Good Riddance to the Bush Doctrine

[DeepModem Mom]

WP: Kennan Had a Vision. Things Aren't So Clear Now.
By Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier
Sunday, July 13, 2008; Page B03

....Over the almost 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, foreign policy experts have all aspired to be the next (George) Kennan....

***

The Bush team set out to speak explicitly about doctrine, emphasizing U.S. dominance of the world system, a willingness to go it alone and an insistence that Washington was entitled to take preemptive action to fight emerging threats. The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, offered Bush a historic pretext for articulating this set of ideas, which were trumpeted in the administration's now infamous 2002 National Security Strategy. Influential commentators and historians (such as Yale's John Lewis Gaddis) swooned, calling the Bush doctrine a major innovation in national security thinking. Many liberals were cowed, believing that opposing it would seem weak.

Today, however, the Bush doctrine is in tatters: Reeling from Iraq, abandoned even by many conservatives, the administration is adopting 11th-hour positions that are far from doctrinaire on issues including China, Iran and North Korea. The new policies are more ad hoc, embracing multilateral approaches and tailoring solutions to specific challenges -- something suspiciously like the Clinton approach Bush used to sneer at.

Even the Bush doctrine's encapsulating phrase, the "war on terror," has lost support. Some of Washington's closest allies reject the premise that the animating feature of world politics today is a war on radical Islam....

No matter who is elected in November, the next president will unceremoniously jettison the Bush doctrine. (McCain is hawkish, not suicidal.) But he will be prodded by advisers and provoked by pundits to replace it with a new one. Policy wonks will destroy scores of trees, consume untold megabytes and crowd the airwaves trying to do so. Our advice to Obama and McCain: Change the channel. The last thing the American people need is another bumper sticker.

As Bush has so painfully demonstrated, the quest to define a simple, Kennan-esque concept to guide U.S. foreign policy is fruitless, overrated and even dangerous in the complex world of the 21st century. The search for the single simple rubric has helped leave the country in deep trouble. Solving problems is more important than laying out all-encompassing ideological pronouncements....

(Derek Chollet is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. James Goldgeier is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a professor at George Washington University. They are co-authors of "America Between the Wars: From 11/9 to 9/11.")

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/11/AR2008071102391.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

[indepat]

1. The Bush doctrine is in such tatters that Senators were literally almost jumping through

their own assholes to pass the unconstitutional unconscionable FISA giving junior everything he wanted to further cement his doctrine. Some tatters. :D

[DeepModem Mom]

2. "Many liberals were cowed, believing that opposing it would seem weak."

Although, I think in this piece the topic is pretty much confined to foreign policy and not our rights as citizens.

[indepat]

3. The harm/damage done to this country since WWII by liberals being cowed, shitting their

pants in fear of being labeled weak/soft on national defense, communism, crime, drugs et al, and caving is evident in every fabric of our society: surely all can see the fine mess we are in, the bad economy, weak dollar, soaring national debt, third-world-like health delivery system, perpetual wars, by letting 'pukes set our national agenda and priorities. :D

[pansypoo53219]

4. 27+ weeks to go.

it ain't over til he is gone

[Demeter]

5. The Bush Doctrine: I Got Mine; F U!

Nothing worth keeping in that.