Recycled Neocons Find Home with Rudy

While Rudy Giuliani may be just dandy for some, he has collected an interesting bunch as "foreign policy advisers." And their writings are....ah....aggressive....to say the least.

Team leader is Charles Hill, a co-signer of the Sept. 20, 2001, neocon ultimatum to Bush, nine days after 9/11, warning the president if he did not attack Iraq, his failure to do so "will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender to the war on international terrorism."

Well, I've never thought that the Iraq move was malum in se; it served a few good purposes.

But there's more:

According to the New York Times, another key Rudy adviser is Daniel Pipes, "who has called for profiling Muslims at airports and scrutinizing American Muslims in law enforcement, the military and the diplomatic corps." Another is AEI's Michael Rubin, "who has written in favor of revoking the United States' ban on assassinations."

And then there's the Tin God of the neocon movement:

Norman Podhoretz [who has written that] [t]he "regimes that richly deserve to be overthrown ... should extend to Syria and Lebanon and Libya, as well as 'friends' of America like the Saudi royal family and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, along with the Palestinian Authority." After toppling them all, wrote Podhoretz, as he mocked the "timorous ... incorrigibly cautious Colin Powell," let's find "the stomach to impose a new political culture on the defeated."

Well, that ought to keep the US Armed Forces busy for a while, no? First, knock off virtually every regime in the Middle East; then "impose a new political culture" on them.

This 'EastAsia' campaign may be charming to Podhoretz.

He should conduct it in person.