Giuliani's Ideas On Foreign Policy

Re Mideast Hawks Help to Develop Giuliani Policy by Michael Cooper and Marc Santora in today's NY Times:

Rudolph W. Giuliani is only half-right in his ideas on foreign policy. He is correct in recognizing the scope of the problem, but wrong in his prescriptions.

(William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, makes a logic error when he says that none of the leading Republican candidates "buy any of these fundamental criticisms that Bush took us on a radically wrong path, and we have to go to a pre-9/11 foreign policy." It was never either/or. Bush did take us on a radically wrong path, but so did Clinton "pre-9/11".)

Giuliani is correct when he speaks about the "Islamic terrorists’ war against the United States". But his prescription for an endless hot war is wrong.

We ought not play by the terrorists' rules. ("Never get into a pissing contest with a pig.") We should play where and how we are dominant. We have strategic bombers and ballistic missiles; the terrorists don't. We have overwhelming "soft" power; the terrorists don't.

We can hurt the terrorists badly wherever and whenever they build training camps, by carpet bombing them from X0,000 feet in the air.

The rest of the time, we can out-publish them on the Internet, on TV, in the movies, music, worlds of art and media. We can out-propagandize them. We can play tricks on them.

There is absolutely no need to do any nation-building.