fa04a29e-e540-4ea2-892b-e2f05d84341a.jpgI'm really not quite sure how you write a 16 page article on Rudy Giuliani at this point and don't mention the firefighters, but somehow one has appeared in the New Yorker. I suppose it's more remarkable, though, for what it does cover. As Sam Boyd notes over at TAPPED today in a post aptly titled "Rudy Giluliani Will Kill Us All," the foreign policy team Rudy has assembled makes Dick Cheney look like Dennis Kucinich.

From the New Yorker article:

In June, I asked Giuliani what he was reading as he campaigned this summer. He answered, “Right now, I’m on the last chapter of Norman Podhoretz’s book ‘World War IV.’ ” Podhoretz (John Podhoretz’s father) is a totemic neoconservative, one of the early group of liberal American political thinkers who broke with the left during the Cold War. Having awakened to the Soviet danger abroad, and to the excesses of the counterculture at home, Podhoretz could now see, with hyper-clarity, the world’s array of malevolent forces, against which stood America, faced always with a Manichean choice between all-out victory and total catastrophe. After the attacks of September 11th, Podhoretz, the editor-at-large of Commentary, was among those who cast the event as part of a life-or-death global war. The construct was adopted by President Bush and given the name Global War on Terror, with implications that soon became manifest. Podhoretz sees Iraq as but one front in the larger conflict. In an essay published this spring in Commentary, he made the case for a unilateral American air assault on Iran as the only way to prevent its otherwise inexorable drive to nuclear status and regional hegemony.

Earlier this month, Giuliani named Podhoretz a senior adviser on his foreign-policy team. (“Yep. It’s official,” the Atlantic blogger Andrew Sullivan wrote. “The bombing begins in five minutes.”) The addition of Podhoretz to the team was a dramatic political gesture by Giuliani, coming at a moment when the neoconservative agenda has been broadly discredited, and blamed for a misbegotten war. Podhoretz is so untempered a neocon that he makes Paul Wolfowitz, Bush’s former Deputy Defense Secretary, and a key architect of the Iraq invasion, seem almost a moderate realist. Podhoretz knows that he carries a certain political radioactivity. While he believes that Giuliani would follow his advice to bomb Iran before it gets nuclear weapons—Giuliani, like other candidates, has said that Iran must be kept out of the nuclear club—Podhoretz hasn’t asked him directly, because he doesn’t want to damage Giuliani’s candidacy with the inevitable controversy that an affirmative answer might arouse. Podhoretz, who is spending the summer in East Hampton, and communicates with the campaign by e-mail, has made his view clear to the candidate. When, recently, John McCain said that the only thing worse than bombing Iran is allowing Iran to get the bomb, Podhoretz told Giuliani, “I wish you had been the first to say that.”

In any case, Podhoretz said to me, he believes that George W. Bush will settle the matter himself, by bombing Iran before he leaves office. “I’m probably the only person on the face of the earth who thinks that Bush will order air strikes,” Podhoretz says. “But we’ll find out. If Bush doesn’t kick the can down the road, then the issue becomes moot, obviously. But if he fails to do what I think he will do, Rudy seems to me to be the best bet for doing what is necessary.”

Podhoretz joins, among others on the foreign-policy team, the conservative Middle East scholar Martin Kramer and Charles Hill, a Hoover fellow and one of the instructors in the Grand Strategy seminar at Yale. It is Hill’s thesis that the Islamic terrorists (“Islamofascists,” in Podhoretz’s term) are at war with the international system that has ordered the world since the Treaty of Westphalia, in 1648.

It is noteworthy that nobody seems to be asking Rudy about this stuff. Seeing as how the GOP YouTube debate is back on maybe some enterprising videographer might take it upon themselves to pose these questions? I think we'd all like to hear what Rudy had to say.