Maybe if he’d gone for 13 ‘commitments’…

June 13, 2007

Following up on an earlier item about Rudy Giuliani’s newly-unveiled “12 Commitments,” Greg Sargent notes that the word “Iraq” didn’t appear once on the former mayor’s list. Given that the document is supposed to be a look at what Giuliani’s top priorities would be if elected, it seems a tad odd that a leading GOP candidate would overlook the most pressing issue in the country.

Reporters asked Giuliani about the omission. The former mayor offered an interesting response.

“What I was trying to do was to look at the things, as best as you can predict it now, that are going to be there a year and a half from now,” he said. “Iraq may get better; Iraq may get worse. We may be successful in Iraq; we may not be. I don’t know the answer to that. That’s in the hands of other people. But what we do know for sure is the terrorists are going to be at war with us a year, a year and a half from now.” (emphasis added)

So let me get this straight. Rudy Giuliani, a self-professed expert on foreign policy and national security, doesn’t believe Iraq will be an important challenge for the next president? If he’s drawing up a list of priorities for 2009, Iraq should be intentionally omitted? The future of the war policy is “in the hands of other people”?

Please. For a candidate who’s basing his candidacy on some kind of amorphous notion of “leadership,” this is just sad.

Greg added, “Iraq of course will be the single most important problem by far facing the next President. Will reporters press Rudy for some real answers on what specifically he would do about it? Or will the alleged “national security credentials” he’s now being credited with having based on his having been Mayor on 9/11 mean he gets a free pass on this question?”

Stay tuned.

For a man with two messy divorces and an estranged relationship with his children, “commitment” is an interesting choice of terms for him to stress here.

  • Yes, how do we know Giuliani won’t run off with some younger prettier nation right in the middle of his presidency?

    I’ve been having some contrarian thoughts lately about the Iraq war. True it’s a really terrible thing in so many ways, but I’m thinking that it is more dramatic than important. The nation spends a lot more money on other things so it’s not all that much money in a national budget sense. The total number of American deaths is about one month of traffic deaths. I think all the attention to the war is somehow giving Bush cover for all his domestic failures.

  • He meant to add “I will solve the Iraq war by hiring Bernie Kerik (or some other criminal) to go over there and make them quit fighting us”. Or something.

    There’s another thing he forgot to mention… A significant chunk of the wingnut base will stay home if one of the “committments” isn’t a bigger pander to the anti-choice mob than “reduce abortions”.

    Rudy also forgot to say he would make America safer by locking up anyone who prints out pictures of him in a dress being molested by Donald Trump.

  • Hey, Rudy — let me go out on a limb for you and predict that Iraq is going to be a major issue for the US for decades.

  • James Monroe, Millard Fillmore and Calvin Coolidge are the only presidents whose last names end in a vowel. Notice that vowel is ‘e’ for all three.

    Giuliani’s name is his biggest negative. If history is any guide, he doesn’t have a chance.

  • Talk about whiffing. He could have delighted the wingnut base, and said Iraq was covered by point number one: Going on the offensive on the Terrorist War on Us. Wouldn’t make it true, but that would be the GOP party line.

    What strikes me about Terrorists War on Us is the passive construction. It’s not us that’s doing it, it’s the terrorists. Very Democratic sounding!

    Haik: “Y” is a vowel in “Kennedy.”

  • Will reporters press Rudy for some real answers on what specifically he would do about [Iraq]?

    No.

    Or will the alleged “national security credentials” he’s now being credited with having based on his having been Mayor on 9/11 mean he gets a free pass on this question?

    Yes.

    This has been another episode of easy answers to questions that don’t even need to be asked.

  • The future of the war policy is “in the hands of other people”?

    Perhaps Giuliani is trusting the Dem majority to end the mess soon? If we started pulling out abut, say, this October/November (soon affter the “September report”) with the final deadline for total pull-out sometime around March ’08, then Iraq would not, indeed, be his problem. It would have been “taken care of” before he became president. All that would be left for him to do is supervise the falll-out (criminal cases against all the architects of the Iraq fiasco).

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