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Arab News – September 14, 2007
Giuliani packs staff with hawks
Barbara Ferguson
Rudy Giuliani, the Republican presidential candidate, is working hard to claim his place as the Republican's leading hawk.
The former New York City mayor recently announced the latest choice to join his presidential campaign team is neoconservative Daniel Pipes.
Pipes is viewed by many as anti-Muslim. Ahmed Rehab, the director general for CAIR, the Council of American Islamic Relations in Chicago, wrote last week in Media Monitors Network: "Daniel Pipes is as much a scholar on Islam and Muslims as David Duke is a scholar on Judaism and Jews. Pipes is wedded to his personal political agenda to such a point that it dominates his worldview invalidating his ability to act as a neutral scholar on Muslim-related topics."
In his article, entitled: "The Islamophobe Who Cried Islamist," Rehab writes: "For Pipes, a 'bad' Muslim is a Muslim who challenges his views on Israel and a 'good' Muslim is one who agrees with them; in his 'scholarly' lingo, the code terms are 'Islamist' and 'moderate' respectively….
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=4§ion=0&article=101183&d=14&m=9&y=2007
Harper's Magazine– August 27, 2007
Meet Giuliani’s Advisors: AIPAC’s Dream Team
Ken Silverstein
“The Republican Party is in desperate straits. How else to explain that Rudy Giuliani–a former mayor with no foreign policy experience–is the Republican front-runner, largely based on his supposed foreign policy expertise?”
So opens an amusing critique penned by conservative writer Doug Bandow about Giuliani’s recent essay in Foreign Affairs. In that essay, Giuliani stated that the next U.S. president “will face three key foreign policy challenges. First and foremost will be to set a course for victory in the terrorists’ war on global order.” It seems that Democrats, and many Republicans besides Giuliani, just don’t understand what needs to be done to confront the terrorist threat. The essay is filled with simplistic, idiotic arguments, and Bandow does a good job of demolishing them.
Let’s take just one of Giuliani’s insights—“For 15 years, the de facto policy of both Republicans and Democrats has been to ask the U.S. military to do increasingly more with increasingly less. The idea of a post-Cold War ‘peace dividend’ was a serious mistake—the product of wishful thinking and the opposite of true realism.”
Bandow’s rejoinder: In an essay filled with silly nonsense, this statement stands out as being uniquely stupid. Between 1980 and 2000 the Soviet Union disintegrated, the Warsaw Pact disbanded, Maoism disappeared from China, the former Soviet republics and Eastern European satellites gravitated towards America and Europe, and Vietnam opened to the West. As a result, the United States found itself allied with every major industrialized state as well as many former communist countries while, as Colin Powell famously put it, America’s enemies were down to Cuba and North Korea. In this new world, Giuliani believes that the U.S. shouldn’t have reduced military spending even a little?
It’s easy to see where Giuliani gets his ideas on foreign policy, given the team of foreign policy advisors he announced last month Norman Podhoretz’s name attracted the most attention when the list was announced, and with good reason–take a look at this video (posted by Andrew Sullivan), for example, in which Podhoretz portrays a military attack on Iran as not only the best option but the only option.
There are a number of other notable hardliners advising Giuliani. Charles Hill of the Hoover Institution, the campaign’s chief advisor, joined a number of leading neo-conservatives in signing a September 20, 2001 letter to President Bush that said that even if Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, “any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove [him] from power in Iraq. Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism.”
During a March 2003 debate at Yale, shortly before the Iraq war began, Hill said: “The U.S. has the power to do this operation swiftly, and it will be a war that will not do great damage to Iraq, to its installations, to its infrastructure, or to its people.” He downplayed obstacles and suggestions that the financial cost of the war might be huge, saying the long-terms benefits of an invasion would be huge, and would include “the restoration of American credibility and decisiveness. We’ll see an Iraq that is freed from oppression. This situation will also do a lot to transform the Israeli-Palestinian situation.” (This is the tip of the iceberg. Do a Google search on Hill and Iraq and you’ll find a trove of false prophecies.)
There’s also Martin Kramer, who spent 25 years at Tel Aviv University and whose Middle East policy can basically be summarized as “What’s Good for Israel,” and former Senator Robert Kasten of Wisconsin, whose career was best known for his loopy attacks on the United Nations and for being arrested for drunk driving after running a red light and driving down the wrong side of the road.
