Friday, September 12, 2008

So what IS the Bush Doctrine, anyway?

Sarah Palin had the right answer –“In what sense, Charlie?” – when he asked her about the Bush Doctrine. Fact is that the “doctrine” covers a lot of ground, not just pre-emptive warfare. Here’s Wikipedia on the term:

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 supposed 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. This represented a dramatic shift from the United States's Cold War policies of deterrence and containment, under the Truman Doctrine, and a departure from post-Cold War philosophies such as the Powell Doctrine and the Clinton Doctrine.

Someone also needs to ask Obama and Biden if they understand (as they should) that their own encouragement of NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia means that the U.S. “perhaps” would go to war for those countries. That’s simply the reality of being in NATO, a military alliance in which an attack on one member is considered an attack on all.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I bet most of the mainstream media are completely clueless on these points. Thanks, Tom, for another excellent post. I love this blog!