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The Myth of the Bush Doctrine
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Governor Sarah Paline
The recent ABC News interview with Republican Vice Presidential nominee Governor Sarah Palin has liberal wags making hay about the Governor's supposed inability to state clearly the nature of the Bush Doctrine. The irony here is that in their disdain they show their own ignorance.
Bill Mahar's HBO show typifies that milieu. Here Salman Rushdie claims “she doesn't know that the most important policy shift this country has made in a hundred years is the Bush Doctrine which said that a preemptive strike was appropriate.” Is that so?
Here are the facts. First, there is no document produced by the White House labeled “Bush Doctrine”. The media and book writers have affixed that term to the concept of preemptive strike in relation to the War in Iraq. But was there really a doctrinal shift with the Iraq War? Yes, but the concept as outlined by Rushdie is wrong.
Hasn't that sort of thing – preemptive war - been done by US Presidents before?
President Bill Clinton in what must be shear prescience demonstrated his mastery of the Bush Doctrine long before President George W. Bush was elected. He bombed and invaded in Bosnia where the Serbs posed no imminent security threat to the United States. He couched his actions as a reaction to a humanitarian crises and regional instability. It was and he was right to do so.
In a continuation of that policy he bombed and invaded Serbian troops in Kosovo. Again, his actions were justified in terms of a humanitarian cause and regional stabilization by him and many of these same liberal pundits. In 1994, President Clinton had troops en route to invade Haiti when a last minute agreement was brokered. Those troops entered Haiti peacefully. The military dictator of Haiti was replaced with a previously democratically elected leader in a last minute concession. But President Clinton had committed US forces to an act of regime change against a government that posed little threat to the United States.
In all these instances some aspect of the so called Bush Doctrine was in play. Regime change in Haiti. Preemption in all cases as defined by the liberal pundits. None of those governments posed a credible threat to the United States. We could go on to examine this concept predating even Bill Clinton but this makes the point.
The only real difference is that in those cases it was a much easier job. The opposing forces were very small compared to the United States military. They were relatively safe endeavors for a president who wanted to flex some military might without too much risk.
That is the real essence of the Bush Doctrine. The shift from doing the right thing only when it was convenient and posed small political risk to a president who did the right thing when it was difficult. The doctrine also was marked by a shift to a more aggressive stance towards state sponsers of terrorism. The only foreign policy blunder demonstrated in that interview is that of Charles Gibson and his liberal media cohorts in demonstrating that their narrative is divorced from a sense of history.
More on this discussion at LA Times, Hot Air, NY Times, Protein Wisdom, American Thinker, Confederate Yankee
Ray Robison is the author of Both In One Trench: Saddam's Secret Terror Documents
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