Digby does a better job than I could ever do in pointing out the inherent dangerousness of Giuliani's simplistic thoughts in his Foreign Policy piece. Suffice it to say that anyone who even listens to Norman Podhoretz at this point, let alone appoints him as a senior foreign policy adviser to his campaign should be ignored and ostracized. Podhoretz is a war mongering octogenarian who lusts for Muslim blood and fantasizes about the mass murder of a nation of 70 million souls, one of the oldest civilizations on the planet, and one of the most modern and cosmopolitan republics in Western Asia.
Another telling flaw in Rudy's thinking is his reliance on the "competence" argument for his criticisms of the war in Iraq. This is a common theme that we'll hear more and more as the Republicans and Democrats who are vying for the presidency attempt to explain their support for the invasion of Iraq by qualifying the decision with the caveat that if only Bush had done a more competent job/sent enough troops/planned better, we'd be on easy street now. Matthew Yglesias wrote an excellent piece on that brand of thinking in the American Prospect back in October of 2005. He was criticizing this line of thinking among liberal hawks, but it is equally true of Rudy's argument, and will be heard by every candidate on the Republican side as they run as fast as they can away from the pariah in the white house.
The incompetence critique is, in short, a dodge -- a way for liberal hawks to acknowledge the obviously grim reality of the war without rethinking any of the premises that led them to support it in the first place. In part, the dodge helps protect its exponents from personal embarrassment. But it also serves a more important, and dangerous, function: Liberal hawks see themselves as defenders of the legitimacy of humanitarian intervention -- such as the Clinton-era military campaigns in Haiti and the Balkans -- and as advocates for the role of idealism and values in foreign policy. The dodgers believe that to reject the idea of the Iraq War is, necessarily, to embrace either isolationism or, even worse in their worldview, realism -- the notion, introduced to America by Hans Morgenthau and epitomized (not for the better) by the statecraft of Henry Kissinger, that U.S. foreign policy should concern itself exclusively with the national interest and exclude consideration of human rights and liberal values. Liberal hawk John Lloyd of the Financial Times has gone so far as to equate attacks on his support for the war with doing damage to “the idea, and ideal, of freedom itself.”
It sounds alluring. But it's backward: An honest reckoning with this war's failure does not threaten the future of liberal interventionism. Instead, it is liberal interventionism's only hope. By erecting a false dichotomy between support for the current bad war and a Kissingerian amoralism, the dodgers run the risk of merely driving ever-larger numbers of liberals into the realist camp. Left-of-center opinion neither will nor should follow a group of people who continue to insist that the march to Baghdad was, in principle, the height of moral policy thinking. If interventionism is to be saved, it must first be saved from the interventionists.
The entire thing is really worth reading.
At the end of the day, the two articles on Rudy illustrate the fundamental problem with his candidacy. Sure he is a hypocrite who has staunchly defended gay marriage, the right to choose and gun control. He'll turn against those positions and the expedient right will continue to support him if they think he can keep that she-devil out of the white house. Sure he's a twice married adulterer who's kids can't even stand him. The fundamentalists will see their way through that as well. But the one thing that worries me most isn't the hypocrisy or the pettiness, it's that he may just be the only man in America who could be elected president that may be as simple and clueless as the current one.
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