NEW YORK: Republican Rudy Giuliani vows to be tough on terror, chooses advisers who want to bomb Iran and doesn’t think pretending to drown prisoners is torture. Add to those views a reputation for being combative, and Giuliani often evokes the word ‘scary’ from opponents who find the tough-guy image that served him so well after the Sept 11 attacks now a cause for concern as he seeks the US presidency.

“He is a scary guy,” said Jerome Hauer, who ran the city’s Office of Emergency Management for Giuliani. “He was probably one of the more divisive mayors the city has ever seen.

“People in this country should be very frightened of Rudy because he is not going to bring the country together,” Hauer added. “Who knows who he’d pick wars with?”

When New Yorkers reminisce about Giuliani, they tend to recall his contentious moments — threatening to pull funding from a museum over a controversial exhibit, he disliked or surrounding City Hall with barricades and barriers.

But voters nationwide, at this stage of the November 2008 presidential contest, seem to be thinking more about his calm and compassion after the deadly attacks in 2001 enough to anoint him the Republican front-runner.

Former New York Mayor Ed Koch said he supported Giuliani twice for mayor but, because of what he sees as his authoritarian and thin-skinned temperament, he no longer does.

“He’s scary? I think they don’t know him to make a statement like that,” said Guy Molinari, a former US congressman and state co-chairman of the Giuliani campaign.—Reuters