I asked Augustus Richard Norton of Boston University, an expert adviser to the Iraq Study Group, for his take on Giuliani’s crew. He dubbed the group (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) “AIPAC’s Dream Team.” …..
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/08/hbc-90001040
Harpers Magazine - September 14, 2007
Giuliani advisor: Raze Palestinian villages
Ken Silverstein
On September 11, staffers for Barack Obama had a campaign ad taken down that had appeared as a "sponsored link" on Amazon.com's web page for The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, the controversial new book by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. Obama's campaign didn't place the ad; it apparently appeared on the Amazon page because his campaign, like those of other presidential candidates, pay to have their ads pop up when people do searches for key words like "politics."
That same day, in the face of questions from the media, Obama's campaign released a statement saying that while he had not actually read the book, its conclusions were "dead wrong" and that the senator "has stated that his support for a strong U.S.-Israel relationship, which includes both a commitment to Israel's security and to helping Israel achieve peace with its neighbors, comes from his belief that it's the right policy for the United States."
Yet just five days earlier, Daniel Pipes-who, as I first reported here, has signed on as a foreign policy advisor to Rudy Giuliani's campaign-essentially argued for war crimes against Palestinians, and there was no cry of protest from the media or anywhere else.
"Believing that if you don't win a war, you lose it, I have long encouraged the Israeli government to take more assertive measures in response to attacks," Pipes wrote on his blog on September 6.
In a Jerusalem Post piece six years ago, "Preventing war: Israel's options," I called for shutting off utilities to the Palestinian Authority as well as a host of other measures, such as permitting no transportation in the PA of people or goods beyond basic necessities, implementing the death penalty against murderers, and razing villages from which attacks are launched. Then and now, such responses have two benefits: First, they send a strong deterrent signal "Hit us and we will hit you back much harder" thereby reducing the number of attacks in the short term. Second, they impress Palestinians with the Israeli will to survive, and so bring closer their eventual acceptance of the Jewish state.
The Geneva Conventions label collective punishments as a war crime. "No protected person may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed," according to Article 33. "Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited."
For the record, there's much I disagree with in the Mearsheimer/Walt Book. But there's something terribly wrong with the American debate on the Middle East when, due to public criticism, Obama's campaign flees from an unintentional link to that book, while a Giuliani advisor argues for a policy of ethnic cleansing against Palestinians and his comments pass unremarked…..
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/09/hbc-90001213
Harper's Magazine– August 28, 2007
Islamophobist Pipes joins Giuliani campaign
Ken Silverstein
Add another neoconservative adviser on the Middle East to an already impressive roster-Daniel Pipes signed on with Rudy Giuliani's campaign today. I'd heard Pipes was advising Giuliani and asked him about it yesterday. He told me by e-mail that he had "close relations with several people in the campaign," but said that he did not have "official connection to it." He e-mailed back just now to say that, as of today, he has officially signed up with the campaign. ....
I think it’s fair to say that Pipes is even further out ideologically than Norman Podhoretz, another Giuliani adviser. Readers unfamiliar with Pipes can check out his profile at Wikipedia. For a representative sampling of his work, consider a 2006 article he wrote in the Jerusalem Post:
Iraq’s plight is neither a coalition responsibility nor a particular danger to the West. Fixing Iraq is neither the coalition’s responsibility, nor its burden. When Sunni terrorists target Shi’ites and vice versa, non-Muslims are less likely to be hurt. Civil war in Iraq, in short, would be a humanitarian tragedy, but not a strategic one.
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/08/hbc-90001048
Daniel Pipes says enfranchisement of U.S. Muslims threatens Jews
"I worry very much, from the Jewish point of view, that the presence, and increased stature, and affluence, and enfranchisement of American Muslims, because they are so much led by an Islamist leadership, that this will present true dangers to American Jews." Daniel Pipes speaking before the convention of the American Jewish Congress, October 21, 2001.
Daniel Pipes supports internment of Japanese-Americans
Daniel Pipes: "Yes, I do support the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II." (December 28, 2004, on his web site)
Daniel Pipes backs convicted French racist
Daniel Pipes backed French far-right racist Jean-Marie Le Pen. On his web site, Pipes said Le Pen's extremist views "represent an important outlook in the national debate over immigration and Islam." An appeals court in France upheld Le Pen's conviction for inciting anti-Muslim hatred in a newspaper interview. Le Pen has been convicted of racism or anti-Semitism at least six times in the past.
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