Rudy Giuliani recently told a supportive audience, “It’s something that I think I know, I think I know as well as anybody else who’s running for president, probably better than a lot.” Last week, he went on to argue that he has more knowledge of the world than anyone else running for President.
If that’s true, we’re all in big trouble because this guy is spectacularly uninformed.
“Neither one of these two wars — the one in Afghanistan/Pakistan or the one in Iraq — was nearly at the level of the planning we had done for the two wars we would have to fight at once,” he said. “Both of them would be considered small wars in comparison to that. So it would seem to me that we should have organized ourselves so that we could accomplish in Iraq what we had to accomplish without taking anything away from accomplishing in Afghanistan and Pakistan what we had to accomplish.”
This has all the sophistication of the proverbial drunk at the end of the bar, but practically sounds like Ivo Daalder in the NYT as compared to the gem he gave USA Today.
“I said it a long time ago … America is too consumed with Iraq,” Giuliani told Page. “We’ve got to be patient and committed (in Iraq), but we’ve got to multitask. We’ve got to have conversations beyond Iraq. We’ve got to talk about Iran — Iran is more dangerous than Iraq — and we have to get the job done in Afghanistan and in Pakistan.”
National Review’s Rich Lowry recently noted, when Giuliani responds to voters’ questions, “his answers on foreign policy and military affairs aren’t deeply informed.”
That was a couple of months ago. I’d hoped Giuliani would have picked up a book or something by now.
Perhaps I’m expecting too much. Perhaps it’s unfair to expect someone who served two terms as a mayor to be able to speak coherently about the Middle East. Giuliani has no experience on foreign policy or national security, so perhaps it’s unrealistic to ask him to understand these issues. If we’re grading on a curve, Giuliani might deserve credit for at least trying to sound like he knows what he’s talking about.
But therein lies the point: Giuliani is running on a foreign policy platform. He’s doing so during a war. He insists that his two terms as mayor, focusing on city government, aren’t terribly important right now, at least as compared to his unique understanding of global events.
And yet, we get nonsense such as “America is too consumed with Iraq,” This from a man who appears to have no idea what to say about the number one issue in the country right now.
Giuliani was confused about the 2000 attack on the USS Cole. He thinks the next president won’t influence the future of Iraq. He’s confused about the Fort Dix plot, he doesn’t know the difference between Iran’s and North Korea’s nuclear programs, and he has no idea whether Iran and al Qaeda are Sunni or Shia. Asked recently for his thoughts on the efficacy of the president’s escalation strategy in Iraq, Giuliani said, “I don’t know the answer to that.”
Does he know anything about his signature campaign issue?