NYT: Mideast Hawks Help to Develop Giuliani Policy

[seafan]

Mideast Hawks Help to Develop Giuliani Policy

By MICHAEL COOPER and MARC SANTORA
October 25, 2007

Rudolph W. Giuliani’s approach to foreign policy shares with other Republican presidential candidates an aggressive posture toward terrorism, a commitment to strengthening the military and disdain for the United Nations.
But in developing his views, Mr. Giuliani is consulting with, among others, a particularly hawkish group of advisers and neoconservative thinkers.
Their positions have been criticized by Democrats as irresponsible and applauded by some conservatives as appropriately tough, while raising questions about how closely aligned Mr. Giuliani’s thinking is with theirs.

Mr. Giuliani’s team includes Norman Podhoretz, a prominent neoconservative who advocates bombing Iran “as soon as it is logistically possible”; Daniel Pipes, the director of the Middle East Forum, who has called for profiling Muslims at airports and scrutinizing American Muslims in law enforcement, the military and the diplomatic corps; and Michael Rubin, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has written in favor of revoking the United States’ ban on assassination.

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Mr. Giuliani has taken an aggressive position on Iran’s efforts to build a nuclear program, saying last month it was a “promise” that as president he would take military action to keep the Iranians from developing a nuclear weapon.
Warnings like that one and his reliance on advisers like Mr. Podhoretz, who wrote an article in June for Commentary magazine called “The Case for Bombing Iran,” have raised concerns among some Democrats.
Mr. Podhoretz said in an interview published Wednesday in The New York Observer that he recently met with Mr. Giuliani to discuss his new book, in which he advocates bombing Iran as part of a larger struggle against “Islamofascism,” and “there is very little difference in how he sees the war and I see it.”

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Like the neoconservatives, who played a major role in developing the Bush administration’s rationale for invading Iraq, Mr. Giuliani is a strong supporter of Israel who has expressed skepticism about how far the United States should go to back the creation of a Palestinian state.

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“Elections are necessary but not sufficient to establish genuine democracy,” Mr. Giuliani wrote in an article in Foreign Affairs, the policy journal. “Aspiring dictators sometimes win elections, and elected leaders sometimes govern badly and threaten their neighbors.”

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The emerging Giuliani doctrine, which is being created through conference calls, policy papers, and seminarlike meetings, contains a number of main elements.
Mr. Giuliani calls for continuing the war in Iraq and building up the military by adding at least 10 combat brigades to the Army. He takes a dim view of the United Nations, which he sees as good for little other than humanitarian and peacekeeping missions, but wants to expand NATO and invite Israel to join it.

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If there is a central tenet to his thinking, it may be that the United States must project strength to keep itself safe. “Weakness invites attack,” Mr. Giuliani warned to cheers in a speech he gave recently to the Republican Jewish Coalition.

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In a recent speech to the Jewish Coalition, he went further, accusing the Democrats of putting too much stock in diplomacy. “This is the great fallacy in this now very strong Democratic desire to negotiate, negotiate, negotiate and negotiate,” he said. “You’ve got to know with whom to negotiate and with whom you should not negotiate.”

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If this man is somehow shoehorned into the White House, America will enter a death spiral.

[OHdem10]

1. II have been wondering when people were going to discover

all his advisors. Bush on Steriods.