- Rudy Giuliani has made a "promise" not to allow
Iran to acquire a nuclear capability, even if it requires U.S. military
action. Though the U.S. Army is scrimping to meet recruitment goals, Rudy
has pledged to add at least 10 new combat brigades.
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- Speaking to an Atlantic Bridge conference in London,
Rudy called for NATO expansion to include Japan, India, Australia, Singapore
and Israel. Has Rudy thought this through?
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- Why would Japan and Australia, each of which already
has a U.S. commitment to come to its defense, commit to go to war with
a nuclear-armed Russia if it invaded Estonia? For joining NATO would require
them to treat an attack on Estonia, or any other NATO nation in Europe,
as an attack upon themselves.
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- Why should the United States commit to war for India,
which has territorial conflicts and has fought wars with China and Pakistan?
What vital interest is it of ours who holds Kashmir? As for Israel, are
American boys now to fight Hezbollah and Hamas?
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- While FDR talked to Stalin, Ike and JFK to Khrushchev,
and Nixon to Mao, Rudy would not talk to any "enemies bent on our
destruction or those who cannot deliver on their agreements." Would
he be even-handed in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute? Answers Rudy, "America
shouldn't be even-handed in dealing with ... an elected democracy ... and
a group of terrorists."
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- If Rudy rivals McCain as the hawk's hawk in the Republican
race, the foreign policy advisers he has signed up make the Vulcans of
Bush look like Howard Zinn and Ramsey Clark. Arnaud de Borchgrave titled
his column about them "<Dogs of War."
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- Team leader is Charles Hill, a co-signer of the Sept.
20, 2001, neocon ultimatum to Bush, nine days after 9/11, warning the president
if he did not attack Iraq, his failure to do so "will constitute an
early and perhaps decisive surrender to the war on international terrorism."
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- Yet Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.
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- A second member of Rudy's team is Martin Kramer, an Israeli-American
who, <http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/08/hbc-90001040>according
to Ken Silverstein of Harper's, "spent 25 years at Tel Aviv University
and whose Middle East policy can best be summarized as, 'What's Best for
Israel?'" Silverstein calls Rudy's eight-man advisory group "AIPAC's
Dream Team" AIPAC being the Israeli lobby, two of whose leaders
go on trial in January for espionage against the United States.
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- According to the New York Times, another key Rudy adviser
is Daniel Pipes, "who has called for profiling Muslims at airports
and scrutinizing American Muslims in law enforcement, the military and
the diplomatic corps." Another is AEI's Michael Rubin, "who has
written in favor of revoking the United States' ban on assassinations."
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- Best known of Rudy's advisers is Norman Podhoretz, who
wrote in June, "The Case for Bombing Iran" in Commentary, thinks
we are in "World War IV" and writes that "as an American
and as a Jew, I pray with all my heart" Bush will bomb Iran. Podhoretz
sees us at Munich in 1938 and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as Hitler.
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- "Like Hitler," writes Podhoretz, Ahmadinejad
"is a revolutionary whose objective is to overturn the going international
order and to replace it in the fullness of time with a new order dominated
by Iran and ruled by the religio-political culture of Islamofascism."
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- Time to return to Planet Earth. Ahmadinejad is not only
jeered at Columbia but at colleges in Tehran. He is openly attacked by
rivals. He does not control the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. He does not
decide on war or peace. He runs a regime with 2 percent of U.S. gross domestic
product, no nukes and no navy or air force to rival ours. He is a Shi'ite
in a Sunni world. How is this 5 foot, 4 inch Persian going to strong-arm
the United States, Russia and China not to mention an Israel with
300 nukes into his "new order"?
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- After the axis-of-evil speech threatening war on Iraq,
Iran and North Korea, Podhoretz wrote that Bush had not gone far enough.
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- The "regimes that richly deserve to be overthrown
... should extend to Syria and Lebanon and Libya, as well as 'friends'
of America like the Saudi royal family and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, along
with the Palestinian Authority." After toppling them all, wrote Podhoretz,
as he mocked the "timorous ... incorrigibly cautious Colin Powell,"
let's find "the stomach to impose a new political culture on the defeated."
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- Bush found the stomach. Near 4,000 Americans are dead,
27,000 wounded, Walter Reed is full, and Norman is looking for new wars.
On a recent National Review cruise, he ranted that Iraq was an "amazing
success," "a triumph. It couldn't have gone better." As
for Saddam's WMDs, they were secretly "shipped to Syria."
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- After meeting with his candidate, Podhoretz emerged happy
to assure us, "There is very little difference in how he (Rudy) sees
the war and I see it." If true, a vote for Rudy is a vote for endless
war.
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- And, as James Madison said, wars are the death of republics.
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