Tell me that Rudolph Giuliani did a good job on September 11 and you'll get no argument from me. Say he was, all things considered, a good mayor and, despite my disagreements with him on some matters, you'll get no argument from me. If we were in the middle of a presidential campaign focused on the topic of reducing urban crime, he'd be just the man I'd expect to see giving a prime-time address. If we were in the middle of a presidential campaign focused on the topic of rallying a confused and frightened population with inspiring rhetoric and personal leadership, again, he'd be a good choice.
But we're not in the middle of either of those campaigns.
We're in the middle of a campaign that the president, saddled with a domestic agenda that's unpopular across the board and an increasingly problematic war in Iraq, desperately wants to make about preventing future terrorist attacks. What business, exactly, does Giuliani have being the featured speaker on the convention night that's supposed to be especially dedicated to security concerns? We're threatened, after all, not by squeegie men (people who try to clean your windshield when you're stopped at a traffic light in New York, demanding money for their services) but by Islamist terrorists, a subject Giuliani would seem to know no more about than anyone else who watched events unfold that fateful morning almost three years ago.
He's never served in the military (or held a civilian job that entailed working with the military). He's never held a job dealing with foreign affairs. He's never held a job dealing with intelligence. Indeed, the closest he gets is time spent as a federal prosecutor working against the Mafia, precisely the law-enforcement model of counterterrorism that the nation has abandoned and that the Bush administration likes to accuse Democrats of being in thrall to. Nor does he have any experience with the problem of post-conflict stabilization, the area in which George W. Bush's policies have most clearly fallen short. The Coalition Provisional Authority even brought Bernard Kerik, Giuliani's favorite police commissioner, to Baghdad to try to help out with security. It didn't work very well. Kerik, like Giuliani, was given a speaking role on Monday evening.
As the mayor of a large city, one that had been the target of terrorist attacks before, Giuliani does have some experience with homeland security. But it's not a very good record.
After the 1993 bombing attack on the World Trade Center, Giuliani decided that the city needed an emergency-management-command center and so he had one built -- in the World Trade Center. Critics suggested that locating the facility in a building that was likely to come under attack wasn't a very good idea. The critics were right. The heroic work and sacrifice of so many members of New York's police and fire departments is made all the more poignant by the knowledge that they weren't even properly equipped for the mission with, for example, interoperable communications systems that would have let them coordinate their work. How much blame can we heap on Giuliani for these failings? Some, though he was no more caught unaware by the attacks than 95 percent of American politicians, so a reasonable person would forgive. But, again, would a reasonable person make him the featured national-security spokesman for a major political party?
Apparently, Bush's political advisers would. After all, their entire security pitch is based on the notion that you should neglect issues of expertise in favor of the sort of strong, reassuring rhetoric that Giuliani offered in mid-September of 2001. This is the campaign of a president who didn't see fit after 9-11 to change up his security team and consider appointing someone with extensive experience in counterterrorism or Arab issues. Instead, he stuck with the same gang of missile-defense advocates and Iraq hawks who, shockingly enough, produced a response oriented around missile defense and invading Iraq rather than counterterrorism and engagement with the realities of the Arab world.
The two men -- Richard Clarke and Rand Beers -- Bush felt were most qualified to run his counterterrorism team before and after 9-11 have both resigned, one to write a book largely about why Bush's policies in this area are bad, the other to become John Kerry's chief national-security adviser. The Democrats, meanwhile, broke with the traditional practice of nominating a charming governor who knows nothing about national security in favor of a combat veteran who, though not a legislative giant, has been unusually engaged for a U.S. senator in foreign-policy issues and combating unconventional threats. Retired national-security professionals -- from the uniformed military, the intelligence community, and the foreign service -- have increasingly turned against the incumbent. The Democratic nominee has received endorsements from an unprecedented number of generals, while others, like Tony Zinni (the man Bush once felt was most qualified to run his Middle East policy), have, without issuing an endorsement, made their displeasure with the current course well-known.
The president's defenders will argue that these professionals are sticks in the mud, simply unwilling to embrace Bush's bold new approach. What's needed, they say, is less expertise and more influence in the hands of the sort of ideologically driven political appointees who gave us the Iraq War and the bulk of the bogus intelligence marshaled to support it. The sort of political appointees who ignored professional advice about stabilizing Iraq in favor of radical de-Baathification. The sort of political appointees whose favored Iraqi leader turns out to have been playing footsie with Iranian intelligence. The sort of political appointees who arrange unauthorized meetings with shady arms dealers who've been reportedly labeled unreliable by the CIA and wind up passing classified intelligence to the government of Israel.
It's not an argument the American people are likely to buy. Better, then, to offer up Giuliani as a superior alternative to expertise. A man who, though he may lack qualification to speak to the topic at hand, does come freighted with positive emotional vibes, reminding us of that brief moment of national unity after the attacks. It's a strategy that just might work, and the president had better hope that it does, because if the voters start listening to the experts, he's not going to like what they have to say.
