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The Bush Doctrine isn't really that important

    by Will Bunch | Columnist
    Published 

A lot of folks in the sphere o' blogs are getting all excited tonight about a segment in the much ballyhooed Charlie Gibson ABC interview with Sarah Palin, the one where Two-Hundred-Thousand-Buck Chuck presses her on the Bush Doctrine and the vice presidential wannabe clearly is clueless to what he's talking about:

"In what respect, Charlie?"
This performance is the kind of thing that could have a serious impact on the race, unless everyone politely agrees to ignore it.

But there's one huge hole in that line of thinking that people seem to be overlooking here. Not knowing "the Bush doctrine" would be a big deal -- if the Bush Doctrine itself were a big deal. It's not like its soundalike cousins like the Monroe Doctrine, which has more or less and for better or worse defined America's role in the Western Hemisphere for nearly two centuries.

No -- the Bush Doctrine is a giant, rotting hunk of CYA baloney, a transparently lame excuse for a naked power grab in the world's oil breadbasket.

The Bush Doctrine was rolled out over the course of 2002. It was spelled out in general terms in June of that year when he spoke to graduates at West Point and said:

We cannot defend America and our friends by hoping for the best. We cannot put our faith in the word of tyrants, who solemnly sign non-proliferation treaties, and then systemically break them. If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.

This was followed up in September 2002 with a new National Security Policy of the United States, which more explicitly endorsed the concept of pre-emptive wars to deal with perceived terrorist threats against the nation. You remember September 2002, don't you? It came right after Bush's chief of staff Andy Card said famously of a plan to go to war with Iraq, that ''From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August.'' As the New York Times reported on Sept. 7, 2002:

— White House officials said today that the administration was following a meticulously planned strategy to persuade the public, the Congress and the allies of the need to confront the threat from Saddam Hussein.

So the Bush Doctrine was merely the "intellectual underpinning" for a plan that really, as we now know, was really a one-off, a plan to establish a U.S. military presence in the heart of the world's oil region, in a nation that contrary to all the bluster of the Bush Doctrine, did not pose any kind of threat to the United States and did not even possess weapons of mass destruction. Since the announcement of this "doctrine" in 2002 and the invasion of Iraq six months later, the U.S. has not pre-emptively invaded hostile nations that possess nuclear weapons like North Korea, and in fact that there's new evidence that the Bush administration may be thwarting a proposed strike by ally Israel on Iran (and if true, good for them.).

The Bush Doctrine is just like the manipulation of pre-war intelligence as described in the Downing Street Memo, that in the case the "doctrine" was being fixed around the policy of a war with Iraq. It is almost as significant as if the U.S. had unveiled something in 1987 called the Reagan Doctrine in which it was now official American policy to trade arms for hostages. As far as the Sarah Palin interview is concerned, I'm much more concerned with her knowledge about important things -- like how to avoid a war with Russia -- than about the Bush Doctrine.

Because the truth is, there's only one thing that the next president needs to know about the Bush Doctrine -- how to take it off the books.