Giuliani’s Passion| Hugh Hewitt |2.25.2015

In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Rudolph Giuliani wrote that he hoped the bluntness of his recent words about President Barack Obama would not obscure his meaning. If ever there were a case of twisted by naves to make a trap for fools, the criticism of the former New York mayor’s remarks is it.

Giuliani had said that the President’s rhetoric is never about love of this country. It is never about affirmation of this country. It is not about the goodness of this country. It takes on a tone that is different and, in its totality, is unsettling, which is true.

But the former mayor’s criticism of the administration was about more that rhetoric. It was also about what Donald Rumsfeld meant when he told Hugh Hewitt on radio Monday, “ [T]here is no question but that we’re losing [in the battle with ISIS], and the reason we’re losing is because of the lack of leadership [in Washington].”

The president’s own Homeland Security secretary as much as anticipated the former Defense secretary on Sunday’s Meet the Press when he said the Americans should be on their guard at places like the Mall of the Americas. Has any high U.S. national security official ever before thrown up his hands and said to the American people, there is nothing your government can do to defend the country?

But in addition to ISIS, Giuliani was also referring to the rising threat of a nuclear Iran and the way the Administration is groveling for an atomic agreement with the Islamic state. It turns out he was right. Yesterday blogger and executive director of The Israel Project Omri Ceren reported that, under deal that is emerging from the U.S.-Iran talks, “The Iranians will be allowed to enrich as much uranium as they want, however they want, to whatever levels they want – including of course weapons-grade levels. Until the second they build and detonate a bomb in the desert, they would be totally unhindered.”

In a recent address, Giuliani’s passion rose as he linked the Administrations feckless parleying to the Iranian leadership’s long proclaimed intention to wipe out the State of Israel. Iran has agreed to deals with us twice in the past and broken its word both times, the former mayor said. What do you call someone when he goes into a third round of talks with people like that? he asked. “Moron.”

Here is a truth Giuliani speaks. We are in potentially apocalyptic times. A front-line American ally, Israel, a nation whose citizens know too well the meaning of the word “holocaust”, faces an adversary whose leaders harbor a Nazi-like hatred of Jews. Further, those adversaries yearn for the devastation to America’s position on the global scene that such an attack on such an ally would bring. And they know that, even if they never launch nuclear strike (or slip atomic devices to terrorist to undertake one for them), the very fact of the U.S. giving them, in effect, the nuclear green light will shift regional power immensely in their favor.

Add to this that, while he was focused on the Middle East, Giuliani could as easily and appropriately have denounced the Administration’s parallel laxitude toward Russian president Vladimir Putin’s incursions in Ukraine. He could have cited warnings from NATO’s recently retired secretary general of the “high probability that [Putin] will intervene in the Baltics [Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania] to test NATO’s Article 5,” that is, NATO’s attack-on-one-is-an-attack-on-all guarantee. It does not take a geo-strategist to conclude that what Iran is doing to the U.S. in the Middle East, Putin is working to do to us in Europe – or to see what Iran and Putin’s success would mean to global peace and security.

Mayor Giuliani sees America hurtling toward a security abyss and dragging the world in with it – thanks to a failure of leadership from the entire administration team. That is his truth and the wellspring of his passion.