Text of Gingrich interview

Excerpts from former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich's visit Tuesday with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

America's current challenges:

"I think the period most like where we are today is April of 1861, with Lincoln, in that I think the total scale of what surrounds us is so much bigger than what we're ready for and the number of changes we need are so much greater than we're ready for -- that we're likely to find ourselves, just like we did with energy for the last two weeks, or Iran or Venezuela -- just start making a list of the interesting things that could happen in the next week, and it's a lot bigger list than you ever would have dreamed of. ...The emergence of China and India as genuine economic competitors. The fact that you have a dual pattern in energy right now, where on the one hand you have the rise of middle-class Chinese and Indians buying cars, so the amount of petroleum being purchased on the world market is going up dramatically. On the other hand, you have an overtly anti-American potential coalition from Russia to Iran to Nigeria to Venezuela to Saudi Arabia to Iraq."

"China is a competitor. They could become our enemy, but they are not today. The Chinese dictatorship does not get up every morning and worry about the United States. They get up every morning and worry about China, because the number of problems they have domestically are so enormous. This is a generation that went to jail. They understand, unlike the Russians, if the Chinese system breaks down, it tends to break down with mass violence on a scale that will be staggering. I think last year they had some amazing number of demonstrations around the country. It was truly an astonishing number where peasants would go out or farmers or local small businesses and just break the law. This is in a dictatorship, which is much more fragile. You start lawbreaking in a dictatorship, you have a much bigger problem. So my view is that we should be very tough-minded with the Chinese about Taiwan. We should be very prepared to invest whatever it takes to overawe them militarily. We should re-gear our own society to be competitive for our own reasons, but we should constantly reach out to the Chinese people while being tough with the Chinese government."

A proposal in Congress to "bring bilingual balance" to the United States:

"The conservative position ought to be very simple: No. ... Ninety percent of the country believes knowing English should be a condition of citizenship."

On whether he's planning to announce a campaign for president?

"I don't know that I'll ever announce. What I intend to do is shape the set of ideas and set of proposals that define where we have to go as a country. (A Gingrich campaign for the presidency) is up to the American people. That's not something I worry about every morning. I'm much more worried about what should we do this month for this country to get ready for avian flu or to get ready for education or get ready for the energy situation."

Illegal immigration:

"The country watches demonstrations in Los Angeles and says, 'Let me get this straight: People are not only here illegally. The system has collapsed to the point where people believe they can stand up illegally and lecture us about how we should change to make sure that they feel good about themselves while they are here illegally and they should do it while waving the flag of another country.'"

"A major part of the current immigration fight is the instinctive belief Americans have that their schools will no longer teach people to be American, the courts will no longer defend being American, and their politicians no longer stand up for being an American. Therefore, they see immigrants as a different kind of threat than they did 30 years ago, because 30 years ago they knew (immigrants) would be assimilated."

Global competition:

"(The Chinese) are an enormous competitor. For us to be the leading country in the world in, say, 2050, we have to go through tremendous domestic transformation here in terms of our schools, our litigation system, our tax system. There are a lot of things that we have to do here to stay ahead of them, but that's a healthy competition, not a bad competition. I think we can do it. I'm not intimidated by the Chinese. I'm worried about us. I'm not worried near as much about the Chinese as I'm worried about our own ability to replace our failing bureaucracies and failing structures. ... You've got to transform litigation, taxation, education, health and energy if you are going to compete with China and India. Think of America as a business, and as a business we're going to take on China and India."

Conservatism in America:

"The country, if anything, is moving to the right...(Republicans) need to tell their Senate and House members -- and they need to tell the White House -- to just go back to being conservatives."

On the shake-up at the Central Intelligence Agency:

"I think you need a profound overhaul of our entire intelligence system. I'm not at all convinced that the Director of National Intelligence is getting that done. Take the example of Iran. If you were to say to them this afternoon, how many agents do you really have in place, the number would be staggeringly small. How many people do they have on the Iranian task force that are fluent in Farsi (the prevalent Iranian language)? The number would be breathtakingly small. How many people who currently study North Korea actually speak Korean? Less than 10 percent. I don't sense that the scale of change in the system is anything comparable to the scale of threat...The CIA has been surprisingly good at protecting itself by leaking against anybody who tries to change it. ... I think it's going to be a continuing problem."

What does the nation need in an up-to-date intelligence program?

"You have to start by understanding that we have moved from a Cold War centered on Moscow, where you had a slow, bureaucratic system, to a multi-polar society in which much of what you want to know exists in very secret places with people that don't speak English. If you are not prepared to go out and figure out how you are going to penetrate those kind of operations, you are not going to know anything. Don't think of it as intelligence in the World War II sense, because it's very misleading. What you want is expert knowledge that leads to the right policies that lead to implementable decisions. ...You want to have people who have some knowledge of ground truth, and that's often intuitive. It's an art form. It's not just how many guys did we train last week to read Arabic, but do they understand the culture? Do they understand the family relationships? ... We don't have that kind of capability right now. ...You need people who are actually on the ground. You need to be able to make a career spending 30 years understanding one country. And you need to understand if you are the leading country in the world, you may have 200 countries you want to know about. This year's crisis may not be next year's crisis."

Health care:

More than 90 percent of Americans "believe you should have the right to know price and quality in health care before you make a decision" on health care.

On Sen. Hillary Clinton's possible bid for president:

"I don't think you can tell right now whether or not she will run. There are a lot of things that start getting looked at differently if you are a potential president than if you are a senator. They may conclude in the end that it's just too expensive. Second, if you look at the polling numbers, this is a person who has extraordinarily high name ID and she's running 30 percent or 32 percent or 34 percent. What they have to be testing is, if it ever gets down to two people, in the general election, does she ever get above 50 (percent), or does it turn out that anybody but Hillary is always at 55 or 60. If they find out in the end that they can't get her above 50 -- and they think through where does all of (former President) Bill Clinton's money come from today and are you really comfortable with a former president getting that kind of money -- a lot of it comes from the Persian Gulf -- all I'm saying is if you are Bill Clinton, and you're saying, 'I've got a pretty good life; we've got a pretty nice foundation; I get to give big speeches -- you know, and now all of a sudden, you're going to have the entire media going through all this...I'm not at all sure she will run."

On lawyers advertising:

It should be banned "because it's totally destructive of the culture. ... Somebody comes on TV and says, 'Do you know somebody with money we can rip off.'"

On the war in Iraq:

"I strongly advocated replacing Saddam. I first advocated replacing Saddam in the mid-1990s. I think if you look at the total evidence, it's good we replaced Saddam. They did have ties with al-Qaida. ... One of the reasons we thought they had weapons of mass destruction is they (the Iraqis) thought they had weapons of mass destruction. They thought it either because they moved them to Syria -- and actually had them -- or they thought it because they lied to one another, because Saddam ran a dictatorship where if you said to him, 'You know, big guy, we don't actually have them,' he shot you. If it was a bad day, he tortured your entire family in front of your face, and then shot you. Everybody in the system lied. It's fair to say, if you look at the data, if we had had Saddam's mistress as a deep agent, she would have said, 'Yes, he has weapons of mass destruction,' because he thought he did. ... (Saddam) was clearly financing terrorism. He publicly said, 'I will pay $25,000 to the family of every suicide bomber.' ... They clearly were running at least two training camps that were terrorist training camps. These things are not mythology."