The Giuliani Doctrine
One had to wonder how Giuliani established his public image as an national security expert. It is quite interesting how Giuliani, and his PR campaign, create such an image from his rule as the NY Mayor in the disaster recovery efforts after the terror attacks of 9/11/2001. It is undisputable that his behavior, and leadership, were crucial in the hard time after the attack, but that alone doesn’t qualify a person as a national security expert.
Nevertheless, Giuliani is a front runner in the white house 2008 campaign and his world view, his concept of the world and the strategy he will adopt, might be the one that will shape our near future. Although it is hard to decipher the real agenda of a politician, mostly when they are standing to election, it isn’t impossible. Giuliani provides such opportunity in a review of his doctrine for Foreign Affairs magazine.
Sadly, however, under the cover of promised strategy change I find no new hope, and no new concept. Giuliani’s doctrine accept the neo-conservative agenda, that the US should maintain its superpower policy and worse, that its the US rule and interest to promote democracy all over the world. With these assumptions as the base of Giuliani’s agenda his strategy is locked into more US military involvement combine with economical and diplomatic efforts to support this failed concept.
It is also interesting to note that Giuliani, the "nation’s security expert", interpretation - or for the benefit of the doubt - his description - historical events wrong. It is hard to believe that anyone can describe this assertion has serious analysis:
America must remember one of the lessons of the Vietnam War. Then, as now, we fought a war with the wrong strategy for several years. And then, as now, we corrected course and began to show real progress. Many historians today believe that by about 1972 we and our South Vietnamese partners had succeeded in defeating the Vietcong insurgency and in setting South Vietnam on a path to political self-sufficiency. But America then withdrew its support, allowing the communist North to conquer the South. The consequences were dire, and not only in Vietnam: numerous deaths in places such as the killing fields of Cambodia, a newly energized and expansionist Soviet Union, and a weaker America. The consequences of abandoning Iraq would be worse.
The American strategy was to be able to withdraw from Vietnam, nobody had any illusion of sustainable victory by 1972. Moreover, the killing fields of Cambodia are much more likely to attribute to the American strategy than to the growing influence of Vietnam’s version of communism, or the legendary domino-effect. It took the US army more than a decade to rebuild and recover from the Vietnam disaster, and it was in no shape to confront the Russian’s Army in the early 70’s. But facts and serious analysis are much less interesting than wishful thinking.
If anything, we don’t need another 4 years of neo-conservatism shaping our foreign policy.
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