Muhammad Idrees Ahmad

Rudy Giuliani, one of the individuals more likely to become the Republican nominee for President, has chosen the founding father of neoconservatism and anti-Muslim crusader Norman Podhoretz as his foreign policy advisor. The choice is significant, since only recently Podhoretz — who is the former editor of American Jewish Committee’s inhouse publication, Commentary, and father-in-law of the Iran-Contra convict, and present day Iran-hawk Elliot Abrams – had written an article entitled, “The Case for Bombing Iran“. Like the son-in-law, Podhoretz comes with an unsavory history. Alexander Cockburn writes:

Giuliani named his list of foreign policy advisers last week. This is an important political ritual, whereby political commentators can run their eyes down the list and assess at a glance what sort of headway the candidate is making in winning the support of the political establishment, starting with Henry Kissinger. Giuliani’s list is heavily freighted with pro-war types, including the apex neo-con, Norman Podhoretz.

No candidate lofting tossing the name Podhoretz into the laptops of the press corps, is aiming at the peace vote. Podhoretz is former editor of the American Jewish Committee’s Commentary magazine, the neocons’ in-house journal. He’s been touting war on Islam and pretty much everywhere on the planet else barring Israel ever since the mid-70s, when he worried that America would quit its support for Israel just as it slunk out of Vietnam. He denounced the Democrats as pro-Arab, pro-gay, pro-terror pinkoes and stumped for Reagan. His wife, Midge Decter, became a moving spirit in the Committee on the Present Danger, his so-in-law Elliot Abrams went to work for Reagan, plead guilty to lying to Congress about the US role in the Reagan-era shuttle of arms and money, labeled the Iran-Contras scandal. These days Elliot in the Bush White House and Norman is now at Giuliani’s elbow.

By publicly identifying Podhoretz as one of his foreign policy advisers, Giuliani is not only emphasizing his view that the United States should stay in Iraq for the long haul. He’s saying that he esteems the counsel of a man who is calling for an immediate attack on Iran. In “The Case for Bombing Iran”, an essay in the June edition of Commentary, Podhoretz trundled his mid-70s arsenal of calumny out of the museum, rehabbed for current conditions: “Looking at Europe today,” he wailed, “we already see the unfolding of a process analogous to Finlandization [a vintage neo-con slur from the Cold War years]: it has been called, rightly, Islamization.” Podhoretz set for the choices in what he calls the Fourth World War. Either bomb Iran now, or “we could wake up one morning to find that Iran is holding Berlin, Paris or London hostage to whatever its demands are then.”

Given their track record it’s not implausible to argue, as many do, that by attacking Iran at some point in the coming months Bush and Cheney will try to revive their administration’s fortunes and the presently abysmal prospects of Republican candidates–not just the presidential candidate–in the 2008 elections. Even though the ordinary folk are not enthused, there’s considerable bipartisan support for such an attack among the political elites.

The Israel lobby has been publicly pushing for it for over a year. Senator Joseph Lieberman recently put up a resolution in Congress stigmatizing Iran as the prime instigator of the deaths of US personnel in Iraq and such supposed Democratic liberals as California’s two senators–Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer–voted for it. Last week, around 70 Democrats let it be known they could not approve any plan for Iraq that didn’t schedule an immediate start to withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. Good for them, but that leaves two thirds of the Democrats in the House NOT supporting such a plan. Plus every Republican except Ron Paul, the only Republican in the House to vote with the 70-odd Democrats on this issue.

Giuliani–now vying with Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts and the (to me) entirely unconvincing former Tennessee senator and actor Fred Thompson for the front-runner’s spot on the Republican side for the presidential nomination–seems to have realised soon enough that waving the Iraqi battle standard isn’t a vote-getter in the sticks. No sooner had he fronted Poddy as the Wise Man at his elbow than he also attacked Bush’s strategy in Iraq, saying it was draining resources and attention from the true war on terror–which is the default option for Democratic contenders such as HRC. Staking his future on the war option, even as McCain’s bier is hauled from the field, is a posture that may play well in New York and Washington, but probably not in the hinterlands of New Hampshire and Iowa, where Giuliani will have first to make his mark.

Poddy in his own words:

Incidentally, even arch-conservative William Buckley Jr., finds this old fart ‘extreme’.