The Liberty Papers

The New York Times has a report out on the foreign policy team that Rudy Giuliani has assembled, and it seems to be made up of the same bunch of guys who got us in the mess we’re in right now:

Rudolph W. Giuliani’s approach to foreign policy shares with other Republican presidential candidates an aggressive posture toward terrorism, a commitment to strengthening the military and disdain for the United Nations.

But in developing his views, Mr. Giuliani is consulting with, among others, a particularly hawkish group of advisers and neoconservative thinkers

(…)

Mr. Giuliani’s team includes Norman Podhoretz, a prominent neoconservative who advocates bombing Iran “as soon as it is logistically possible”; Daniel Pipes, the director of the Middle East Forum, who has called for profiling Muslims at airports and scrutinizing American Muslims in law enforcement, the military and the diplomatic corps; and Michael Rubin, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has written in favor of revoking the United States’ ban on assassination.

(…)

One of Mr. Giuliani’s most important foreign policy tutors is Charles Hill, a career diplomat and former deputy to Secretary of State George P. Shultz in the Reagan administration. Mr. Hill had never met Mr. Giuliani when he was invited to a 45-minute meeting at Giuliani Partners in late February — a meeting that stretched to nearly three hours.

Mr. Hill went on to become the campaign’s chief foreign policy adviser, and to assemble a team that is united by its generally hawkish views and its belief in using American power to achieve its aims.

Just days after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Hill joined a number of foreign policy experts in signing an open letter to Mr. Bush urging that “even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.”

I’ve made it clear on this site in the past that I’m not exactly in the “bring all the troops home” crowd when it comes to foreign policy. At the same time, though, I think it’s fairly clear that the neocon foreign policy that’s been in place since September 11th and its seeming devotion to eternal war and some grand dream of imposing democracy by fiat on a region of the world that has no experience with either liberty or democracy has failed spectacularly, with Exhibit A being Iraq. The surge may have quelled violence, but it’s done nothing to turn Iraq into anything resembling a stable democracy, and there’s no reason to believe that any amount of American military force is capable of accomplishing such a goal.

The fact that Giuliani is apparently taking advice from people who still believe in this fallacy should be an indication of what his foreign policy will be like.