Behind Giuliani's Tough Talk

"Islamic terrorists are at war with us," Rudy Giuliani told about 300 people at a synagogue in Rockville, Md., one evening in July. He likes to say it that way — that they are at war with us, not the other way around. "They want to kill us," he warned a group in New Hampshire the same month. "They hate you," he told a woman in Atlanta.

Giuliani says he understands terrorism "better than anyone else running for President," and he certainly talks about it more than anyone else. "Basically, what he's selling is, 'As dangerous a world as this is, I can make it safer,'" says G.O.P. pollster Frank Luntz. So far, it seems to be working. Giuliani has been the consistent front-runner of the Republican candidates in most national polls through August.

By framing his campaign this way, Giuliani has raised an interesting question. What does it actually mean to understand terrorism? His supporters might find the question absurd. He owns terrorism, they say. The entire world watched on television as Giuliani led New York City through the aftermath of a terrorism attack. To his opponents, the answer is equally plain: he has no foreign policy experience, and he talks about terrorism as if it's an enemy country on a continent only he knows how to find.

But being a victim of terrorism, or the steely leader of a recovery, is not necessarily the same as understanding terrorism. Nor is foreign policy experience all that matters. So how would Giuliani actually prevent, contain and respond to the next major terrorist attack in the U.S.? What is his vision for what he considers the existential challenge of our time?

This much is indisputable: Giuliani knows what it means to be a victim of terrorism, to lose old friends in an avalanche of violence and spit the dust of a skyscraper out of his mouth in a new, blackened world. He understands the urgency of speaking to the American people after an attack — and not circling above the ruins in Air Force One. He knows how to grieve and go to work at the same time.

But before 9/11, Giuliani spent eight years presiding over a city that was a known terrorist target. A TIME investigation into what he did — and didn't do — to prepare for a major catastrophe is revealing. In addition to extraordinary grace under fire, Giuliani developed an intimate knowledge of emergency management and an affinity for quantifiable results. On 9/11, he earned the trust of most Americans; one year later, 78% of those surveyed by the Marist Institute had a favorable impression of Giuliani. This magazine also named Giuliani its Person of the Year in 2001. Assuming he can keep it, trust is a priceless resource in psychological warfare.

The evidence also shows great, gaping weaknesses. Giuliani's penchant for secrecy, his tendency to value loyalty over merit and his hyperbolic rhetoric are exactly the kinds of instincts that counterterrorism experts say the U.S. can least afford right now.

Giuliani's limitations are in fact remarkably similar to those of another man who has led the nation into a war without end. Some of the Bush Administration's policies, like improved intelligence sharing between countries and our own agencies, have made the U.S. better at fighting terrorism. But others, from the war in Iraq to the treatment of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, have actually made the task much more difficult. The challenge for the next President will be focusing on and adapting the good tools and jettisoning the bad. Whether you conclude Giuliani can win this war depends ultimately on whether you think we are winning now.