I wonder if Rudy Giuliani is elected as President, will he defund the PLO? Submitted by MH

Giuliani Warns on PLO State
Stance Puts Daylight Between Him and Rice

By ELI LAKE
Staff Reporter of the Sun
August 15, 2007

WASHINGTON e(130)‚– In a sweeping repudiation of the conventional wisdom that America’s war on terrorism must address Palestinian Arab national grievances, the leading Republican contender for the presidency is warning of the dangers of pressing too soon for Palestinian statehood and is asserting that Israeli security is a “permanent feature of our foreign policy.”

“Too much emphasis has been placed on brokering negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians e(130)‚– negotiations that bring up the same issues again and again,” Mayor Giuliani writes in an essay published yesterday in Foreign Affairs. “It is not in the interest of the United States, at a time when it is being threatened by Islamist terrorists, to assist the creation of another state that will support terrorism.”

In some of the boldest language on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict used thus far by any presidential candidate, Mr. Giuliani writes: “Palestinian statehood will have to be earned through sustained good governance, a clear commitment to fighting terrorism, and a willingness to live in peace with Israel.”

That language appears to be a direct shot at President Bush and Secretary of State Rice, who are making just such a push for final status negotiations between President Abbas and Prime Minister Olmert in September, despite Hamas’s takeover of Gaza in June.

The former mayor’s vision for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations is also a repudiation of the approach of the Baker-Hamilton Commission, a panel on which Mr. Giuliani served briefly. In its final recommendations on Iraq policy in December 2006, the commission urged America not only to re-engage in the peace process, but also to explore ways for Israel to cede the Golan Heights to Syria.

Mr. Giuliani’s senior foreign policy adviser, Charles Hill, said yesterday that the Bush administration’s current push to forge a peace deal between the Palestinian Authority president and the Israeli prime minister may be “risking too much.”

“It looks as though they are trying to get right at the most difficult issues right away and go to the road map,” Mr. Hill said in a telephone interview from his office at Yale University, where he lectures on international studies. “It has a Palestinian state coming into being before the negotiations are completed. That is risking too much. We do not want another failure e(130)‚– another failure and a terrorist haven.”

Mr. Giuliani is not opposed in principle to a Palestinian state or two-state solution, Mr. Hill said. But he added: “We have one more part of the region given over to terrorism. It is not that we are opposed to an outcome there, but to go to final status talks without seeing the Palestinian political and security process earn its way, at least minimally, in a responsible way, it doesn’t make any sense.”

Mr. Giuliani’s emphasis on creating free institutions in non-democratic states before elections mirrors that of a former Soviet dissident and Israeli legislator, Natan Sharansky. Mr. Sharansky was one of the few Israelis to criticize both the Oslo process in the 1990s, for empowering the late Yasser Arafat, and the Bush administration’s approach after 2002, for emphasizing the elections that ultimately led to the empowerment of Hamas.

Mr. Giuliani’s cautious stance on elections is evident in his writings on Iraq and Afghanistan in Foreign Affairs. He writes that he anticipates that American soldiers will be fighting terrorists in the two countries for the foreseeable future and that the defeat of Al Qaeda is a laudable goal.

But missing from his definition of success in Iraq and Afghanistan are consecutive elections, which the Bush administration has stressed. “We must be under no illusions that either Iraq or Afghanistan will quickly attain the levels of peace and security enjoyed in the developed world today,” the former mayor writes. “Our aim should be to help them build accountable, functioning governments that can serve the needs of their populations, reduce violence within their borders, and eliminate the export of terror.”

Mr. Hill went further yesterday, saying he does not expect that Mr. Giuliani, if he becomes president, would support Iraqi national elections, scheduled for 2009, if it appeared that they would empower Islamist terrorist parties and others with their own private armies. “We would have to look at the situation at that time,” he said.

While Mr. Giuliani’s reluctance to support elections before building strong courts and transparent ministries may seem to put him closer to some of his Democratic rivals for the White House, he differs from them in his expectations for the United Nations. He writes in Foreign Affairs that America should seek to strengthen the “international system,” by which he means multilateral and regional organizations, as a front line defense against terrorism. But he cautions that America should have “realistic” expectations about the efficacy of the United Nations. “The organization can be useful for some humanitarian and peacekeeping functions, but we should not expect much more of it,” he writes. In the resolution of conflicts, the United Nations has proved itself “irrelevant,” he writes, and the institution has failed to combat terrorism or human rights abuses.

Mr. Hill expanded on this theme yesterday, saying a Giuliani administration would seek to reform the United Nations but that it would not be a veto on American action. “The U.N. is going to have to shape itself up or else other ways will have to be found,” he said. “That can be unilaterally, bilaterally, with other entities that may come into being.”

Major presidential candidates have taken to the pages of Foreign Affairs, the scholarly journal associated with the Council on Foreign Relations, in recent years as a way to outline their prospective foreign policy. Earlier this year, Senator Obama, a Democrat of Illinois, and a former Massachusetts governor, Mitt Romney, wrote about their foreign policy for the journal.

Essays in Foreign Affairs have not always been a road map to what an administration will end up doing, however. In 2000, Ms. Rice wrote that Mr. Bush would not seek to rebuild nations the way President Clinton had. Mr. Bush is now engaged in rebuilding two countries, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Source: http://www.nysun.com/article/60514/p>