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Banned
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Originally Posted by Ustwo
.....The logical ones will say they are still planning on making a bomb the desire hasn't gone away and they are waiting for a time politically, say when a republican isn't in office when they can do so without fear of invasion.
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http://www.joinrudy2008.com/news/pr/416/index.php
Rudy Giuliani Announces Foreign Policy Team Members
Jul 9th
The Rudy Giuliani Presidential Committee announced today several members of Mayor Giuliani’s foreign policy team. The team will advise the Mayor on a foreign policy vision that advances the United States as a world leader, while expanding America’s involvement in the global economy, strengthening our reputation around the world, and keeping our country on the offense in the Terrorists’ War on Us.
Charles Hill, former executive aide to President Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State George P. Shultz, a lecturer in the International Security Studies program at Yale University, a special consultant on policy to the United Nations Secretary-General, and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, will serve as the Chairman of the Senior Foreign Policy Advisory Board. He is also the campaign’s Chief Foreign Policy Advisor.
<h3>Senior foreign policy team members include Norman Podhoretz</h3> and Senator Bob Kasten. Other team members include Steve Rosen, Senior Defense Advisor; Martin Kramer, Senior Middle East Advisor; S. Enders Wimbush, Senior Public Diplomacy Advisor; Peter Berkowitz, Senior Statecraft, Human Rights and Freedom Advisor; and Kim R. Holmes, a Senior Foreign Policy Advisor.
“This group is committed to helping the Mayor develop a comprehensive foreign policy vision that keeps America globally strong, promotes the expansion of freedom, and recognizes that our greatest challenge is remaining on offense in the Terrorists’ War on Us,” said Bill Simon, the campaign’s Policy Director. “Mayor Giuliani understands the critical foreign policy issues facing our nation, and we’ve assembled an outstanding team with decades of experience and knowledge to help advise the Mayor.”...
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http://www.commentarymagazine.com/bl...podhoretz/1474
A Few More Questions About The NIE
Dark Suspicions about the NIE
<h3>Norman Podhoretz</h3> - 12.03.2007 - 17:50
A new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), entitled “Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities,” <h3>has just dealt a serious blow to the argument some of us have been making that Iran is intent on building nuclear weapons and that neither diplomacy nor sanctions can prevent it from succeeding.</h3> Thus, this latest NIE “judges with high confidence that in fall 2003 Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program”; it “judges with high confidence that the halt was directed primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure resulting from exposure of Iran’s previously undeclared nuclear work”; it “assesses with moderate confidence that Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007”; it assesses, also with only “moderate confidence that the halt to those activities represents a halt to Iran’s entire nuclear weapons program”; but even if not, it judges “with high confidence that Iran will not be technically capable of producing and reprocessing enough plutonium for a weapon before about 2015.”
<h3>These findings are startling, not least because in key respects they represent a 180-degree turn from the conclusions of the last NIE on Iran’s nuclear program.</h3> For that one, issued in May 2005, assessed “with high confidence that Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons” and to press on “despite its international obligations and international pressure.”
In other words, a full two years after Iran supposedly called a halt to its nuclear program, the intelligence community was still as sure as it ever is about anything that Iran was determined to build a nuclear arsenal. Why then should we believe it when it now tells us, and with the same “high confidence,” that Iran had already called a halt to its nuclear-weapons program in 2003? Similarly with the intelligence community’s reversal on the effectiveness of international pressure. In 2005, the NIE was highly confident that international pressure had not lessened Iran’s determination to develop nuclear weapons, and yet now, in 2007, the intelligence community is just as confident that international pressure had already done the trick by 2003.
It is worth remembering that in 2002, one of the conclusions offered by the NIE, also with “high confidence,” was that “Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding its chemical, biological, nuclear, and missile programs contrary to UN resolutions.” And another conclusion, offered with high confidence too, was that “Iraq could make a nuclear weapon in months to a year once it acquires sufficient weapons-grade fissile material.”
<h3>I must confess to suspecting that the intelligence community</h3>, having been excoriated for supporting the then universal belief that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, is now bending over backward to counter what has up to now been a similarly universal view (including as is evident from the 2005 NIE, within the intelligence community itself) that Iran is hell-bent on developing nuclear weapons. I also suspect that, having been excoriated as well for minimizing the time it would take Saddam to add nuclear weapons to his arsenal, the intelligence community is now bending over backward to maximize the time it will take Iran to reach the same goal.
<h3>But I entertain an even darker suspicion. It is that the intelligence community, which has for some years now been leaking material calculated to undermine George W. Bush, is doing it again.</h3> This time the purpose is to head off the possibility that the President may order air strikes on the Iranian nuclear installations. As the intelligence community must know, if he were to do so, it would be as a last resort, only after it had become undeniable that neither negotiations nor sanctions could prevent Iran from getting the bomb, and only after being convinced that it was very close to succeeding. How better, then, to stop Bush in his tracks than by telling him and the world that such pressures have already been effective and that keeping them up could well bring about “a halt to Iran’s entire nuclear weapons program”—especially if the negotiations and sanctions were combined with a goodly dose of appeasement or, in the NIE’s own euphemistic formulation, “with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways.”,,,,
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Rudy's "senior advisor", Norman Podhoretz is making the same absurd argument that <a href="http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2007/10/018662.php">Ken Timmerman made</a>....everybody in the CIA is "out to get George Bush". Isn't this George Bush's CIA? He's been in office seven effing years. Fringe candidates, fringe thinking, fringe behavior. The republican party is acting as if it is the greatest threat to our national security. The rhetoric and the "results" they are achieving reinforce that. You're a businessman Ustwo, what do you think of the return on investment from Bush's $3.3 trillion national treasury debt increase?
