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RUDY GIULIANI WILL KILL US ALL. Not quite, but his foreign policy team makes Dick Cheney look like Dennis Kucinich, according to the recent New Yorker piece that Stephen blogged about:
Earlier this month, Giuliani named Podhoretz a senior adviser on his foreign-policy team... Podhoretz is so untempered a neocon that he makes Paul Wolfowitz, Bush's former Deputy Defense Secretary, and a key architect of the Iraq invasion, seem almost a moderate realist. Podhoretz knows that he carries a certain political radioactivity. While he believes that Giuliani would follow his advice to bomb Iran before it gets nuclear weapons -- Giuliani, like other candidates, has said that Iran must be kept out of the nuclear club -- Podhoretz hasn't asked him directly, because he doesn't want to damage Giuliani's candidacy with the inevitable controversy that an affirmative answer might arouse.
Which of course raises the question: if one of Giuliani's top advisers advocates attacking Iran why hasn't anyone asked Giuliani about it?. A quick Nexis search didn't turn up any comments by him on the issue, but if you know of one please post it in the comments.
Other stars of the Giuliani foreign policy team are almost as nutty:
Podhoretz joins, among others on the foreign-policy team, the conservative Middle East scholar Martin Kramer and Charles Hill, a Hoover fellow and one of the instructors in the Grand Strategy seminar at Yale. It is Hill's thesis that the Islamic terrorists ("Islamofascists," as Podhoretz would say) are at war with the international system that has ordered the world since the Treaty of Westphalia, in 1648.
It's as if Giuliani's economic team was headed by Objectivists, or his social policy team was led by the Army of God. Liberals should start hitting him with this now so that it's considered common knowledge by the time the general election gets here in case, and I consider this a worst-case scenario, he gets the nomination.
--Sam Boyd
COMMENTS (6)
if one of Giuliani's top advisers advocates attacking Iran why hasn't anyone asked Giuliani about it?
Ten to one he defuses the whole issue by saying we don't talk openly about what we might do with our nukes. Keep the enemy guessing. The press will just nod sagely and let it pass -- we all know, from the Obama/Pakistan flap, that that's the officially approved Very Serious Person position.
Posted by: Ryan | August 13, 2007 3:34 PM
Scratch out the "with our nukes" part of my comment above. For some reason (perhaps the "radioactivity" remark) I was thinking JPod had advocated nuking Iran. But the same principle -- don't tell our enemies what you might do -- could easily be invoked by Rudolph to sidestep this whole potential controversy.
Posted by: Ryan | August 13, 2007 4:47 PM
From the June 5 CNN debate:
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0706/05/se.01.html
BLITZER: What do you think, Mayor? Do you think, if you were president of the United States and it came down to Iran having a nuclear bomb, which you say is unacceptable, you would authorize the use of tactical nuclear weapons?
GIULIANI: Part of the premise of talking to Iran has to be that they have to know very clearly that it is unacceptable to the United States that they have nuclear power. I think it could be done with conventional weapons, but you can't rule out anything and you shouldn't take any option off the table.
Posted by: Rudy | August 13, 2007 10:38 PM
I'm starting to think that when Republicans say (especially with Giuliani honing his Bush/Cheney impression), "If you vote for Democrats, terrorists will kill you!" Democrats should respond by saying, "If you vote for Republicans, *Republicans* will kill you."
Then wait for the inevitable outcry from Very Serious People who know that Civility and Bipartisanship are The Way To Get Things Done, and ask them why an Administration that brags about promoting a culture of life has gotten so many Americans killed, whether it's from war, terrorism, natural disasters, or non-enforcement of regulation.
Just because it's harsh doesn't mean it shouldn't be said...
Posted by: Chris | August 13, 2007 10:39 PM
To be fair, Giuliani's economic team may as well be headed by Objectivists, as he did say this:
Asked if he would support a gas tax increase to go towards repairs, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said, “There is a liberal Democratic assumption that if you raise taxes, you raise money. We should put more money into infrastructure. We should have a good program for doing it. But the kneejerk liberal Democratic reaction — raise taxes to get money — very often is a very big mistake.”
(http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2007/08/05/gop-contenders-tax-hike-not-answer-for-fixing-bridges/)
Posted by: Zack | August 14, 2007 1:56 AM
Gosh, thanks for this post! I was worried about who I was going to support after McCain drops out. But Podhoretz on the Giuliani campaign - that clinches it for me!
Next stop Iran!
Posted by: Donald Douglas | August 14, 2007 10:15 AM