Last week, at a speech in DC, Rudy Giuliani offered some unrestrained bluster towards Iran, apparently looking forward to a military confrontation, and insisting without proof that Iran is currently building nuclear weapons.
Apparently, the former mayor, who has no experience in foreign policy, military policy, or national security policy, is getting some very bad advice.
Norman Podhoretz believes that America needs to go to war soon with Iran. As far as he knows, Rudy Giuliani thinks the same thing.
“I was asked to come in and give him a briefing on the war, World War IV,” said Mr. Podhoretz, a founding father of neoconservatism and leading foreign policy adviser to Mr. Giuliani. “As far as I can tell there is very little difference in how he sees the war and how I see it.”
And given that Podhoretz’s hyper-neocon worldview is pretty horrific, the notion that there’s little daylight between Giuliani and Podhoretz on the “World War IV” issue should tell us quite a bit about just how far gone the former NYC mayor really is.
Indeeed, Podhoretz boasts in his New York Observer interview that he has confidence that Giuliani will attack Iran, whereas the other candidates are less reliable: “Do I think that Giuliani would take that action? I personally think he would,” Podhoretz said. “I don’t know who Romney is. I have no sense of him. I don’t know who Fred Thompson is.”
Oddly enough, Podhoretz’s boast that Giuliani would pull the trigger on a military offensive is intended as a compliment.
And speaking of Giuliani, Rachel Morris has an amazing piece in the next issue of the Washington Monthly, exploring what Americans can expect from a Giuliani administration.
Many Giuliani watchers already understand that Rudy is a hothead and a grandstander, even a bit of a dictator at times. These qualities have dominated the story of his mayoralty that most people know. As that drama was unfolding, however, so was a quieter story, driven by Giuliani’s instinct and capacity for manipulating the levers of government.
His methods, like those of the current White House, included appointments of yes-men, aggressive tests of legal limits, strategic lawbreaking, resistance to oversight, and obsessive secrecy.
As was also the case with the White House, the events of 9/11 solidified the mindset underlying his worst tendencies. Embedded in his operating style is a belief that rules don’t apply to him, and a ruthless gift for exploiting the intrinsic weaknesses in the system of checks and balances.
That’s why, of all the presidential candidates, Giuliani is most likely to take the expansions of the executive branch made by the Bush administration and push them further still. The blueprint can be found in the often-overlooked corners of his mayoralty.
Read it, clip it, save it, and send it around to your friends.
Choosing the best presidential candidate among the 2008 contenders is a tough job. Picking the worst is easy. Rudy Giuliani is the guy you’d get if you put George Bush and Dick Cheney into a wine press and squeezed out their pure combined essence: unbounded arrogance and self-righteousness, a chip on his shoulder the size of a redwood, a studied contempt for anybody’s opinion but his own, a vindictive streak a mile wide, and a devotion to secrecy and executive power unmatched in presidential history. He is a disaster waiting to happen.
That’s not even the slightest bit hyperbolic.