Would You Buy a Used Hawk From This Man?

Most of the Republican Presidential candidates have realised that neo-cons are like Kryptonite and are best avoided at all costs. Indeed, many distance themselves from the entire movement by claiming that Bush isn't really a Conservative as they understand Conservatism.

Not Rudi Giuliani. He's appointed Norman Podhoretz, a founding father of the neocon movement as one of his top foreign-policy consultants. Norman Podhoretz! A man who says this kind of nonsense:

Podhoretz is in favor of bombing Iran because of the country's unwillingness to suspend its uranium-enrichment program. He also believes America is engaged in a "world war" with "Islamofascism" and that Giuliani is the only man who can win it. "I decided to join Giuliani's team because his view of the war—what I call World War IV—is very close to my own," Podhoretz tells NEWSWEEK. (World War III, in his view, was the cold war.) "And also because he has the qualities of a wartime leader, including a fighting spirit and a determination to win."

So, if Giuliani succeeds in winning his party's nomination then he is actually going to campaign on a ticket of more of the same.

Nor is Podhoretz the only extremist Giuliani has on board:

"He's positioning himself as the neo-neocon," jokes Richard Holbrooke, a top foreign-policy adviser to Hillary Clinton.

Among the core consultants surrounding Giuliani: Martin Kramer, who has led an attack on U.S. Middle Eastern scholars since 9/11 for being soft on terrorism; Stephen Rosen, a hawkish professor at Harvard who advocates major new spending on defense and is close to prominent neoconservative Bill Kristol; former Wisconsin senator Bob Kasten, who often sided with the neocons during the Reagan era and was an untiring supporter of aid to Israel, and Daniel Pipes, who has advocated for the racial profiling of Muslim Americans. (He's argued that the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II was not the moral offense it's been portrayed as, though he doesn't say Muslims should suffer the same.)

Bizarrely, Giuliani appears to think that running to the right of Bush is a clever place to be.

"Clearly it is a rather one-sided group of people," says Dimitri Simes of the Nixon Center, a Washington think tank. "Their foreign-policy manifesto seems to be 'We're right, we're powerful, and just make my day.' He's out-Bushing Bush."

It's extraordinary. Not only is Giuliani promising more of the interventionist nonsense that has led Bush into the Iraqi quagmire that he can currently see no way out of, but - of all the Republican candidates - Giuliani is currently favourite to take the nomination which means that the Republican Party itself fancies more of the same.

The party apparently still favours people who hire Podhoretz, the man who "hopes and prays" that Bush bombs Iran. And then there's Daniel Pipes who proposes "razing [Palestinian] villages from which attacks are launched."

The Republican Party really have become the party of loons. And Giuliani is their saviour. At a time when many see the need for the US to find ways to stop al Qaeda's recruitment of Muslims, Giuliani steps up to say that "it is not in the interest of the United States, at a time when it is being threatened by Islamist terrorists, to assist in the creation of another state that will support terrorism."

Meaning, if I become President a state of Palestine is off the table.

Palestine remains the number one issue on the Arab street. If Giuliani gets the nomination, and then the Presidency, there will queues all the way to the doors of al Qaeda's recruiting offices.

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Tags: Rudy Giuliani, Norman Podhoretz, Daniel Pipes, 2008 Presidential election, Republican candidates