Karl Rove was at the University of Arkansas yesterday, addressing various aspects of Bush’s presidency. When he wasn’t wildly mischaracterizing the record regarding U.S. Attorneys, Rove touched on Bush’s “legacy.”
[Rove] said that the biggest Bush legacy will be what he terms the “Bush doctrine.” It “says if you train a terrorist, harbor a terrorist, feed a terrorist, you will be treated like a terrorist yourself. And then the corollary of that, which is that we will not wait until dangers fully materialize before taking action.”
Wait, the “Bush doctrine” is still a serious concept at the White House? Weren’t “serious” people supposed to have given up on such nonsense years ago?
As long as Rove is still emphasizing this as the key to the Bush legacy, we might as well take a moment to consider how wrong he is. For one thing, the White House has generally struggled to define exactly what the “Bush doctrine” is.
It started as the “with us or against us” policy. When that proved ineffectual as a standard for shaping policy — we show tolerance for harboring nations all the time — the doctrine shifted into a preemption principle that empowered Bush to wage war against countries, whether they’re a threat or not, based solely on the idea that they might someday be a threat. When that doctrine was left in shreds, Bush used his second inaugural to roll out a third doctrine to replace the first two: we’re not only defending democracies, we’re committed to creating them around the globe (a concept, I might add, that Bush has never actually taken seriously).
In this context, Rove’s notion that the “Bush Doctrine” will be the president’s legacy seems misguided, unless Rove believes “we’re making this up as we go along” is an admirable principle of effective government.
Indeed, Dan Froomkin declared Rove’s idea of the “doctrine” dead a year ago.
How can Bush still argue for attacking another country based on his suspicions about their intentions — when the first time he tried it, his public case turned out to be so utterly specious?
The idea that the American public or the international community would tolerate such behavior once again seems highly unlikely at this point in time. The American people, for one, won’t be keen on putting troops in harm’s way again on spec anytime soon.
Winning support for the application of a doctrine of preemption requires enormous credibility. It requires public trust in intelligence and motives. And that trust isn’t there. […]
In fact, the more we know about the run-up to war in Iraq, the more evidence there is that the doctrine of preemption (and the cherry-picking and manipulation of intelligence used to make the case for it) was just a pretext for an invasion that Bush and his top aides had already decided on for other reasons.
That’s the funny thing about foreign policy doctrines — they’re supposed to be applicable. Considering what Rove said in Arkansas yesterday, it sounds like even Bush doesn’t embrace the Bush doctrine. Pakistan, for example, has looked the other way as al Qaeda re-established control of their terror network, creating training camps on Pakistani soil. Bush, meanwhile, continues to treat Pakistan as an ally. For that matter, the White House has decided that pragmatic negotiations with Iran and Syria might not be such a bad idea after all. Who, exactly, is Bush “treating like a terrorist”?
If this is Rove’s idea of Bush’s greatest lasting legacy, Bush’s place in history is secure — at the bottom.
