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By The Hill Staff
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Posted: 10/19/07 06:21 PM [ET] |
People tend to think of Rudy Giuliani as a political moderate. Strong on leadership, a tough guy and all that, sure, but not another Republican hard-liner.
What doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere near enough attention, however, is that Rudy is assembling a team of foreign policy advisers who are about twice as crazy — and probably would turn out to be about three times as crazy — as the Bush team that brought us the last six years of Bush-inspired catastrophes. Beside Rudy’s brain trust, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz look downright rational.
It’s true that candidates usually gather all manner of different advisers around them during a presidential campaign. And it’s not fair to hold them to every position this or that adviser holds. But the calculus is a bit different if the candidate would come to the White House with little or any foreign policy knowledge or experience. And like George W. Bush, that’s definitely the case with Rudy, even if he thinks kicking Yasser Arafat out of Lincoln Center counts as a foreign policy résumé. And the thing about the folks Rudy is picking as his foreign policy team — the folks who will teach him the topic, since he knows so little about it — is that they’re all pushing for more wars in the Middle East to build on the all the great things that have happened because of the war in Iraq.
So let’s run down the list of some of Rudy’s greatest gets.
First up, legendary godfather of neoconservatism Norman Podhoretz. Podhoretz is on the side of the debate that says the war on terror is actually World War IV (World War III was the Cold War, apparently) pitting the United States against the combined forces of “Islamofascism.” More pressing, however, is the decision Podhoretz has made about Iran. We have to go to war, says Podhoretz. Not “we might have to” or “we’re willing to go to war if that’s what it takes to stop the Iranians from getting nuclear weapons.” The question’s already been answered. It will take war. And we need to get started with it as soon as possible. Podhoretz even went over to the White House last month for a secret audience with President Bush and outgoing adviser Karl Rove to implore them to attack Iran as soon as possible.
If Bush doesn’t come through, presumably he has the inside track with Rudy.
Next up: Daniel Pipes, headman of the Middle East Forum, advocate of war against Arabs and Muslims abroad and paranoiac about Arabs and Muslims at home. Earlier in this decade President Bush nominated Pipes for membership on the board of the U.S. Institute for Peace. But his reputation for anti-Muslim bigotry was so deep-seated that he couldn’t even get confirmed while the Senate was safely in Republican hands.
Just last week, Giuliani added two new advisers to his team. One is Thomas Joscelyn, an aggressive propounder of the now-thoroughly discredited idea that Saddam Hussein had ties with al Qaeda. Now he’s moved on to the idea that Shiite Iran is a main backer of the Sunni extremist group.
And of course Team Rudy wouldn’t be complete without a key adviser on Iran specifically. And that would be Michael Rubin. You may remember him as a key supporter of disgraced charlatan Ahmad Chalabi. He also did a stint at Doug Feith’s Office of Special Plans just before the outbreak of the war — where so much of the lies and nonsense was generated. And he even showed up in the news as the author of a proposed presidential directive to overthrow the Iranian government — the document at the center of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee espionage trial.
If you’re impatient with our slow pace of going to war with Iran, I think you’ve found your candidate.
Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com.
His column appears in The Hill each week.
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