Gingrich warns of 'long war'

WASHINGTON — Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich warned Friday that the United States could be at war with Islamic radicals for another half century, but nobody is willing to say so.

"The sheer reality of the long war — I call it long war deliberately — (is) we're going to be fighting the irreconcilable wing of Islam for at least 50 to 70 years," Gingrich said in a speech to the National Press Club.

"And . . . my biggest complaint is nobody has yet to stand up and say this is going to be really hard, this is going to take a long time," he added in response to questions after the speech.

Gingrich, 62, asked about his possible candidacy for the GOP presidential nomination in 2008, continued to encourage speculation. "Who knows? It's a long way from here," he said.

Further, Gingrich, whose early career in politics in the 1980s was marked by aggressive partisan attacks, lamented the "angry hostile process" of politics.

He suggested that Americans are "tired of the negatives, they are tired of the attacks, they are tired of traditional debates, they are tired of all the baloney by which consultants look at focus groups to get 40 seconds to be memorized so candidates can pretend they're actually answering."

Average Americans "have a much better sense of how much trouble we're in than Washington does," he added.

The topic of Gingrich's speech was billed as his plans for reforming Medicaid, the $360 billion state-federal health program for lower-income Americans. His major proposals included cracking down on waste and fraud, expanding the use of technology, and using a voucher system to provide private insurance coverage to all Americans.

But Gingrich himself raised the issue of the war on terror in the context of overhauling the country's health care system, complaining that "nobody is doing (the) level of planning" needed to address a possible nuclear, chemical or biological terrorist attack on an American city.

"That war is dangerous to us because it's not about an occasional car bomb, it's not about an occasional sniper, it's about the absolute danger that sooner or later they (the terrorists) will get chemical or nuclear weapons or biological weapons and then all of your freedoms will be at risk," Gingrich said.