He's Warning You! If He Loses, The Terrorists Win!

And is he really going down??



He speaks:

Mayor Giuliani will announce a new four-point war strategy in New Hampshire today, an effort to refocus a primary campaign season for Republicans that has centered in recent weeks less on foreign affairs and more on immigration and domestic issues.

Specifically, Mr. Giuliani will call for a new military surge in Afghanistan, a change in the way America's spies are promoted so that officers are rewarded for finding actionable intelligence and not just the number of agents they recruit, and a new war on Al Qaeda's intricate network of Web sites, sites used both to communicate with its agents in the field and to recruit new jihadis.

As Republican voters have changed the conversation, Mr. Giuliani's campaign has dipped in the national polls and has pulled out of Iowa's first in the nation caucuses scheduled for tomorrow. Instead, Mr. Giuliani has focused his efforts on winning in Florida and South Carolina, and will be campaigning for a respectable showing in the first primary in New Hampshire.

Mr. Giuliani's new proposal also comes as President Bush heads to Jerusalem this week for his first trip there as president, and as the White House comes to grips with the crisis in Pakistan after the assassination of the country's former premier, Benazir Bhutto.

"I think the problem in Pakistan and the assassination of Benazir Bhutto has raised a lot of concern and questions," the Giuliani campaign's senior foreign policy adviser, Charles Hill, said in an interview yesterday. "The media has focused on it, the American people have asked questions anew, it has certainly made clear that the challenge of Islamic radicalism is very much alive and very much a threat."

Mr. Giuliani will give his speech today at the Wright Museum in Wolfeboro, N.H.

His plan is divided into four major themes: expanding the military, improving intelligence, homeland security, and winning the war of ideas against radical Islam. The speech differs in emphasis in important ways from Mr. Giuliani's essay in Foreign Affairs from September, in that it focuses exclusively on what Mr. Giuliani calls the "terrorists' war on us."

Mr. Hill yesterday conceded that the question of Al Qaeda's Web sites was a tricky one, both from an international jurisdiction perspective (almost all of these sites are hosted on servers in foreign countries) and because there is some intelligence value to monitoring the sites.

"There is the larger question of these being used for incitement. It is a balance between the intelligence value of monitoring these and the other side where they are using them for proselytizing and inciting violence," Mr. Hill said.

He added later that the Web recruitment for Al Qaeda is one of the areas in the current war that is "not being attended to," by the current administration.

On Afghanistan, Mr. Hill said the military surge that the mayor envisions would potentially double the number of Americans serving there. "We are talking about something that may be in the dimension of doubling the Americans there, which is now around 25,000, with less than half in a combat role," he said.

When asked from where the troops would come, Mr. Hill did not rule in or rule out reducing the size of the American presence in Iraq, but he also stressed that the troop level in Iraq should be based on the security needs there. He pointed out that over time, a Giuliani administration would seek to expand the size of the military considerably.

For the changes to intelligence agencies, Mr. Giuliani will focus on the promotions within the CIA's clandestine service and also potential change of the office of the director of national intelligence, the agency created in the wake of the intelligence failures after September 11, 2001. That agency last month released a national intelligence estimate on Iran that in its declassified form contended that Iran's open enrichment of uranium was distinct from a formal weapons program.

"We are not there yet, there is a lot of work to be done in terms of reconciling and reforming the intelligence community," Mr. Hill said. Of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Mr. Hill said "maybe there is a lot of value in that, it doesn't seem to be where it ought to be right now."

On Homeland Security, Mr. Giuliani is going to emphasize the importance of turning "first responders," firemen, police officers and other local officials called on to respond to crisis, into "first preventers." Mr. Hill said this would mean encouraging local police departments to have a closer relationship with the Department of Homeland Security than just a national data base of terror alerts. "Law enforcement and homeland security should be talking to each other more, they should be interwired," Mr. Hill said.

Link.