Sorry to follow up one Giuliani article with another, but this was so striking that I had to post it.
For the second time in a single month (The first being the August edition of Harper's cover article "A Fate Worse Than Bush") Rudy Giuliani has been declared by a media source as not only bad but in fact (almost unbelievably so) worse than our current President.
The well known Huffington Post (via Yahoo, via Google) posted an article titled "Giuliani: Worse Than Bush" detailing the past NYC Mayor's frightening idea of a foreign policy.
Starting off by speaking about how the US should never have left Vietnam, Giuliani continues to go off on a policy so violent that it makes Apocalypse Now look like a walk in the park.
HuffPost continues to say:
He does not conceive of, admit to, or even mention the possibility of a region-wide political settlement which even now the Bush Administration is apparently contemplating. In addition, he would "press ahead" with an anti-ballistic missile system -- regardless of its outsized costs or ineffectiveness. And he would, as he says, "pursue the gains made by the USA Patriot Act and not unrealistically limit electronic surveillance or legal interrogation." Sounds a lot like an embrace of unrestricted presidential power and possibly torture.
On the UN, HuffPost notes Rudy's divorce from reality on the issue of the UN:
he goes further and argues that the UN has "proved irrelevant to the resolution of almost every major dispute of the last fifty years." This is a breathtaking display of incomprehension. Just a reminder: the UN stopped the invasion of South Korea; settled the Suez crisis of 1956; assisted in the ending of the Cuban missile crisis of 1963; ousted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991. It brought peace to conflicts in Guatemala, Angola, Mozambique, El Salvador, Cambodia and helps keep the peace in Cyprus. More recently, it aided Haiti in holding an election and ending violence, pushed the Syrians out of Lebanon, enforced a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon and presently supports a dozen or so other peacekeeping missions.
Even odder, his ideas on NATO:
Now we come to the ex-mayor's most bizarre suggestion -- that NATO be encouraged to act "globally," be reconfigured to confront "significant threats to the international system," and "we should open the organization's membership to any state" -- though it is a European-based body. Is Mr. Giuliani thus proposing that NATO replace the UN as the world's arbiter? And why not? Since the US dominates NATO, this would give Washington a direct means to extend its security purvey over the entire planet. This is a vision consistent with the authoritarian instincts with which Mr. Giuliani governed NYC.
I'm pretty sure that this should be universally disturbing. Even the most die-hard rightest should recognize the enormous negative economic impact that making the US arbiter of an ad-hoc nuUN would bring. As for those, like myself, on the left the entire thing should scare the shit out of you.
