Whether you love or hate Bush policy, make sure you read Charles Krauthammer’s column re: Charlie Gibson’s interview with Sarah Palin and the Bush Doctrine question.
Krauthammer pointed out what most of us probably didn’t think about while we were figuring out whether Gibson’s glasses could slide any further down his condescending nose: there have been at least four working definitions of the so-called “Bush doctrine” over the past eight years, none of them official.
So, neither Palin nor Gibson nor Santa Clause could say for sure what it is without some sort of clarification. Which is why Krauthammer called the NYT’s view that Gibson ”informed” Palin of the meaning of the Bush doctrine (anticapatory self-defense) “rubbish.”
Krauthammer knows a little something about this because (he points out) he was the one to first to use the term. In the cover essay of the June 4, 2001, issue of the Weekly Standard entitled, “The Bush Doctrine: ABM, Kyoto, and the New American Unilateralism,” Krauthammer wrote that the Bush policies of unilaterally withdrawing from the ABM treaty and rejecting the Kyoto protocol (and others) amounted to a radical change in foreign policy that should be called “the Bush doctrine.”
Then came 9/11. In his address to Congress nine days after that event, Bush declared: “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.” This policy re: terror became the essence of “the Bush doctrine.”
Until Iraq. When Bush offered his major justification for the war vis a vis the necessity of a preemptive act. (This is the one Charlie Gibson thinks of as ”the Bush doctrine.”)
And then there’s the fourth (current) definition of “the Bush doctrine”: as Krauthammer puts it, “the idea that the fundamental mission of American foreign policy is to spread democracy throughout the world.” It was clearly enunciated in Bush’s second inaugural address: “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.”
Near the end of his piece, Krauthammer wrote, “If I were in any public foreign policy debate today, and my adversary were to raise the Bush doctrine, both I and the audience would assume — unless my interlocutor annotated the reference otherwise — that he was speaking about the grandly proclaimed (and widely attacked) freedom agenda of the Bush administration.
So, ok, Sarah Palin doesn’t know what “the Bush doctrine” is. But apparently neither does Charlie Gibson. And at least Palin didn’t pretend to know — while, as the New York Times noted, Gibson “looked down his nose and over his glasses with weary disdain, sighing and “sounding like an impatient teacher.”
Seems Gibson is the one in need of a teacher - and I’d say Krauthammer schooled him real good.
