Gingrich said he is "very worried" about Republicans facing fall elections and says the party must have the "nerve" to nationalize the elections and make the 2006 campaigns about a liberal Democratic agenda rather than about President Bush's record.

Gingrich says that as of now Republicans "are sailing into the wind" in congressional campaigns. He said that's in part because of the Iraq war, adding, "Iraq is hard and painful and we do not explain it very well."

But some of it is due to Republicans' congressional agenda. He said House and Senate Republicans "forgot the core principle" of the party and embraced Congressional pork. "Some of the guys," he said, have come down with a case of "incumbentitis."

Gingrich said in the coming days he plans to speak out publicly, and to the Administration, about the need to recognize that America is in World War III.

He lists wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, this week's bomb attacks in India, North Korean nuclear threats, terrorist arrests and investigations in Florida, Canada and Britain, and violence in Israel and Lebanon as evidence of World War III. He said Bush needs to deliver a speech to Congress and "connect all the dots" for Americans.

He said the reluctance to put those pieces together and see one global conflict is hurting America's interests. He said people, including some in the Bush Administration, who urge a restrained response from Israel are wrong "because they haven't crossed the bridge of realizing this is a war."

"This is World War III," Gingrich said. And once that's accepted, he said calls for restraint would fall away:

"Israel wouldn't leave southern Lebanon as long as there was a single missile there. I would go in and clean them all out and I would announce that any Iranian airplane trying to bring missiles to re-supply them would be shot down. This idea that we have this one-sided war where the other team gets to plan how to kill us and we get to talk, is nuts."

There is a public relations value, too. Gingrich said that public opinion can change "the minute you use the language" of World War III. The message then, he said, is "'OK, if we're in the third world war, which side do you think should win?"

An historian, Gingrich said he has been studying recently how Abraham Lincoln talked to Americans about the Civil War, and what turned out to be a much longer and deadlier war than Lincoln expected.

Gingrich is here for fund raisers for Congressman Dave Reichert, 2nd District GOP challenger Doug Roulstone, and the state party. I talked to him in a hotel suite with a few of his and Reichert's staff.

Any time his name comes up here it's said that he once called Washington state "ground zero for the Republican revolution." Republicans saw huge gains in Washington in the 1994 mid-term elections, though they have largely decayed away.

"I think there is a reform oriented populism that is a key a component of Washington State's, if you will, culture or personality," he said. Voters here also got caught up in the national, anti-incumbent, anti-Democratic wave. The other thing that was different here, he said, was "that there was no place in America where talk radio was more enthusiastically favorable to the idea that it was time to try something new."

(Speaking of talk radio, waiting to go in to see Gingrich as I was leaving were KVI's John Carlson and Kirby Wilbur and William Maurer, an attorney with the Institute for Justice who has been backing the talk show hosts in the legal challenge against their on-air championing of an anti-tax initiative.)

With Republicans in control of Washington, D.C., it's Democrats who this year are hoping for a reform wave to sweep them into office. Democrats want to nationalize the election and make each congressional race about Bush, the Iraq war and the Republican agenda. Republicans have been trying to localize each race, as in Reichert's challenge from political newcomer Darcy Burner, and make the race about the qualifications and personalities of the candidates, not about a national agenda.

Gingrich says that's a mistake. Republicans, he says, should nationalize the contest, too. He said that yesterday he saw polling that gave him some optimism for the first time about this year's elections. He didn't say what state it was from, but it showed that Democratic incumbents' poll numbers crashed when tagged with the record of House Democrats.

He said that as Democrats make the elections about George Bush, Republicans should make it about House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco. He said voters need to be told "how weirdly San Francisco these guys are voting" and Democrats will "collapse in defeat."

"The line I think every Republican should use is, 'X knows their record, they just hope you don't,' which is actually the line I used in my winning race in '78. I'm a historian. I don't do anything new. I just imitate. I guarantee you there are 60 or 70 Democrats, if their districts thoroughly understood their record, they'd lose this year even though people aren't happy with Bush. Because people aren't suicidal. ..."

"While people understand that while they may be irritated with Republicans, we at least broadly share their values and visions and the left is just out of touch with reality. I think then you have a totally different debate by October, if we have the nerve to do it. ... There's going to be a national conversation in October. The only question is whether it's the Republicans defining it or whether we have some nutty idea that we can run local races, and so the entire definition is on the left."

UPDATE: I tried to get a comment today from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee but no one ever got back to me. This evening, Kelly Steele, spokesman for the state party, did respond and sent this e-mail:

This is classic - that Gingrich's solution to Bush's failed leadership is a different "marketing strategy" shows the true extent to which Republicans cannot be trusted to win the war on terror. Democrats believe we need a "tough and smart" strategy that makes 2006 a year of transition in Iraq and aggressively takes the fight to the terrorists, while Gingrich and Bush seek to elect a new crop of loyal rubberstamps - McGavick, Reichert, and Roulstone included - to blindly support and extend their monopoly on their "tough and dumb" conduct of the war in Iraq and the larger battle against global terrorism.

