I know I’m not telling you anything you don’t know by noting that being mayor on 9/11 doesn’t give Rudy Giuliani any expertise on terrorism, no matter what he might think. But it’s only crystallized in my mind in recent days — from watching him speak and seeing who his advisors are — that Giuliani appears to know virtually nothing about either the Middle East or counter-terrorism policy. And he looks very much like another George W. Bush in the making. Indeed, not the President Bush we now have, who has slowly lost the greater proportion of his more fanatic deputies and has Bob Gates and Condi Rice as his two main policy advisors, but the President Bush of 2001.
With Giuliani you have a man who appears to have very little familiarity with the Middle East but does have a personality which prioritizes gut-instinct, point-scoring and aggression. And like Bush he appears to believe he can make up for his lack of knowledge and experience with attitude and ass-kicking. To round things out, his foreign policy advisory team looks quite like the crowd of neocons who were advising President Bush while he was running for president. If anything they look like a group that was too extreme to gain entry into the original ‘vulcans’ group.
The fact that he set up his pre-9/11 counter-terrorism HQ as a love nest may make for good sizzle. But the direction he’d take US policy on the Middle East would likely be a genuine disaster.
