Updated: 26 Nov 2007
If a policy fails, most reasonable people trash it later if not sooner. Not so Giuliani.
From the Guardian Weekly, 11 Nov 2007:
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Giuliani is a dangerous man. George Bush with brains. Dick Cheney with better aim. Consider yourself warned.
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Bush has/had his Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Leon Kass, Douglas Feith, Abram Shulsky, William Kristol, Richard Perle, Andrew Sullivan, Philip Gorman, David Brooks, Carnes Lord, William Galston, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and Robert A. Goldwin.
Giuliani is certainly not George W Bush. He kept his cool under fire while Bush went into hiding. Neither does he have so many Neocons on his team. But the number of Neocons and sympathizers he does have is down right scary. Consider Giuliani's Foreign Policy team:
- Peter Berkowitz: Champions the philosophy of Leo Strauss which provides the guiding light for Neoconism. [The Neocon Manifesto would live on if Giuliani becomes president.]
- Nile Gardener: Says America has arrived at a Munich-like crossroad. He compares Ahmadinejad to Hitler. [The Neocons claim war is the means to democratize the lands of Islam. Never mind that there are better ways to democratize and gain allies in the process.]
- Robert Kasten: Sided consistently with the Reagan Neocons midway along their conquest of the US Government. [The foregoing and his America-First philosophy identifies him with the Neocon agenda.]
- Martin Kramer: Favors knocking out Islam over building democracy. Like his shipmates, Kramer remains blind to the reality that Iraq represents.
- Daniel Pipes: Founded "Middle East Forum" which promotes American Interests." [American Interests has become a euphemism for oil empire. It is the cause of much unrest; not its cure.]
- Norman Podhoretz: A holdover Neocon maestro who says: "I hope and pray that President Bush will do it (bomb Iran)." [Without a shred of evidence that enrichment has gone beyond the level needed for nuclear-power generation, Podhoretz would take out the known Iranian nuclear facilities. Iran, by international law has the right to enrich to the level required for power generation. With their oil fields depleting, Iran will need nuclear power generation in a decade or so. It takes time to turn on. Nuclear power must be controlled for sure. But bombing Iran's facilities would only postpone the day the nations of the world can come together on that issue. In the meantime Iran's very development as a member of the comity of nations is delayed. North Korea seemed to be intractable. But diplomacy involving concerned neighbors has made significant progress if news reports are to be believed. This is not only living history, but it was generated by this administration. Yet, that lesson goes unlearned. The hidden Irani agenda is, of course, regional OIL.]
If this is not enough, here is what the Rocky Mountain Chronicle writes about Giuliani:
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“'Freedom' is so closely connected with 9/11 that the new towers being erected are named after the principle. Here is how America’s Mayor views freedom:
“Freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.”
If Americans west of the Hudson River know anything about Giuliani beyond 9/11 heroism, it’s that he “cleaned up New York,” which he genuinely did. New York feels, and is, significantly safer since Giuliani’s reign. What New Yorkers know is that cleanup came at a cost: Times Square became Disneyland. Homeless were arrested and children taken from parents. Jaywalkers were strip-searched. Ferrets were banned. The list is long.
Giuliani’s approach to crime, which lowered the rate by 60 percent, is known as the “broken window” concept: One broken window in a building leads to more. So, if a neighborhood is willing to tolerate graffiti, jaywalking, beer drinking on stoops, turnstile jumpers, etc., then murder, crack dealing, robbery and other, more serious crimes will ensue. But what followed was an extreme zero-tolerance policy, resulting in almost 70,000 people suing the city for police abuses, like strip-searching jaywalkers.
“If I had to sum it up in a few minutes, I would say he’s a control freak, and the control is over your life,” says Ed Koch, former U.S. congressman and two-term mayor of New York. Koch supported Giuliani during his two mayoral campaigns, but the two had a notorious falling out over policy. Koch has since authored Giuliani: Nasty Man.
During Giuliani’s term, police wore T-shirts with intimidating statements, such as the Hemingway quote, “There is no hunting like the hunting of man.”
But most of the crime reduction was achieved during his first term, when the economy was faring well. By the second term, Giuliani’s agenda became bizarre. He outlawed ferrets and banned squeegee men, panhandlers who move through stopped or slowed traffic soliciting to wash car windows for change. He built massive networks to track graffiti artists. He lined streets with formidable barricades to prevent jaywalking.
“For Rudy, governing New York was conquering New York,” Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban planning at New York University, told Newsweek. “He thrived on confrontation.”
Giuliani’s zero-tolerance “quality-of-life crackdown,” which allowed for anyone to be stopped and patted down, raised the ire of even the police.
James Savage, then-president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, told Daily News, “If we don’t strike a balance between aggressive enforcement and common sense, it becomes a blueprint for a police state and tyranny."
George Packer of the New Yorker chimes in:
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[Giuliani] has essentially promised to go to war with Iran in order to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons, and he recently suggested that waterboarding is only torture when the wrong people are doing it, and blamed the "liberal media" for giving it a bad name. He has said that he would improve America's miserable image around the world by threatening State Department diplomats with unnamed consequences unless they defend the United States foreign policy more aggressively. "The era of cost-free anti-Americanism must end," Giuliani snarled in the polite pages of Foreign Affairs, which had invited the candidates to lay out their views.
Finally we note that even though Mr. Bush himself accused John Kerry of saying anything to get elected, Rudy Giuliani has now professed to do just that. In other words, he is both harder and smarter than Bush. Giuliani ran an ad in New Hampshire claiming survival rates from prostate cancer are 82% in the US, but only 44% in the United Kingdom under socialized medicine, as if those were the only variables. The truth is otherwise: survival rates in the UK are in actual fact 74%. When asked if he would continue using the 44% Giuliani responded "Yes." We can only hope no one of his ilk gets the nomination. We have had enough lies from the White House to last a millennium.
All this is most scary!
Does anyone doubt that Giuliani could resist pulling the nuclear trigger aimed at Iran?
Does anyone doubt he could become dictator?
We wonder.
Does anyone doubt he could become dictator?
We wonder.
Giuliani seems to combine most of what was bad about both Bush and Clinton.
For these reasons, we prefer any candidate to Giuliani in a Republican White House. Of the Democrats, Richardson is seasoned best for the job. But even he is too hawkish for our times. Obama thinks for himself and is in touch with ordinary citizens. He or Richardson are our choices among the Democrats. No candidate from either party seems up to the real job at hand. Things are sure to get a lot worse before they get better. Will they ever? Is Vietnam III on the horizon?
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Tempers in our times need to be smoothed, not riled. Until they are, it will be war and more war. Until then, dialogue, the only way forward, will be impossible. |
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If there is one lesson to be learned from the Cold War, it is that it concluded on positive notes for all belligerents without massive losses of life
or economic ruin. |
What are we waiting for? The American public, as well as most of the literate world, can understand these issues.
Barack, Bill, Dennis, Hillary, John E, John M, Mitt, Rudy:
WHERE ARE YOU?
WHERE ARE YOU?
Whoever gets this will get our vote.
Whoever recognizes these most basic of issues and moves on urgently to achieving renewable energy balance, gets our full support. When the need to be in the Middle East evaporates, we can get on seriously with dealing with the nuclear question from a position of moral strength as well as economic power.
Posted by RoadToPeace on Saturday, October 13, 2007.
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