"The NATO Defense Planning Committee, which takes this decision, agreed but also expressed to General Jones, in the name of NATO governments, their gratitude for his distinguished service," the alliance said in a statement released in Brussels.

The United States typically appoints the NATO top commander of operations. Its civilian secretary-general, at present the Dutchman Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, comes from Europe. Craddock's appointment must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate.

As head of Miami-based U.S. Southern Command, Craddock oversees operations at the detention facility for foreign terror suspects at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

European officials and human rights activists have expressed deep concerns over the treatment of prisoners at the camp, which Bush said last month he wanted eventually to shut.

Craddock's appointment could shine the spotlight on NATO detention policy in Afghanistan, already an area of concern for some allies, as it readies to expand military operations into the violent south of the country around the end of the month.

CONCERNS OVER PRISONERS

U.S. forces have been accused of aggressive search tactics and their image was hit by reports of detainee abuse, including some deaths, at U.S. military detention centers in Afghanistan.

The separate NATO-led ISAF force which currently operates in the capital Kabul, west and north has been perceived as a pure peacekeeping force. But it recognizes the expansion into the south will bring it into more regular contact with insurgents.

Craddock last year rejected a recommendation by military investigators to discipline a former commander of the Guantanamo jail for failing to monitor and limit the interrogation of a detainee who they found had been degraded and abused.

Earlier this year Craddock said Guantanamo officials had strapped some detainees taking part in a hunger strike into "restraint chairs" during force-feeding and isolated them after determining some had been purposely vomiting the liquid they had been fed.

Craddock said that some detainees subsequently decided that taking part in the strike had become "too much of a hassle."

Prior to taking in 2004 the Southern Command post, which oversees U.S. military interests in Latin America, Craddock served as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's senior military assistant.

As NATO SACEUR, Jones sought to drive its reform from a Cold War giant to a body more able to mount rapid reaction operations outside the alliance's traditional boundaries.

The men and women had been caught entering the country illegally and were ordered to court but never showed or had been ordered deported but never left, authorities said. Twenty had been charged with crimes. One was a reputed member of the Mexican street gang MS13.

No recent event spurred the sweep, government officials said.

"Sept. 11 showed us that, to have security, we have to have an immigration system with integrity," said Marc A. Raimondi, national spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Most of the Sept. 11 terrorists had taken advantage of lax enforcement, he said.

"You can't have integrity if there is no consequence for abusing the laws or ignoring a court order."

Among those taken were immigrants who had been in the U.S. for a decade or more. They must leave homes, jobs and maybe children born here who are U.S. citizens.

"If they had complied and left 10 or 15 years ago, that wouldn't be the case," said Rob Baker, field office director in charge of detention and removal for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Ohio and Michigan.

He noted that, by the end of September, seven agents will be based permanently in Cleveland to cover such operations throughout Ohio.

James E. Brown Jr., a deportation officer for the Immigration Fugitives Operation Unit in Boston, said agents received leads from other law-enforcement agencies and by running database searches against immigration court files.

Once in Ohio, the agents tapped local police and sheriffs to help confirm identities and homes of the immigrants.

Agents looking for a Mexican man found he had a barbershop in his basement. There they arrested several waiting men who had no proper documents. More came through the door, were questioned and taken in as well.

The agents can check names against an immigration database that lists who is in the country legally, who has overstayed a visa and more, Baker said.

In all, the agents arrested 68 they'd sought and 86 they came across.

The arrested were taken to the Seneca County jail; 72 Mexicans have already been flown home. Agents escorted them and handed them over to authorities in their homelands.

The agents were within their legal rights, said Baldemar Velasquez, president of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee and a founder of the Network of Immigrant Organizations in Ohio. "People who enter the country illegally have committed a misdemeanor.

"The effectiveness of how we use the resources of this country is another matter."

A policy that would allow those seeking work to register and obtain a permit and the ability to travel would go a long way toward solving the perceived immigration problem, he said.

The vast majority of those who come here would register, allowing the border patrols and inland agents to concentrate on criminals, Velasquez said.

The government and immigrant study centers estimate that 9 million to 12 million undocumented immigrants are in the United States.

If the goal is to remove them all, "it will take some time," Raimondi said.

Velasquez said, "As many years it takes to find them all, more will come over the border."

The campaign committee replaced the ad with a radio commercial that targets Rep. John Hostetler, R-Ind., for opposing an increase in the minimum wage. Democrats have made a minimum wage increase a central theme of this year's election.

Democrats had featured the video ad for nearly two weeks on the DCCC Web site where it had gone largely unnoticed until Republicans began objecting to it this week. On Thursday, more than a dozen Republicans, many with military backgrounds, called on DCCC Chairman Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., to apologize. Democratic Reps. John Spratt of South Carolina and Chet Edwards of Texas asked Emanuel to pull or alter the ad.

"We're moving to another major effort that we're highlighting on our Web site," DCCC spokesman Bill Burton said.

In South Carolina, Spratt's Republican challenger, state Rep. Ralph Norman, commended the removal. It was "the right thing to do for the state, country and especially the brave men and women who serve in our military," said Norman's spokesman, Nathan Hollifield.