RUDY GIULIANI, AMBASSADOR TO THE U.N.?
From Best of the Web Today... James Taranto

Rudy Belongs at Turtle Bay
The position of U.S. ambassador to the U.N. is coming vacant, now that President Bush has appointed its current holder, John Negroponte, to the newly created post of ambassador to Baghdad. If President Bush wants to be bold, why doesn't he tap Rudolph Giuliani as Negroponte's replacement?

The New York Post floated the idea last week, and it deserves serious attention. Giuliani seems just the right man for the time--a time when America, the only country capable of doing the hard work of protecting Western civilization from Islamic terrorists, is constantly at risk of falling into the quagmire of U.N. diplomacy.

Not only would Giuliani be a bully-pulpiteer in the great tradition of Jeane Kirkpatrick and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, but he would bring the penetrating eye of a former prosecutor to the continuing Oil-for-Food scandal--which may well turn out to be the corrupt reason why countries like France and Russia fought so fiercely to keep Saddam Hussein's murderous dictatorship in power in Iraq. To be sure, some of Giuliani's critics, including our colleagues at The Wall Street Journal, are of the view that he was overzealous and unfair in prosecuting white-collar crimes. But that's all the more reason why he's a perfect fit for the U.N., which certainly doesn't suffer from an excess of prosecutorial fervor.

Apart from the president himself, it's hard to think of any more powerful spokesman and symbol for America's war on terror than Rudy Giuliani, and not only because of his inspired mayoral leadership after Sept. 11. Giuliani took a stand against terror even when it was unpopular. In 1995 he ordered security to eject Yasser Arafat from Lincoln Center, in an era when the terror boss was being feted at the White House and lavished with Nobel Peace Prizes.

The politics of a Giuliani appointment seem perfect for Bush as well. At the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas, Jeane Kirkpatrick gave a rousing foreign-policy speech in which she, a lifelong Democrat, denounced her party for abandoning its erstwhile policies of strength:

When the San Francisco Democrats treat foreign affairs as an afterthought, as they did, they behaved less like a dove or a hawk than like an ostrich--convinced it would shut out the world by hiding its head in the sand. . . .

When the Soviet Union walked out of arms control negotiations, and refused even to discuss the issues, the San Francisco Democrats didn't blame Soviet intransigence. They blamed the United States. But then, they always blame America first.

When Marxist dictators shoot their way to power in Central America, the San Francisco Democrats don't blame the guerrillas and their Soviet allies, they blame United States policies of 100 years ago. But then, they always blame America first.

The American people know better.

Imagine U.N. Ambassador Rudy Giuliani traveling across town to the Republican National Convention to deliver a speech on the "Boston Democrats," and you begin to see why this is such a brilliant idea.