Another reason to be thankful for the collapse of Rudy Giuliani’s potentially disastrous presidential campaign:
Nor were neoconservative ideologues—who had the most-elaborate visions of a liberal, democratic Iraq—interested in the Kurdish cause, or even particularly knowledgeable about its history. Just before the “Mission Accomplished” phase of the war, I spoke about Kurdistan to an audience that included Norman Podhoretz, the vicariously martial neoconservative who is now a Middle East adviser to Rudolph Giuliani. After the event, Podhoretz seemed authentically bewildered. “What’s a Kurd, anyway?” he asked me.
Just to refresh your memory, this is the same “adviser” who wants to bomb Iran and thinks Iraq’s WMD are in Syria. Assuming Podhoretz wasn’t questioning the legitimacy of the Kurdish identity, that’s an unbelievable lack of knowledge for someone who was serving as a foreign policy adviser to a major presidential candidate.