Presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani would have voters believe that only he can effectively deal with the plight of international terrorism. Yet Giuliani belongs to a political party with a schizophrenic view of terrorism, which since the Reagan years has tended to be both for and against international terrorism all at the same time. The office of the Secretary Of State has often opposed efforts in the Republican White Houses since the Reagan years to support terrorism for short term political purposes, creating internal foreign policy disputes.

During the Reagan White House years, Secretary Of State George Schultz proposed that the U.S. military first strike terrorist bases around the world, but the Cold War instincts of Ronald Reagan and many of his cabinent members won out, and instead funded covert efforts to support Saudi Arabian and Pakistani efforts to recruit Islamic radicals such as Osama Bin Laden, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri and others to come to Afghanistan and Pakistan and to form permanent terrorist bases, many of which still remain today, to combat the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan during the 1980's. After the Soviets were defeated, the most extreme elements including the Taliban soon grabbed power in Afghanistan, giving Al Qaeda the bases they needed to launch the 9/11 attacks against the U.S. and to launch international terrorism elsewhere including Europe and Nigeria.

After a Republican White House helping to both fund and create a permanent terrorism problem by building up both Al Qaeda and the Taliban, you would think that a serious lesson in foreign policy failure would have been learned. But instead, another internal conflict between the Secretary Of State opposing and the Vice President's Office suporting terrorists results in some U.S. support for the terrorist MEK(Mujahideen E-Khalq) operating in Iran. The resulting Iranian anger has expressed itself in Iran exporting weapons such as IEDs into Iraq to kill American servicemen in retaliation for the bombings and assassinations linked to the U.S. backed MEK terrorists operating in Iran.

With a serious face, Rudolph Giuliani wants the average American voter to believe that he is a serious opponent of international terrorism. But is he really? Does he support U.S. backed terrorism like so many in his party have continued to since the Reagan years, or is he a different sort of Republican? The problem for Giuliani is that he's still running in a political party that is on all sides of the terrorism issue, both for and against international terrorism, all at the same time.

At some point Republican foreign policy needs to grow up and start wearing the big boy pants and realize that support for terrorism always either backfires or helps to bring on undesirable results at some point down the road. Until the Republicans are all on this page, opposing all terrorism, then the average American voter needs to be wary of their schizophrenic foreign policy of supporting international terrorism when it serves short term political goals, while opposing the same terrorism when it hits home in the U.S.such as the dastardly 9/11 attacks or a U.S. friend such as attacks in Europe.