RUDY GIULIANI WILL KILL YOU (WITH LAMENESS). Rudy Giuliani's Foreign Affairs article is the dumbest/scariest thing I've read in a serious journal in quite some time. In fact, I almost regret reading it, as I could have spent my time doing something more intellectually engaging like
punching myself in the face. Here's the article's summary: "The next U.S. president will face three key foreign policy challenges: setting a course for victory in the terrorists' war on global order, strengthening the international system the terrorists seek to destroy, and extending the system's benefits. With a stronger defense, a determined diplomacy, and greater U.S. economic and cultural influence, the next president can start to build a lasting, realistic peace." And here are the reasons it's so hard to take Giuliani seriously:

• The very first sentence: "We are all members of the 9/11 generation."
• The phrase "Terrorists War on Us" is now capitalized.
• Dumb statements like: "And the era of cost-free anti-Americanism must end."
• Grand new ideas like: "Companies such as Pepsi, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, and Levi's helped win the Cold War by entering the Soviet market. Cultural events, such as Van Cliburn's concerts in the Soviet Union and Mstislav Rostropovich's in the United States, also hastened change. Today, we need a similar type of exchange with the Muslim countries."
• Oh, and we totally had Vietnam: "America must remember one of the lessons of the Vietnam War. Then, as now, we fought a war with the wrong strategy for several years. And then, as now, we corrected course and began to show real progress. Many historians today believe that by about 1972 we and our South Vietnamese partners had succeeded in defeating the Vietcong insurgency and in setting South Vietnam on a path to political self-sufficiency. But America then withdrew its support, allowing the communist North to conquer the South. The consequences were dire, and not only in Vietnam: numerous deaths in places such as the killing fields of Cambodia, a newly energized and expansionist Soviet Union, and a weaker America. The consequences of abandoning Iraq would be worse."

Could be the next president, folks. Seriously.

--Steven White