Giuliani vs. Giuliani

Rudy Giuliani, December 30, 1999:

"No mayor, no Governor, no President can offer anyone perfect security. You've got to be able to deal with a certain level of risk in anything that you do. When people overdo it about terrorism, terrorists actually win. You're sort of like becoming agents and instruments of the terrorists."

Rudy Giuliani on the campaign trail, 2007:

"They hate you!" says Rudy Giuliani in his new role as fearmonger in chief, relentlessly reminding audiences of all the nasty people out there. "They don't want you to be in this college!" he recently warned an audience at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta. "Or you, or you, or you," he said, reportedly jabbing his finger at students. In the first Republican debate he warned, "We are facing an enemy that is planning all over this world, and it turns out planning inside our country, to come here and kill us." On the campaign trail, Giuliani plays a man exasperated by the inability of Americans to see the danger staring them in the face. "This is reality, ma'am," he told a startled woman at Oglethorpe. "You've got to clear your head."

That first quote came from Amanda Ripley's new lengthy profile on Giuliani in Time magazine, which is a pretty good piece of journalism. Ripley does a good job probing beneath the conventional wisdom about Giuliani and actually examining his record. She gives him some credit where credit is due, but not where it isn't, and that's a huge improvement over other Giuliani profiles I've seen in the mainstream media. I recommend reading the whole thing.

The most deeply ironic point that Ripley makes is that the one thing for which Giuliani truly deserves praise--being a calm and reassuring presence in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks--is completely antithetical to the central theme of his presidential campaign. On September 11 and the days that followed, Giuliani reassured a frightened and shaken populace that New York was resilient and life would go on. He was a calming presence. Now he's touring the country trying to scare the hell out of people and greatly exaggerating the actual threat posed by terrorists, calling it "existential" and comparable to the threats posed by Nazism and Communism. From the Time article:

[M]ore than anything else, counterterrorism experts interviewed by Time cited Giuliani's campaign rhetoric as a cause for concern. He frequently conflates different threats, from Iraqi insurgents to al-Qaeda to Iran, into one monolithic dark force. He routinely compares the terrorism threat to the Holocaust and the cold war. In one 15-min. phone interview in August, Giuliani compared the terrorism threat with Nazism or communism six times. When I asked him if he risked exaggerating the threat, since most terrorist plots against the West are not the kind of attacks that will bring down a nation, he replied, "I'm not saying it would take down a country. What terrorism can do and has done is kill thousands and thousands of people. It's real, it's existential, it's independent of us."

Retired Lieut. General William Odom was director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan from 1985 to 1988. He calls Giuliani's terrorism rhetoric "the most delightful thing that al-Qaeda could want." And he laments that Giuliani isn't showing the stoicism he displayed on 9/11. "We need a President who cools it," says Odom, a senior fellow with the conservative Hudson Institute. As for Giuliani's analogy to the cold war, a period Odom knows rather well, he is unimpressed. "Jihadism is a mosquito bite compared to communism," he says. "Anybody who talks about terrorism this way is like a witch doctor."

On a tangential note, one other passage from the piece jumped out at me:

Democratic Senator Joe Biden is so far the only presidential candidate to directly rebut Giuliani's claim that he knows more about terrorism and foreign policy. "Give me a break," says Biden, who has served on the Senate Foreign Relations committee for 32 years and has been to Iraq seven times. "I'm more qualified than him by a mile." He calls Giuliani a "semidemagogue" on terrorism and criticizes him for mischaracterizing the threat. "I think he gets away with this because the most catastrophic event in modern American history saw him at the base of a building demonstrating some personal courage and taking command." But this is no time for sentimental whimsy, Biden says. "When power is passed from this President to the next, that person is going to be left with virtually no margin for error."

If it's true (and it seems to be) that Biden is the only Democratic candidate to take Giuliani to task for claiming to be a terrorism and foreign policy expert, then the obvious question is: what are the others waiting for? Giuliani is the Republican frontrunner and his claim to expertise in this area is the central rationale for his candidacy. It's well past time to start tearing that image down. The Republican candidates are all attacking Hillary, Obama, and Edwards already, building narratives about them and planting the seeds of general election themes. It's silly to allow Giuliani free reign to construct his public image as a seasoned terrorism expert, particularly when lack of such experience will almost surely be a major attack theme used against whomever manages to win the Democratic nomination. Giuliani is no more an expert on terrorism than Ray Nagin is an expert climatologist or the mayor of Tokyo is an expert seismologist.