he has said in another context, all options should be on the table.  As we read in the Qur’an, the best jihad is to turn your enemy into your friend, but only those specially gifted can do this.