In the speech delivered this morning at the American Enterprise Institute, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich suggested that the Iraq war may not have been necessary if Congress and the Bush administration had handled matters better in the wake of the September 11th attacks six years ago.

Had the United States immediately engaged in a broad diplomatic, military and economic mobilization on September 12, 2001, “The challenges of Iraq, Iran , Syria, and Saudi Arabia would have been dealt with as a regional conflict,” he said. “There would have been no safe harbors for Iraqi dictators to send their money and their key staffs.”

Gingrich speculated that a better “grand strategy” would have “built up sufficient economic, political, and military power” to deal with Iraq and other rogue regimes in the region without necessarily invading.

“In that world, there might have been less violence as weak dictatorships realized they could not survive against the fury of an American people mobilized to action,” he said. He also added, however, that dictatorships could have banded together to promote more violence and terrorism.

Gingrich’s 24-page speech offered an alternative history of the war on terrorism since 9/11 in which decisive leaders had educated the public better about the threat of Islamic terrorism and acted quickly to protect the border and prepare for response to a major terrorist attack. Gingrich also suggested that the United States immediately after 9/11 should have relied “on the sympathy worldwide for the United States” and called for a “new Geneva Convention against terrorism” and a worldwide public-opinion campaign to marginalize terrorists and nations that support them.

Calling Gen. David Petraeus’s report “important,” Gingrich nonetheless stated that the press and Congress are wrong to zero in on it to the exclusion of a broader assessment of America’s war against terrorism. “Six years after the attack of 9/11/2001, we are having the wrong debate about the wrong report,” he said.