Giuliani Pledges to Fight the 'World Guerrilla War'

    Giuliani, who is the leading Republican presidential candidate in most polls, took on the mob and turned violent and seedy New York City into an American jewel.

    "I'm running for president because of the big challenge we face in terrorism," he said. Sometimes it's not described properly. It's described as the 'War on Terror,' as if it's our war against them. It's their war against us. They are planning to come here and kill us. But we're on offense against them. If we go back the way we used to be, if we go back on defense, we're going to be in serious jeopardy."

    I asked Giuliani if the U.S. was involved in a world war.

    "We're in a world war in the sense that the people who are planning to kill us are in different parts of the world," Giuliani began.

    "It is not a world war in the scope of the first or second world wars, because we're not in a war with adversaries with tremendous power, who have armies equal to ours; economies anywhere near our economy. You could call it a 'World Guerrilla War.' I think the better analogy for us if we want a comparison to our history and we want to do it right is the Cold War, where the physical part of this war is a small part, meaning, we have the engagement, we have their attack in '93, we have the attack on our military, we had the (USS) Cole we didn't respond to, we had the attack on the World Trade Center, we had the attack in England, and we've engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq. The casualties are heartbreaking and they're terrible, but they amount to the casualties in one battle in the Civil War. The point is this is a big psychological war."

    Giuliani said the reason he's seeking the presidency is "the country needs a different spirit. We're a very strong country. We've got great strengths. I think we need to go beyond that, take a good look at ourselves, and say the following to ourselves: We're the luckiest people in the world; nobody luckier in the history of the world. Nobody has had more wealth, more people coming out of poverty, more freedom, more of an opportunity to do good than Americans in the beginning of this century. If we can't get it right, nobody can."

    As for Iraq, he said he would have taken out Saddam in 2003, just as President Bush did. "Saddam was a large pillar of support for world terrorism," Giuliani said. "The way to deconstruct world terrorism is if you take away its support."

    Pulling out of Iraq now, he said, would be a catastrophe, leading to "genocide" as the Shiites would slaughter the Sunnis, with the conflict growing into a regional war as Sunnis from Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other southern gulf nations would take up arms.

    "I may have made the same mistakes he (President Bush) made," Giuliani said. "Lincoln made an enormous amount of mistakes. You learn from mistakes. We had too few troops, not for the invasion, but for the occupation. We had too few troops by 150,000. We never internalized our mission on nation building for fear of looking 'imperialistic.' "

    "Here's what I would do now," Giuliani said. "Now we're doing what we should be doing. Pacify the areas; we should do a better job of holding them. We should do a third thing. We should get the country working again. Get the unemployment down from 60 to 30 percent and maybe this thing can work. I'll try and make it work because the price of leaving is horrendous."


Rudy just plain gets it. And says it very well.