Giuliani’s Neocons

Rudolph Giuliani will not be the next decider and commander guy. Even so, at least to make a good appearance, Giuliani has stacked his campaign deck with insiders and neocons. As we know, Giuliani’s chief foreign policy adviser is Charles Hill, a George Shultz flunky, and the team led by Hill includes Martin Kramer, a “scholar” at the Middle East at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the Shalem Center, and the Olin Institute, that is to say at the very core of the neocon movement to destroy America and kill Muslims. Now we are told Giuliani will hire the grand daddy of the neocon cabal, Norman Podhoretz. “In addition to being an unwavering supporter of the war against Iraq, Podhoretz, a former editor of Commentary magazine, has grabbed headlines in recent months as one of most vocal proponents of American military action against Iran,” notes InFocus.

“The naming of leading neoconservative Norman Podhoretz as one of Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani’s senior foreign policy advisers is disconcerting to those Americans who have hoped that the current disagreements with Iran might be resolved short of war,” laments Philip Giraldi for National Interest Online. “Giuliani—together with Mitt Romney and John McCain—has publicly advocated a military strike against Iran to keep it from acquiring nuclear weapons. He has also not ruled out the use of America’s own nuclear weapons if that should prove necessary to deter Tehran.” In other words, the neocon agenda is alive and well amidst the Republican hopefuls, or at least those billed as front-runners by the corporate media (the real front-runner, Ron Paul, assiduously ignored by the corporate media, is strenuously opposed to the neocon mass murder project).

Giraldi continues:

Podhoretz has recently called on the United States to bomb Iran and he describes the current situation—pitting Washington against what he describes as “the Islamofascist threat”—as World War IV. Podhoretz basically advocates a world-wide conflict not unlike World War II to defeat Islamists everywhere they are to be found. Giuliani is already the U.S. presidential hopeful who is perceived most favorably in Israel because of his uncompromising stance on issues like the Iranian threat and terrorism, and the addition of Podhoretz will certainly be viewed favorably by many influential neoconservatives. Podhoretz is himself an uncompromising advocate of what he sees as Israeli national security imperatives very much in the mold of the right-wing Likud party….

Podhoretz’s definition of the enemy as Islamofascism is itself a borrowing from right-wing Israeli think tanks that prefer to see an enemy in unitary terms that can be conflated with international terrorism. Most experts on Islam and on the many countries that have majority Muslim populations would reject that Islamofascism or anything like it really exists, just as the “global war on terrorism” is essentially a misleading simplification that has little meaning. The basically false depiction of a hostile and menacing global entity is done deliberately to help formulate a policy which perforce makes Israel’s enemies also the enemies of the United States, even when they are not.

Chances are slim to none Giuliani, with Podhoretz and any number of neocons in tow, will occupy the White House. Even the neocon Newt Gingrich admits as much. “The odds are fairly significant that that the left will win next year. My personal bet is that it’ll be a Clinton-Obama ticket. I think they have a very high likelihood of winning,” Gingrich told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Six months ago in the polling numbers, Giuliani was ahead of Clinton. He is now behind. He’s the strongest Republican in terms of popular vote, whether you’re for him or against him.” In fact, it was decided some time ago the Clinton-Obama team would “win” the “election” come November, 2008.

Of course, the “left,” headed up by the decider gal Hillary Clinton, will pick up the neocon baton and go after Iran, as planned.

In 2005, during a Hanukkah dinner speech hosted by Yeshiva University, Clinton said: “I held a series of meetings with Israeli officials, including the prime minister and the foreign minister and the head of the [Israeli Defense Force] to discuss such challenges we confront. In each of these meetings, we talked at length about the dire threat posed by the potential of a nuclear-armed Iran, not only to Israel, but also to Europe and Russia. Just this week, the new president of Iran made further outrageous comments that attacked Israel’s right to exist that are simply beyond the pale of international discourse and acceptability. During my meeting with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, I was reminded vividly of the threats that Israel faces every hour of every day … It became even more clear how important it is for the United States to stand with Israel,” that is to say the Likudites.

Clinton will “continue to support AIPAC’s mission to occupy the whole of the occupied territories, as well as a war on Iran in the future,” writes Joshua Frank. Earlier this year, Clinton declared during an AIPAC dinner, “no option can be taken off the table” when dealing with Iran. “We need to use every tool at our disposal, including diplomatic and economic in addition to the threat and use of military force,” the latter naturally the preferred course, as the neocons and their friends on the Democrat “left” are determined to shock and awe Iran, not divest it of illusory nukes.

Although we can assume Hillary Clinton will not court the likes of Norman Podhoretz and the over-the-top neocons, once “elected” her foreign policy will be a neocon mirror image. As Joshua Frank notes, Richard Holbrooke, fondly known as the “Balkans bulldozer,” may “be asked to serve as Secretary of State if she is to win the presidential campaign next year. Holbrooke, a Democratic adaptation of Henry Kissinger, loves her approach to foreign policy.” Frank reminds us that Holbrooke has a special place in his heart for the neocon way of doing things, that is say the neocon way of killing Muslims. “In an unguarded moment just before the 2000 election, Richard Holbrooke opened a foreign policy speech with a fawning tribute to his host, Paul Wolfowitz, who was then the dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington,” Frank quotes First of the Month.

Holbrooke, a senior adviser to Al Gore, was acutely aware that either he or Wolfowitz would be playing important roles in next administration. Looking perhaps to assure the world of the continuity of US foreign policy, he told his audience that Wolfowitz’s ‘recent activities illustrate something that’s very important about American foreign policy in an election year, and that is the degree to which there are still common themes between the parties.’ The example he chose to illustrate his point was East Timor, which was invaded and occupied in 1975 by Indonesia with US weapons—a security policy backed and partly shaped by Holbrooke and Wolfowitz. ‘Paul and I,’ he said, ‘have been in frequent touch to make sure that we keep [East Timor] out of the presidential campaign, where it would do no good to American or Indonesian interests.’

It helps, as well, that Holbrooke is a regular at CFR and Bilderberg meetings, thus demonstrating his globalist pedigree (in fact, Holbrooke is not simply your garden variety member, but rather sits on the board of directors). Other CFR members include Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, James Woolsey, Irving Kristol, and a smattering of other neocons and like-minded, including the butcher of Honduras, John Negroponte. Richard N. Haass, current president of the CFR and former State Department director of policy planning under Colin Powell, while not strictly a neocon, paralleled the release of “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” the neocon plan of attack issued by the Project for the New American Century, with his own “Imperial America,” a paper “that urged the United State to fashion an ‘imperial foreign policy’ that makes use of its ’surplus of power’ to ‘extend its control’ across the face of the globe. While still denying that lasting hegemony was possible, Haass declared that the United States should use the exceptional opportunity that it now enjoyed to reshape the world in order to enhance its global strategic assets. This meant military interventions around the world,” John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney explain in Pox Americana: Exposing the American Empire (Monthly Review Press, 2004, p. 170).

In short, be the next president Clinton or Giuliani, and it will likely be the former, foreign policy will remain virtually the same, no doubt with a few stylistic differences.

Of course, not only will the neocons be satisfied with this change, as their policies will continue, albeit without their direct participation, but “progressive” Democrats, as exemplified by the Kos cadre embracing Clinton last week, will be happy as pigs in a certain disagreeable substance come November, 2008, and will blissfully ignore the “common themes between the parties,” namely more bodies piled up in their name, same as they dutifully ignored Bill Clinton’s mass murder spree in Serbia and his intermittent attacks against Iraqi civilians, including the renown Iraqi artist Layla al-Attar.