Rudy talks tough on Iran, wants Israel in NATO

Rudy Giuliani's Presidential campaign appears to be based on the premise that, if he shows himself to be more insane and extreme right wing than any of the other Republican candidates, then he is assured of the nomination.

How else can one explain his recent outburst regarding Iran?

"If they get to the point that they become a nuclear power, then we will set them back five years. That is not a threat, that is a promise,'' Giuliani, 63, said.

So here we have a presidential candidate "promising" to bomb Iran into oblivion for doing what they are legally permitted to do under the NNPT. That surely is shocking enough, but Giuliani took it even further:

Rudy Giuliani talked tough on Iran yesterday, proposing to expand NATO to include Israel and warning that if Iran's leaders go ahead with their goal to be a nuclear power "we will prevent it, or we will set them back five or 10 years."

While Giuliani did not explicitly address the implications for Iran of adding Israel to NATO in his speech, his aides later highlighted a 2006 Heritage Foundation paper by Nile Gardiner, a former Thatcher aide who was announced as a new Giuliani adviser yesterday.

That step would "leave the mullahs with no illusions about the West's determination to respond to Iran's strategic threat to the region," Gardiner wrote. "Any nuclear or conventional attack on Israel, be it direct or through proxies such as Hezbollah or other terrorist groups, would be met by a cataclysmic response from the West."

So Guiliani is now seeking to make the entire Nato alliance an ally of Israel and implying that it should be Nato's responsibility to tackle Israel's enemies such as Hizbullah and Hamas with, what he calls, a "cataclysmic response".

The idea that Israel's wars were actually America's wars was first mooted by William Kristol during Israel's disastrous invasion of Lebanon last summer. I thought at the time that Kristol was letting the cat out of the bag and saying publicly what many had been accused of Antisemitism for even hinting at.

Giuliani is taking this argument substantially further by claiming that any conventional attack on Israel should become the responsibility of the entire Nato alliance.

He blatantly does not understand that Europe sees the conflict in the Middle East from an entirely different perspective than the US does. In Europe we would much rather see this conflict sorted according to international law, which means Israel returning to the pre-1967 borders and the dismantling of the illegal settlements.

Giuliani is now asking that Nato give a "cataclysmic response" in defence of the only country in the world who refuses to even define her own borders.

Israel's wars are now no longer to be America's wars as well, they are to be the wars of Nato.

The simple fact is that there is no majority of Americans who even support the notion that Israel's wars are America's wars, far less a majority of Europeans who would agree with this insane notion:

During the Israel-Hezbollah war last summer -- even with virtually no significant political figures criticizing the Bush administration for involving itself so blatantly in supporting Israel's war effort -- the vast majority of Americans wanted the U.S. to stay out of that war. A Washington Post poll found that a plurality (46%) blamed "both sides equally" (Israel and Hezbollah) for the war; a plurality (48%) believed that Israel's claimed "bombing [of] rocket launchers and other Hezbollah targets located in civilian areas" was "not justified"; and a solid majority (54-38%) said Israel "should do more to try to avoid civilian casualties in Lebanon."

More importantly, while large majorities favored the deployment of U.N. peacekeeping forces to Lebanon, a large majority (59-38%) opposed having U.S. troops involved in that force. More significantly still was this finding from an August, 2006 CBS News/New York Times poll:

"Do you think the U.S. has a responsibility to try to resolve the conflict between Israel and other countries in the Middle East, or is that not the U.S.' business?"

Has responsibility - 39%

Not the U.S.' business - 56%

Not sure - 5%

American politicians of both political parties appear to fall over themselves in order to prove loyalty to Israel, to an extent that the American public does not appear to share.

Sometimes the votes in favour of Israel from America's political elites resemble the kind of results one would expect from a Stalinist state, with majorities in favour that resemble the kind of election results that used to be won by Saddam Hussein in his "free and fair" elections.

So the American people have no real democratic choice when it comes to whether or not they wish Israel to be supported in this way as both their political parties are as biased as each other when it comes to this matter.

However, Giuliani greatly underestimates the sentiments on this subject in Europe if he seriously believes that Europeans would welcome sending their young men and women to defend a country that most of us see as engaging in rampant colonialism.

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