Iraq Redux II

On April 15 I posted my latest commentary on Iraq.

The comments which I received convincingly argued that a phased withdrawal is a sin qua non for any progress in stabilization. That is clearly not the Administration’s view, but the remarkable thing is that not a single Republican candidate for President is supporting a phased withdrawal, and it appears that despite the President’s incredibly low approval ratings, Republican candidates appear to be vying for who can be the closest clone to the incumbent in the White House.

For example, the Republican front runner for the nomination, Rudy Giuliani, charged that if a Democrat were elected, they would “wave the white flag” in Iraq, cut back on surveillance of terrorists, restrict the ability of law enforcement officials to gather intelligence and limit interrogation techniques, curtailing their effectiveness. He neglected to say how he would deal with what he called, “the defining conflict of our time.” We can, however, get a good idea of how Giuliani would deal with the situation. He would do exactly the same as what Bush is doing and I guess the theory is that in the Republican primaries the American people will not be voting. A small hard core of Bush supporters will be voting and the aim is to get the nomination. After that there will be time enough to flip and flop and say he didn’t really mean all the things he said in trying to get the nomination. But the American people must not have short memories. They must reject the liars. We have had enough of those during the past six years.

But let us analyze the meaning of his attacks. “Wave the white flag.” What does Giuliani mean by not waving the white flag. Does he mean we should keep the troops in Iraq until hell freezes over? How long Mr. Giuliani? For four more years? For eight? For ten? Six years ago the man whose clone Giuliani now aspires to be, declared victory, flying on to an aircraft carrier to dramatize that “victory.” See BBC News dated May 2, 2003.

Now four years later after having told us every few month that victory is just around the corner; that things are getting better, we now have the “surge,” and things are getting worse. More Iraqi’s killed! More Americans killed, but they tell us that just proves things are getting better. Give it a chance. How long Mr. Giuliani? And tell us where the troops will come from. Even now troop deployments are being extended more and more because your clone has broken our once proud military. Will you call for a draft? How will you sustain this deployment?

“Cut back on surveillance of terrorists.” Would Mr. Giuliani tell us who wants to cut back on surveillance of terrorists? This is a favored tactic. Set up a straw man and knock him down. If Mr. Giuliani means that Democrats object to giving the President authority to snoop on American’s without court warrants, and he favors it, he should say so. That is certainly a useful way of spying on political opponents as Nixon did, but it has nothing to do with terrorists. 

“Limit interrogation techniques.” Is Mr. Giuliani advocating the use of torture? If so let him say so. It is a matter that should be debated openly, not by indirection.

Who is this hero who runs on his record of 9/11. The media, which is always looking for heroes, whether it is Private Lynch or Pat Tillman, turned Rudy into one after 9/11. What did he do? He stood on the ruins of 9/11 with a bullhorn and gave speeches and posed for photos. Ah yes, these people are good at photo ops. But did Rudy do anything to prevent this catastrophe from happening? If he did it is a well-kept secret. It isn’t as though an attack on the Trade Center could not be anticipated. They had tried once before and failed. But neither Bush nor Giuliani learned a thing from that. 

When the attack came the radio frequencies of the police and fire departments prevented effective communications causing untold confusion and casualties. Where was Giuliani’s leadership then?

Following the disaster the air was dangerously polluted, but Mr. Giuliani let the responders work without masks causing untold additional casualties.

Before the disaster happened Giuliani had the foresight to create an extremely expensive and ultra-sophisticated Emergency Operations Center, which he perched high up above many large tanks of combustible fuel in the Trade Center. And when the planes struck he didn’t do the things that need to be done except in his fictitious telling of events in the book he published. But then he was always good at one thing, and that is in promoting himself. But read the real story entitled, “Rudy's Grand Illusion What Giuliani likes to remember about 9-11—and what he actually did (or didn't do)” which you can find here.

But even before the myth of 9/11 Giuliani was working on his image. Before 9/11 he bragged about how he had brought crime down in the City of NY. Indeed crime had come down. Of course it had come down throughout the U.S., thanks to Bill Clinton’s national drive against crime, under which the Federal government provided money to increase police departments. So just how much credit Rudy deserves is problematic. But he did effectively attack crimes that reduced the quality of life for New Yorkers and that was not a National trend. He did it by appointing William J. Bratton as his police chief, and Bratton was good. He devised police methods that stopped a lot of petty crimes and that carried over to more serious crimes. But then he started to get too much credit. With Giuliani only one person gets credit for anything and we know who that is, so he fired Bratton. Who did he hire? Bernard Kerik! Who is Bernard Kerik? He was Rudy’s Correction’s Commissioner, where he did an undistinguished job, but he was a Giuliani loyalist and so he became police commissioner, and when Rudy left his job as mayor and started a consulting firm he made Kerik a partner and they both became rich. But what is Kerik’s background. According to Wikipedia, Kerik was chief of investigations for the security office at King Faisal’s Specialist Hospital in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia from 1982 to 1984. In 1984 he was fired and deported after an investigation by the Saudi secret police. In May 2003, during Operation Iraqi Freedom, Kerik was appointed by the George W. Bush Administration as the Interim Minister of Interior of Iraq and Senior Policy Advisor to the U.S. Presidential Envoy to Iraq, L. Paul Bremer. On December 3, 2004, Kerik was nominated by President Bush to succeed Tom Ridge as United States Secretary of Homeland Security. But on December 10, after a week of press scrutiny, Kerik withdrew acceptance of the nomination. It turned out that there were questions about his past which included Kerik's sale of stock in Taser International shortly before the release of an Amnesty International report critical of the company's stun-gun product; a sexual harassment lawsuit; an affair with Judith Regan the aborted publisher of O.J. Simpson’s “Why I did it”; allegations of misuse of police personnel and property for personal benefit; connections with a construction company suspected of having ties to organized crime; and failure to comply with ethics rules on gifts.

By his friends though shalt know him!

What does this tell us about the Republican Party?