Last week, former New York City Mayor and 2008 Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani made headlines by warning that America will be at risk for a “new 9/11” if a Democrat is elected president next year. It wasn’t the most reasonable statement ever made by a top-tier candidate for the highest office in the land, but the real shock lies in the blatant hypocrisy.

No sensible person would deny that in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, Giuliani’s calm leadership brought great comfort and inspiration to the people of his city. His determination in re-establishing order and sending a message of resolve to New Yorkers and to the entire world won him rock star status.

Last week’s remarks remind us that on issues of national security, Giuliani feels he has earned the right to claim superiority over his opponents.

But has he? Courageous leadership in response to a crisis is an important part of public management, but it takes far more than that to be an effective chief executive. A president’s ability to exercise good judgment regarding the most pressing policy decisions of our day is an absolute necessity. And should he make it through the primaries, Rudy’s reckless decision-making in preparation for a terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11 will likely emerge as his political Achilles’ heel.

Edward Plaugher, the chief of the Arlington County Fire Department in Virginia who spearheaded the coordinated response to the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon, declared to the 9/11 Commission staff that “the lack of a unified command” from the Office of Emergency Management in New York “dramatically impacted the loss of first responder lives on 9/11.”

The OEM was the brainchild of none other than Giuliani, who explained in his book “Leadership” that it was created as an “overarching agency” to coordinate a response to catastrophes like 9/11.

The OEM failed to function properly in the immediate response to the World Trade Center attacks – as opposed to Plaugher’s coordinated response to the Pentagon attacks through the Incident Command System – and the tragic result of this incompetence was the needless loss of additional lives. We’ll never know if a Democratic mayor would have made the same mistake, but Giuliani seems to think he has the answer.

Giuliani’s failure to make all of the necessary preparations for a large-scale terrorist attack extends to his insistence that the Emergency Operations Center be built within walking distance of City Hall on the 23rd floor of 7 World Trade Center. Police Commissioner Howard Safir resisted Giuliani’s proposed location for the command center, aptly referring to it as “Ground Zero” in light of the 1993 terrorist bombings.

Giuliani was offered a secure city facility across the Brooklyn Bridge, but his stubbornness prevailed, and the consequences were deadly. According to the 9/11 Commission’s senior counsel John Farmer, had the command center not been in a location that rendered it inoperable during the 9/11 attacks, “the number of responder deaths could have been greatly reduced. That’s where I think the real tragedy is.”

Farmer went on to argue that had the command center been operational that day, engineers from the Department of Buildings who “routinely appeared at the command center during emergencies” would have been able to communicate much more quickly that they believed both towers were structurally unstable and in great danger of collapsing. Giuliani’s refusal to listen to the warnings of Commissioner Safir and others exacerbated the ineffective communication and inefficient emergency response.

It is nothing short of ludicrous to witness outright fear-mongering on national security by the very man whose irresponsible policy decisions directly increased the number of lives lost on 9/11.

Playing politics with any number of issues is a natural part of most competitive campaigns, but the irony at play when America’s mayor touts his 9/11 record is almost too much to bear.