Johann Hari

This week, a fretful, frightened conservative party is peering at its leader and looking beyond him for a successor. The choice they make will determine the future of our politics, and the world’s. Who will be bombed? Who will be saved? How rapidly will our climate unravel? These decisions are being made thousands of miles away from Britain’s faded sea-side side-shows, across an ocean, in New Hampshire, in Iowa, in Florida, and in California. It now looks likely the Republican Party will now choose a man even more extreme than Bush – and that he will be the next President of the United States.

Last week, a series of findings by the Democratic Party’s leading pollsters, Lake Research, were leaked. Until now, Democrats have assumed the flat-lining opinion polls for President Bush guaranteed a return to the White House. After all, CBS News recently found that with a 28 percent approval rating, Bush is now as popular in opinion polls as brussell sprouts, body hair on men, and reptiles. But the reality is “more sobering”, the leaked study warned. In crucial swing districts, Rudi Giuliani beats Hillary Clinton, who is cruising to the Democratic nomination, by a whopping ten points. Even if Barack Obama beats her, he still loses to Rudi at the general.

So who is the man most likely to be President? Giuliani was born to poor Italian-American immigrants in Brooklyn at the tail-end of the Second World War. His father, Harold, was an armed robber who had been banged up in Sing-Sing Prison, but he hid this from his son, raising him to have an intense, unquestioning loyalty to the police. This led Rudi to a career as a famously theatrical prosecutor, fond of arresting people in public and long press conferences boasting about his work. From there he ran for mayor of New York City – and the myths begin.

You know the script: Giuliani rescued New York City from its spiral into ungovernable criminality, and then became the hero of 9/11. He says he “saved New York” by introducing the famous policy of Zero Tolerance: crack down on any sign of social disorder, no matter how small, with the full force of the law. There’s only one problem. It’s not true.

The fall in crime Giuliani brags about began three years before he became mayor. On the watch of his black predecessor, David Dinkins, murder fell by 13.7 percent, and car theft by 23.8 percent. Giuliani inherited these trends. They had a complex range of causes, none of which were primarily his responsibility: the global economic boom, the fall in unemployment, the improvement in police computers.

Nor is zero tolerance the reason why the fall continued: criminal violence fell even more dramatically in cities that adopted smarter, ‘softer’ policies. For example, San Francisco chose to lavish cash not on chasing petty crime but on programmes to divert juvenile delinquents into job training, drug treatment and counselling. The result? Their crime rate fell by 33 percent, compared to 26 percent in NYC during the same period.

As for 9/11, nobody can doubt Giuliani’s personal courage as he stumbled through the dust and falling bodies. This is at the core of Giuliani’s Presidential bid: his fundraisers have been asking for donations of $9.11. But the reality is that, even as he was bravely donning a dust-mask, many people were dying because of obtuse and foolish decisions Giuliani had taken as mayor.

When the World Trade Centre was attacked by jiahdists in 1993, the fire service was horrified to discover that their radios didn’t work properly in the towers. They spent eight years warning about it – but Giuliani did nothing. As a result, the heroic firefighters in the Second Tower couldn’t be told that the building was about to collapse on them, and they died. Giuliani then lied about them to investigators, saying they refused to evacuate – when in fact, they didn’t hear the order. Don’t take my word for it. Ask the New York’s Uniformed Fire Officer’s Association, a conservative organisation who endorsed George Bush in 2004. They loathe Giuliani, and their spokesman explains bitterly: “He had eight years to solve that problem.”

It wasn’t his only call that ended hellishly that day. He chose to place the emergency “command bunker” for the City on the 23rd floor of the World Trade Centre, even though he knew it was the only place jihadis had ever tried to attack in America. The result was that the emergency services were barely able to co-ordinate as the dust filled Manhattan.

Yet on the basis of these myths, he may be on the brink of becoming President. On foreign policy, he says George Bush is “a great example” – except that he hasn’t been aggressive enough. Giuliani has pledged that, unlike the pansy Bush, he would bomb Iran imminently, offering last week “an absolute assurance” that “if they get to the point that they are going to become a nuclear power, we will prevent that or set them back five or 10 years. That is not said as a threat. That should be said as a promise.”

This is only the start. He has appointed as his senior foreign policy advisor Norman Podhoretz, the godfather of neoconservatism. When I interviewed Podhoretz last autumn, he declared that the Iraq war has been “an amazing success.” He added, “There were WMD, and they were shipped to Syria ... This picture of a country in total chaos with no security is false. It has been a triumph. It couldn't have gone better.” He describes critics of the war as “the domestic insurgency”, and says the fight against them is “no less bloody than the war being fought by our troops in the Middle East.”

Giuliani agrees. This summer, he blamed the media for the impression that Iraq is a disaster, and reasserted that Saddam “was a major pillar of support for Islamic terrorism”. Whatever you think US foreign policy should be, it cannot be achieved by these ideological hallucinations.

When Bush recently declared that the lesson from Vietnam is that the US should have stayed and killed more people, he was merely copying Giuliani. He bragged in a recent speech: “Many historians today believe that by about 1972 we had succeeded in defeating the Vietcong insurgency.” This wasn’t quite his view at the time: he secured for himself no less than three exemptions from the draft.

America’s Mayor is also even more hardline than Bush when it comes to the Palestinians. He chides Bush’s purely rhetorical commitment to the creation of a Palestinian state, saying: “Too much emphasis has been placed on brokering negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians… It is not in the interests of the US to assist in the creation of another state that will support terrorism.” He waves away the United Nations with the same haughty contempt, declaring that “the UN has been irrelevant to the resolution of every major dispute of the last 50 years,” and it should continue to be so. He shares Bush’s keep-on-burning approach to global warming.

Is there any way in which Giuliani is better than Bush? Well, he is not homophobic, supports civil partnerships and even moved in with a gay couple after he dumped his second wife live in the middle of a press conference. He is not against a woman’s right to have an abortion. And that’s it.

Yet it is in these personal, liberal views that a tiny glimmer of light can be glimpsed. If Giuliani becomes the Republican nominee, there is a significant chance that the evangelical wing of the party – obsessed with God, guns and gays – will break away and run a third party candidate against him. James Dobson, founder of the influential hard-right Focus on the Family, has already said he “cannot, and will not, vote for Rudi Giuliani in 2008. It is an irrevocable decision.” An evangelical third party could split the right-wing vote and let a Democrat through the middle – just as Ross Perot did in 1992 and 1996, and just as Ralph Nader let Bush through in 2000. Or perhaps – the best scenario of all – the American people will see through the Giuliani façade by then.

If President Giuliani becomes a reality, then yet another tragedy will have been born in the burning rubble of the World Trade Centre.

The evangelical third-party backlash against Giuliani is happening even sooner than I thought: check out my lovely friend Andrew Sullivan's post about it here.