RUDY GIULIANI WILL KILL US ALL. Not quite, but his foreign policy team makes Dick Cheney look like Dennis Kucinich, according to the recent New Yorker piece that Stephen blogged about:
Earlier this month, Giuliani named Podhoretz a senior adviser on his foreign-policy team... Podhoretz is so untempered a neocon that he makes Paul Wolfowitz, Bush's former Deputy Defense Secretary, and a key architect of the Iraq invasion, seem almost a moderate realist. Podhoretz knows that he carries a certain political radioactivity. While he believes that Giuliani would follow his advice to bomb Iran before it gets nuclear weapons -- Giuliani, like other candidates, has said that Iran must be kept out of the nuclear club -- Podhoretz hasn't asked him directly, because he doesn't want to damage Giuliani's candidacy with the inevitable controversy that an affirmative answer might arouse.
Which of course raises the question: if one of Giuliani's top advisers advocates attacking Iran why hasn't anyone asked Giuliani about it?. A quick Nexis search didn't turn up any comments by him on the issue, but if you know of one please post it in the comments.
Other stars of the Giuliani foreign policy team are almost as nutty:
Podhoretz joins, among others on the foreign-policy team, the conservative Middle East scholar Martin Kramer and Charles Hill, a Hoover fellow and one of the instructors in the Grand Strategy seminar at Yale. It is Hill's thesis that the Islamic terrorists ("Islamofascists," as Podhoretz would say) are at war with the international system that has ordered the world since the Treaty of Westphalia, in 1648.
It's as if Giuliani's economic team was headed by Objectivists, or his social policy team was led by the Army of God. Liberals should start hitting him with this now so that it's considered common knowledge by the time the general election gets here in case, and I consider this a worst-case scenario, he gets the nomination.
--Sam Boyd
