[Marxism] It's Giuliani Time

[Greg McDonald <sabocat59@xxxxxxx>]

Stephen Schlesinger


Giuliani: Worse Than Bush

Posted August 22, 2007 | 11:33 AM (EST)

The Republican presidential frontrunner, former New York mayor Rudy  
Giuliani, has just written his foreign policy credo for Foreign  
Affairs magazine. It is a truly unnerving pronouncement -- even worse  
than Bush-ism. Not unexpectedly, Mr. Giuliani backs all of the most  
brazen features of the Bush administration's global agenda. But he  
tosses in several deeply scary initiatives of his own that George W.  
never touched.

Giuliani first provides a post-facto assessment of the Vietnam War  
which serves as his base doctrine. He believes we could have won the  
war but we precipitously "withdrew" our support in 1972. Had we  
stayed, he says, South Vietnam would have achieved "political self- 
sufficiency." Instead, by caving into an "expansionist Soviet Union."  
we created a "weaker America." Few historians, foreign policy experts  
or political figures give any credence to this thesis. And, aside  
from the irony that Giuliani is criticizing Richard Nixon, a  
president of his own party for such "errors," he fails to acknowledge  
the fact that 58,000 American soldiers had already died for a South  
Vietnamese government that was hopelessly corrupt and had no popular  
support -- and that the American public was utterly fed up with the  
conflict. Nor does the former mayor address the secondary point that  
the putatively omnipotent USSR 17 years later lost the Cold War to  
the apparently "enervated" USA.

With Vietnam as his global measuring stick, Giuliani ticks off all of  
the programs he plans to hold fast to from the Bush era. He promises  
to pursue Bush's strategy in Iraq relentlessly to "eliminate the  
export of terror," and warns that, as in Vietnam, any withdrawal  
would be a sign of weakness and "an invitation for more war." 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.

For Israel, he now opposes the "creation of another state" in  
Palestine -- a repudiation of Bush's own stance. On Iran, "should all  
else fail," he would destroy that nation's nuclear infrastructure --  
a mini-Cheney on steroids. More broadly, though, he would ratchet up  
our public diplomacy, expand the old Cold War radio stations, ditto  
with Internet networks, and insist that our US ambassadors "clearly  
advocate for US policies" -- a kind of in-your-face proselytizing of  
the sort the former mayor practiced so fervently when he ran New York  
City.

But Mr. Giuliani's most peculiar innovations are with the United  
Nations and NATO. Predictably, he is anti-UN -- as he was as mayor of  
NYC. But 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.

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. Still his retro-policies appear to be out of kilter with the  
times. He will have a lot of explaining to the American electorate  
about his foreign policy weltanschauung. It should be an illuminating  
exercise that may actually remind voters of why the only elected post  
he has ever risen to is mayor.


________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism