Asked to explain the former mayor’s seeming reluctance to address the issue of Iraq directly, beyond the occasional statement of sympathy with the Bush administration’s stated goals, Mr. Hill said that Mr. Giuliani takes the position that the threat to America is much bigger than Iraq, and that most people make the mistake of talking about Iraq as a “stand-alone operation.”
Mr. Giuliani, not coincidentally, has been saying much the same thing.
“I see it as part of a much bigger picture,” Mr. Giuliani told reporters on Tuesday, adding, “The terrorist war against us is going to go on whether we are successful in Iraq or whether we are unsuccessful in Iraq. It’s just going to be different consequences.”
In political terms, it is easy to see the benefits for the mayor of speaking broadly—critics would say vaguely—on the most pressing and difficult foreign policy issue of the day. Mr. McCain, in contrast with Mr. Giuliani, has been outspoken and explicit in his support for the war in Iraq, and has suffered for it. His polls numbers have collapsed and his fundraising has been anemic enough to lead to the layoff of dozens of members of his staff. (On July 10, his campaign manager and his chief strategist both announced that they were resigning from the campaign.)
The Giuliani campaign, meanwhile, has offered few specific propositions on Iraq that could open the candidate up to criticism, instead offering broad statements about the fight against terrorism and pointing again and again to Mr. Giuliani’s achievements as mayor of New York and as an official in the Justice Department as indications of how he would handle America’s dealings with the rest of the world.
One of Mr. Giuliani’s closest advisers, Anthony Carbonetti, argued that as mayor, Mr. Giuliani oversaw more police officers than there are FBI agents, that he met often with world leaders and that he had a proven record of dealing with terrorism.
Mr. Carbonetti also pointed to Mr. Giuliani’s service on government committees to combat terrorism during the Ford and Reagan administrations.
“Rudy is a guy who also recognized terrorism years before most people,” said Mr. Carbonetti. “Go back 25 years and he was investigating Arafat and his terrorist organization.”
To illuminate the point, Mr. Carbonetti cited the familiar passage from Giuliani lore, when the former mayor expelled Yasir Arafat from a city-sponsored event to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the United Nations in 1995. The incident prompted Clinton Administration officials to blame Mr. Giuliani for an embarrassing breach of international diplomacy. Even Mr. Giuliani’s successor, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who early in his administration made a point to avoid any public criticism of Mr. Giuliani, said in a 2001 radio interview that the move was rash, and that he was “wrong in doing it, obviously.”
Mr. Carbonetti argued that Mr. Giuliani’s response as president would be consistent with his past actions, to a degree.
“Obviously as president you have to look at things differently,” said Mr. Carbonetti. “But as president he would not have negotiated with Yasir Arafat.”
