Giuliani, the Likud Candidate?

Republican front-runner Rudy Giuliani announced his foreign-policy
advisory team Tuesday, and it looks from the membership as if he’s bidding
for the Likud vote (for which he will no doubt receive tough competition
from John McCain, Fred Thompson, and, eventually perhaps, Newt Gingrich).

Heading the team is Charles Hill, a retired career foreign service officer
who worked as former Secretary of State George Shultz’s executive officer
during the Reagan administration and is currently a research fellow at the
Hoover Institution. Hill’s paper trail is confined almost exclusively to
the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal where, among other things,
he hailed the creation in 2004 of the Committee on the Present Danger
(CPD), proposed the replacement of the UN by a new organisation of nations
“committed to democracy,” criticized the 9/11 Commission for failing to
sufficiently emphasize “the nature of the enemy” – “Islamist terrorism;
Saddamist-style hijacked states; and regimes fearful of subversion, such
as Saudi Arabia, whose policies have inflamed the situation and increased
the danger to itself,” and decried the Commission’s suggestion that U.S.
policies in the region might have something to do with anti-American
sentiment there.

A big fan of Bernard Lewis’ theories about what ails the Arab Middle East,
Hill was a signer of the Sep 20, 2001, letter from Bill Kristol’s Project
for the New American Century (PNAC) that urged Bush to be sure to include
Saddam Hussein, Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, and the Yassir Arafat, as well as
al Qaeda and the Taliban, in his war on terror.

Of the seven other members of Giuliani’s “Senior Foreign Policy Advisory
Board,” several have also been associated with PNAC and the CPD, most
spectacularly, the legendary former editor of Commentary magazine, Norman
“World War IV” Podhoretz, whose most recent contribution to
Western-Islamic understanding was his article, “The Case for Bombing Iran”
(an eight-minute “must-see” video version of which is available on
YouTube. A founding father of neo-conservatism, Podhoretz is also, of
course, the father-in-law of Deputy National Security Advisor Elliott
Abrams whose own work in frustrating serious peace efforts between Israel
and its Arab neighbors has been second only to Dick Cheney’s. Apparently
relying on inside information, Podhoretz still believes that Saddam
Hussein secreted his weapons of mass destruction to Syria for safe-keeping

Also noteworthy on the advisory board is Martin Kramer, a long-time Lewis
disciple, who is also closely associated with Daniel Pipes and
particularly his Campus Watch program which many in the Middle East
studies field have denounced as McCarthyite. Kramer, a frequent
contributor to The National Review Online, is a senior fellow at the
Jerusalem-based Shalem Center, which in turn is closely linked to former
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

Similarly, Peter Berkowitz, another Hoover fellow, has served on the
policy advisory board of the neo-conservative Ethics and Public Policy
Center (which, along with the Hudson Institute, served as Abrams’ primary
institutional home for a number of years after his service in the Reagan
administration) and director of the Israel Program on Constitutional
Government, a program that brings prominent U.S. academics and
opinion-shapers to Tel Aviv University each year. {articipants in the
program over the last few years have included former CIA director James
Woolsey; former Asia specialist on Vice President Dick Cheney’s staff,
Aaron Friedberg; Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia; Johns Hopkins
School for Advanced International Studies Professor Ruth Wedgwood, Bill
Kristol, Victor Davis Hanson, Jeremy Rabkin, and Eliot Cohen.

Rounding out the group are former Wisconsin Sen. Bob Kasten, who, along
with his fellow-Wisconsonian, Rudy Boschwitz, was among the most pro-Likud
members of the Senate during his service there between 1981 and 1993;
Enders Wimbush, a senior fellow at the neo-conservative Hudson Institute,
protege of the late Albert Wohlstetter and long-standing disciple of the
Pentagon’s Net Assessment guru, Andrew Marshall; Steve Rosen, a Harvard
professor who contributed to PNAC’s 2000 report, “Rebuilding America’s
Defenses;” and Kim Holmes, a fixture at the Heritage Foundation’s foreign
policy unit since 1985, who served during Bush’s first term as assistant
secretary of state for international organization affairs. 


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