WASHINGTON — Emboldened by the U.S. military victory in Iraq, neoconservatives and their allies in Congress are mounting a preemptive campaign against the U.S. plan to implement a so-called road map for settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
As Secretary of State Colin L. Powell laid the groundwork for a planned trip to the Middle East in early May, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich -- increasingly identified as a neoconservative spokesman -- unleashed a blistering attack Tuesday on the State Department and, by implication, on Powell. He characterized the latest Mideast peace plan as "a deliberate and systematic effort to undermine the president's policies."
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) also has inveighed against the road map, calling it "a confluence of deluded thinking between European elites, elements within the State Department bureaucracy and a significant segment of the American intellectual community."
In a March 12 speech at the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, DeLay, referring to the road map, said: "The Israelis don't need to change course. They don't need to travel the path of weakness as defined by the neo-appeasers."
A strongly pro-Israel letter expressing similar sentiments is being circulated during the congressional recess among lawmakers of both parties and had gained 262 signatures as of Tuesday afternoon, according to congressional aides. Its authors say they intend to send the letter to President Bush.
Gingrich made his remarks at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank that has provided much of the ideological underpinnings of the Bush administration.
The former speaker, a senior fellow at the institute, said that after "six months of diplomatic failure and one month of military success," the State Department is "back at work pursuing policies that will clearly throw away all the fruits of hard-won victory" in the region.
Gingrich urged the administration to "take on transforming the State Department as its next urgent mission." The U.S., he said, "cannot lead the world with a broken instrument of diplomacy."
The White House later rejected Gingrich's advice, strongly defending both the department and Powell. Spokesman Ari Fleischer said they simply "carry out the president's directions, and they do so very ably and professionally."
The dispute is about more than the hope of pro-Israel forces that they can block any attempt by the White House to pressure Israel into making concessions to the Palestinians.
