The Bush Doctrine

The Bush Doctrine

I wanted to write about this ever since I saw the clip where Charlie Gibson asked the question and (*GASP!*) Sarah Palin didn't know what "The Bush Doctrine" was.

Funny, because I didn't either. Oh, I had my own understanding of "The Bush Doctrine," but it didn't equal the one Charlie Gibson enuciated:

The Bush doctrine, as I understand it, is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense, that we have the right to a preemptive strike against any other country we think is going to attack us.

Charlie stated that this doctrine was laid down by President Bush in "September 2002." Wikipedia (yes, I know) states:

The Bush Doctrine is a phrase used to describe various related foreign policy principles of United States president George W. Bush, created in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks. The phrase initially described the policy that the United States had the right to treat countries that harbor or give aid to terrorist groups as terrorists themselves, which was used to justify the invasion of Afghanistan. Later it came to include additional elements, including the controversial policy of preventive war, which held that the United States should depose foreign regimes that represented a threat to the security of the United States, even if that threat was not immediate (used to justify the invasion of Iraq), a policy of supporting democracy around the world, especially in the Middle East, as a strategy for combating the spread of terrorism, and a willingness to pursue U.S. military interests in a unilateral way. Some of these policies were codified in a National Security Council text entitled the National Security Strategy of the United States published on September 20, 2002.

That would be, I believe, this document. Here's the key excerpt:

In the 1990s we witnessed the emergence of a small number of rogue states that, while different in important ways, share a number of attributes. These states:

* brutalize their own people and squander their national resources for the personal gain of the rulers;
* display no regard for international law, threaten their neighbors, and callously violate international treaties to which they are party;
* are determined to acquire weapons of mass destruction, along with other advanced military technology, to be used as threats or offensively to achieve the aggressive designs of these regimes;
* sponsor terrorism around the globe; and
* reject basic human values and hate the United States and everything for which it stands.

At the time of the Gulf War, we acquired irrefutable proof that Iraq's designs were not limited to the chemical weapons it had used against Iran and its own people, but also extended to the acquisition of nuclear weapons and biological agents. In the past decade North Korea has become the world’s principal purveyor of ballistic missiles, and has tested increasingly capable missiles while developing its own WMD arsenal. Other rogue regimes seek nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons as well. These states’ pursuit of, and global trade in, such weapons has become a looming threat to all nations.

We must be prepared to stop rogue states and their terrorist clients before they are able to threaten or use weapons of mass destruction against the United States and our allies and friends. Our response must take full advantage of strengthened alliances, the establishment of new partnerships with former adversaries, innovation in the use of military forces, modern technologies, including the development of an effective missile defense system, and increased emphasis on intelligence collection and analysis.

First Charlie Gibson asked Gov. Palin if she agreed with "the Bush Doctrine."

Then he asked her this, not once, not twice, but three times:

What if Israel decided it felt threatened and needed to take out the Iranian nuclear facilities?

--

So if we wouldn’t second guess it and they decided they needed to do it, because Iran was a threat, we would be cooperative or agree with that?

--

So if it felt necessary, if it felt the need to defend itself by taking out Iranian nuclear facilities, that would be all right?

Charlie apparently forgot that Israel took out Iraq's Osirak reactor in 1981. (Read that piece!) Apparently he forgot the even more recent destruction of a Syrian nuclear facility (built with the apparent assistance of Kim Jong Il's government) in September of 2007. Governor Palin simply stated,

I don’t think that we should second guess the measures that Israel has to take to defend themselves

three times.

Governor Palin's response to the original "Bush Doctrine" question was this:

I believe that what President Bush has attempted to do is rid this world of Islamic extremism, terrorists who are hell-bent on destroying our nation. There have been blunders along the way, though. There have been mistakes made, and with new leadership, and that's the beauty of American elections, of course, and democracy, is with new leadership comes opportunity to do things better.

Once Gibson clarified his question, her response was this:

Charlie, if there is legitimate and enough intelligence that tells us that a strike is imminent against American people, we have every right to defend our country.

And so does Israel. But what I wanted to point out is that Charlie Gibson's definition of the "Bush Doctrine" doesn't agree with the document that he supposedly cites. Charlie states that the Bush Doctrine is

...that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense, that we have the right to a preemptive strike against any other country we think is going to attack us.

However, the National Security Strategy spells out plainly the nations against which this doctrine is directed. States which:

* brutalize their own people and squander their national resources for the personal gain of the rulers;
* display no regard for international law, threaten their neighbors, and callously violate international treaties to which they are party;
* are determined to acquire weapons of mass destruction, along with other advanced military technology, to be used as threats or offensively to achieve the aggressive designs of these regimes;
* sponsor terrorism around the globe; and
* reject basic human values and hate the United States and everything for which it stands.

I'm not sure what Gibson was looking for. Was it just Palin's acknowledgment that preemptive strikes were not out of the question? Was it to make her look ignorant or stupid? Personally (for a politician), I didn't think her answers were all that bad.

More troubling still, I asked my Obama supporting colleague today whether he believed the US had the right to strike preemptively against such regimes.

He said no. I asked him again, specifically, if he was willing for the country to lose a city before we took action, and he said "Yes. We don't shoot first."

Is this something the Left as a group actually believes?

The hell we don't.