E-Mail This Article to a Friend Giuliani to World: Drop Dead I got your weapons of mass destruction right here BY DAVID S. BERNSTEIN

TUESDAY, AUGUST 31, 2004 -- I suggested in reviewing John McCain's speech to the Republican National Convention last night that he showed some New York chutzpah in painting the Iraq War into the broad picture of an ill-defined but vital war of some kind against some bunch of enemies. I apologize. Chutzpah, I'll show you chutzpah. Come to New York for chutzpah.

Nothing vague for Rudolph Giuliani, who was the final speaker of the night. "In any plan to destroy global terrorism, removing Saddam Hussein needed to be accomplished." Clear enough for you? "Saddam Hussein… was himself a weapon of mass destruction." He started right in at the top of his lengthy speech by saying that "they" who attacked the Twin Towers -- as in George Bush's Ground Zero cry of "they will hear from us" -- have been punished in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Libya, and elsewhere. That's right, you might have heard that al-Qaeda did it, but it was actually the vast all-encompassing they, and "they" are global terrorism. You might recall that the "Bush Doctrine" is the use of preemptive force against an imminent threat. But Giuliani said Monday evening that the Bush Doctrine was "you are either with us or you are with the terrorists."

In case you were wondering, Europeans are with the terrorists. Turns out, according to Giuliani, that for 30 years the response of Europe to terrorism was accommodation, appeasement, and compromise, which led us into this mess. Never mind that Bush started his presidency by explicitly deciding not to retaliate in any way for al-Qaeda's bombing of the USS Cole, rejecting it as swatting at flies. Hey, Europe appeased Hitler, Giuliani reminded us. Rest assured that President Bush will not let those Europeans dictate our actions, he said.

The sad truth is that Giuliani, like much of the Bush Administration leadership, remains locked into nation/state thinking. Terrorism is like Communism, they seem to think, and you defeat it by flipping countries into the freedom column. In fact, it has become a sort of "hidden hand" belief on a par with faith that the free market cures all woes. "The hatred and anger in the Middle East arises from the lack of responsible governments," Giuliani said. Freedom will defeat terrorists. "The long-term answer to ending global terrorism [is] governments that are free and accountable."

This would come as a surprise, I suspect, to anyone who has read Osama bin-Laden's writings, or perused Jessica Stern's Terror in the Name of God. Or to the families of those killed in the Oklahoma City bombing.

Guiliani continued: "These governments deflect their own failures by pointing to America and Israel and other external scapegoats. But blaming these scapegoats does not improve the life of a single person in the Arab world…. It certainly does not stop the slaughter of African Christians in the Sudan."

This spring a Sudanese woman told me that she had grown increasingly cynical of the West's failure to respond to the current horrors in her country. Four years ago, when it was Christians targeted in the northern part of the country, America cared, she said. Today it is Muslims and America does not care.

She and many others must have felt physically ill when Rudy Giuliani said the words above Monday night. They are simply inexcusable from a headlining speaker at a major-party convention. The Fur, Zaghawa, and Masalit people of Sudan's Darfur region -- all Muslim -- have in the past year suffered some of the worst horrors imaginable. But Guiliani -- and the GOP -- wasn't concerned with reality last night. It was all about rhetoric.