Quote:
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/v...10882?page=all
The Case for Bombing Iran
Norman Podhoretz
June 2007
....In a number of European countries, Holocaust denial is a crime, and the European Union only recently endorsed that position. Yet for all their retrospective remorse over the wholesale slaughter of Jews back then, the Europeans seem no readier to lift a finger to prevent a second Holocaust than they were the first time around.
Not so George W. Bush, a man who knows evil when he sees it and who has demonstrated an unfailingly courageous willingness to endure vilification and contumely in setting his face against it. It now remains to be seen whether this President, battered more mercilessly and with less justification than any other in living memory, and weakened politically by the enemies of his policy in the Middle East in general and Iraq in particular, will find it possible to take the only action that can stop Iran from following through on its evil intentions both toward us and toward Israel. As an American and as a Jew, I pray with all my heart that he will.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpag...55C0A9629C8B63
PUBLIC LIVES; A Neocon Is Honored by a President He Reveres
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY
Published: June 24, 2004
AS the grandfather of so much more than his children's children, Norman Podhoretz stood proudly in the East Room of the White House yesterday as President Bush awarded him a Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.
''The biggest deal imaginable,'' Mr. Podhoretz called it during an interview several hours before the ceremony. ''It's the most wonderful honor ever to come my way, the most wonderful honor I could ever imagine coming my way.''
Well, maybe it's not so hard to imagine, after all. Mr. Podhoretz, 74, a lifelong New Yorker, is widely recognized as a grandfather of neoconservatism, the intellectual and political movement begun in the 1970's by former liberals to push a wide-ranging agenda that included a renewed flexing of American power in the world. Only a handful of major writers and thinkers traveled a similar path, and those who held their new beliefs the most passionately, like Mr. Podhoretz and Irving Kristol, begat a generation or two of followers, many of whom have reached high seats of power and, some say, transformed neocon ideology into current foreign policy click to show .
Mr. Podhoretz's soapbox was Commentary, the monthly magazine he edited for 35 years, and the 10 books he has written. They articulate a political evolution that has led him to praise President Bush as ''achieving greatness'' in his response to the Sept. 11 attacks.
Yet he is not entirely sure, he said, why he was chosen to join this year's diverse group of 13 Medal of Freedom winners -- imagine, Pope John Paul II and Doris Day. ''I haven't scrutinized the list,'' he said. ''I don't know if they conform to a political configuration in any given administration. I imagine there is always something of a mix.''
In any case, he insisted that his selection arose not from any relationship with the president, whom he had met only once, long enough to shake his hand. Mr. Podhoretz said he did not even support Mr. Bush in the early goings of the 2000 presidential campaign, preferring Senator John McCain.
Nor did his son-in-law have anything to do with it, as far as he knows. Mr. Podhoretz and his wife of nearly 48 years, Midge Decter -- she, too, a neocon writer and social critic -- have presided over a family of conservatives that includes Elliott Abrams, a veteran of the Reagan administration who is now a senior official in the National Security Council and is married to the oldest of their four children, Rachel. (The other children are Naomi Munson, a public relations executive in northern Virginia; Ruth Blum, a columnist and feature writer for The Jerusalem Post; and John Podhoretz, a columnist for The New York Post and contributing editor at The Weekly Standard, a conservative weekly he helped Mr. Kristol's son William found.)
If any of his children or politically aware grandchildren are out of step with him, Mr. Podhoretz said, ''they're further to the right.''
So maybe it was just his time to receive a Medal of Freedom, he said. And Mr. Bush could not have found a more kindred spirit.
Mr. Podhoretz not only subscribes to the so-called Bush Doctrine of foreign policy, which embraces the concept of pre-emptive action against those who are viewed as a threat to the United States, but he is also taking the doctrine a step further in the next book he intends to write. The working title refers to an era begun by the Sept. 11 attacks: ''World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win.''
He sounds no less assertive than Mr. Bush in stressing the urgency of the doctrine, to the point of predicting that if the next Democrat to occupy the White House does not continue the policy, ''we will be in danger of the most horrendously imaginable attacks, something infinitely worse than 9/11.''
HE recalled the political climate following the 1952 election, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower at first resisted, then carried out the Truman Doctrine of containment against the threat of Soviet aggression. ''I really don't think there's any other way to go than the way Bush has staked out,'' he said. ''As a strategic plan, it's not only a viable one, it's necessary.''
If his words belie the liberal he was long ago, through Columbia University, Cambridge University and New York bohemia of the early 1960's, they carry the same confidence and feistiness.
Mr. Podhoretz's journey from left to right has cost him friends, Norman Mailer foremost among them, and long periods of discomfort, reading the nasty things his old friends were writing about him. But as the son of working-class immigrants, growing up in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, he developed a thick skin that served him well on the streets, and later in the towers of the New York intelligentsia as his old political views were evolving into the new. Perhaps not surprisingly, along the way he and his wife moved from the Upper West Side to the Upper East Side.
Though he retired from Commentary in 1995, he has kept on writing -- three books and more than 100 essays. No doubt Mr. Bush would nod in agreement with most of them. But Mr. Podhoretz hopes it is not political symmetry with the president that got him to the East Room. He prefers to think it was his patriotism, even if neocon-flavored.
''This honor comes from the United States of America,'' he said. ''That is how I understand it. That's how it's intended to be taken.''
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Last edited by host; 12-04-2007 at 10:49 AM..
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