Nation-Building Rudy

Rudy Giuliani gave the commencement speech at the Citadel on Saturday and sketched out a proposal for a permanent nation-building apparatus. He whipped it out again at a Heritage Foundation dinner last night near the end of one of the better speeches I've heard from him in this campaign. Let's go to the tape:

Maybe we have to start thinking about some kind of hybrid organization of our military and our civilian agencies of the government. There's a lot here that the Justice Department can bring to bear in places like Iraq and if we have to do another Iraq in the future. There's a lot of skills that the Commerce Department can bring to bear, the Treasury Department, and a lot of our private businesses. This nation needs to get started again. Maybe we didn't see that because this idea of nation-building is not one you want to undertake lightly. But whether we wanted to or not, it's now our responsibity. We've got to get it done right.

"If we have to do another Iraq." Like with less "q"s and more "n"s? The polls keep sloshing back and forth, but at any given time Giuliani, McCain and Romney command about 60 percent of the GOP vote. All of them want a larger military, and the first two want to make aggressive nation-building more viable; Rudy via the "hybrid organization" and McCain via a "League of Democracies."