Newt Gingrich, the conservative poster boy of the 90s, is jumping up and down at the American Enterprise Institute so that you will notice that he’s a neoconservative too. He says that the State Department is responsible for the global unpopularity of the war in Iraq:

The State Department communications program failed during these five months [running up to the war] to such a degree that 95 percent of the Turkish people opposed the American position. This fit in with a pattern of State Department communications failures as a result of which the South Korean people regarded the United States as more dangerous than North Korea and a vast majority of French and German citizens favored policies that opposed the United States.

Clearly the policy could not have anything to do with it; it must be the inadequacy of the television commercials.

Gingrich blames the State Department’s Bureau of Near East Affairs, which he says opposed the war because of its “propensity for appeasing dictators and propping up corrupt regimes.” I would have guessed it was because they actually understood something about the region, but I am not a senior fellow at AEI. I just look like one.