Rudy Giuliani and the Deep Unseriousness of the Right on National Security

With Sarah Palin on a national media blitz, the amount of false reality out there naturally increases by a huge amount. Palin lives in her own little impenetrable world; she’s the commensurate victim. Why anyone believes a word she says is beyond me.

(An aside: I don’t think Palin expects to be a credible conservative leader—she’d rather be a popular conservative celebrity. As Ana Marie Cox said on Rachel Maddow on Tuesday night, you don’t write a book taking revenge on staffers if you want to build a campaign in the future. Likewise, you don’t quit your only major elected office if you want to be seen as a qualified presidential candidate. So let’s agree, for now, that Palin’s lies are those of someone craving the spotlight as an ends, not a means.)

But this post isn’t about Sarah Palin’s false realities. It’s about Rudy Giuliani’s, and those of the right’s “experts” on national security, which I think are far more dangerous.

Giuliani is still seen—GOD KNOWS WHY—as an expert on national security. I’m not going to get into the reasons this is ridiculous, but they are many. Because Giuliani is seen as an authority on national security, however, his opinions on serious topics are taken seriously, when really he is a deeply unserious thinker on matters of national security and foreign policy.

I wrote about this a long time ago, during the 2008 primary campaign, on my now-defunct personal blog, but I think it bears repeating. Back then, Giuliani’s campaign website (also defunct, thankfully) listed “12 Commitments” he would uphold as President, the very first of which was:

1. I will keep America on offense in the Terrorists’ War on Us.

To which I responded, on January 28, 2008:

I won’t even bother explaining why Terrorists’ War on Us is a stupid formulation, except to say that it’s a pathetic, misleading appeal to a sense of victimhood. It’s passive and I’d hope we’re above such rhetoric. [... But w]hat really bugs me about this first commitment is that it doesn’t even make sense.

Let’s be generous and assume that a Terrorists’ War on Us really does exist. We must therefore assume that the terrorists are on the offensive. It is, after all, their “war on us.” So how, we might ask, can we be on the offense in what is, by Rudy’s own formulation, a defensive war? [...] An understanding of basic logic should probably be a prerequisite for running for President.

I had hoped Giuliani’s flameout in the Republican primaries—has there ever been a more enjoyable trainwreck?—would have humbled him, or at least tempered his rhetoric. Yet here he is now, using his stale megaphone to crow that it’s too dangerous to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York:

“One of the best things the Bush Administration did was put us on offense. Putting us back on defense puts us in a very vulnerable position, not just in New York, but nationally,” Giuliani said Wednesday in a conference call with reporters. “New York City is a prime target of terrorists, unfortunately, we know that for reasons we can’t control, otherwise we’d have to destroy ourselves as a financial capital, a cultural capital. Why add to that risk for a reason that is not necessary is my major concern.”

This is insultingly stupid. If 9/11, Giuliani’s supposed area of expertise, should teach us anything, it’s that concepts like “offense” and “defense” are far too simplistic to solve the problem of Islamist terrorism. More importantly, Giuliani makes no effort to argue how trying an extremely famous terror suspect in New York City could possibly “add to the risk” of additional terrorist attacks here. This is exactly the point he’s trying to make—and he doesn’t bother to make it!

Of course, the whole thing is a dodge, which illustrates the point I’m getting to. A major part of the right’s insistence on using military tribunals, aside from the absurd machismo aspect of it, is that a civilian trial would expose some of the worst, and least effective (ineffective?) aspects of the Bush administration’s torture regime—something in which conservatives like Giuliani are quite invested. They can’t make this point, however—”We don’t torture,” after all— which is one of the reasons Giuliani is on such tenuous rhetorical ground. And yet he bumbles on, using polemic to distract from the actual difficulties of trying KSM in a civilian court.

The gall doesn’t stop there. Later in the same Politico piece, Giuliani “singled out the administration for its refusal to use the term ‘War on Terror.’” Really, he said that. This comes on the heels of major conservative outcries over Obama’s supposed weakening of America during his Asia trip—by bowing to the Emperor of Japan and refusing to say whether he believes that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was appropriate. How can the Kenyan President of the United States of Socialism get away with doing such awful things to America?!

This is all of a piece with the fundamental unseriousness of conservatives, and especially neoconservatives, when it comes to national security and foreign relations. Or as Conor Friedersdorf says, the right’s “childish desire for self-righteous rhetoric above the actual demands of statesmanship.”

Because an ideology that portrays America as constantly the victim of evil outside forces hell-bent on destroying our way of life; that requires the jingoistic sacrificing of the traditional and polite norms of diplomacy on the altar of false pride; that trumps up unproven risks in an attempt to distract from the actual demands of justice and national healing—this is not an ideology interested in governing, or even in thinking. It’s the worst kind of reactionism: the mindless anger of children pretending to understand. What’s important to remember here is that we’re not talking about my beloved tea partiers (although they comprise much of the audience for this dreck). We’re talking about actual opinion makers who are seen as experts in this field. “Experts,” acting like children.

And the ideology of children has no place in the serious debates of this or any age.