{"id":4323,"date":"2005-05-30T10:58:49","date_gmt":"2005-05-30T14:58:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/4323.html"},"modified":"2005-05-30T10:58:49","modified_gmt":"2005-05-30T14:58:49","slug":"the-ever-shifting-bush-doctrine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/the-ever-shifting-bush-doctrine\/","title":{"rendered":"The ever-shifting ‘Bush Doctrine’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Atrios raised a point yesterday<\/a> that I’ve been thinking about for a while.<\/p>\n

This has been bugging me for some time but I can’t possibly be the only one who has noticed. Internet connection is too crappy to look into this deeply right now, but has anyone else noticed that our media allowed the “Bush Doctrine” to magically evolve from “pre-emptive war against anyone who might want to hurt us<\/a>” to “spreading freedom and democracy throughout the world<\/a>” without blinking?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’s a good point, but I’d add that the “Bush Doctrine” has transitioned between at least three different notions.<\/p>\n

The first doctrine was supposed to be the “with us or against us<\/a>” policy.<\/p>\n

The world President Bush has described since Sept. 11 is divided between good and evil, a black-and-white map on which each country must choose its color. “Either you are with us,” Bush said in his Sept. 20 speech to Congress, “or you are with the terrorists.”<\/p>\n

That is the essence of what the president now calls the Bush Doctrine. Asked to define it further, a senior White House official said: “We must eliminate the scourge of international terrorism. In order to do that, we need not only to eliminate the terrorists and their networks, but also those who harbor them.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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<\/i> be a threat.<\/p>\n

When that doctrine was left in shreds<\/a>, 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. <\/p>\n

Except this wasn’t really a new “doctrine” per se, because almost as soon as the speech was over, the White House said the notion was more an idealistic goal<\/a> than a policy — one Bush aide famously said<\/a>, “Do you want us to be rhetorical or to be effective?” — and certainly isn’t the kind of approach we’re going to pursue anytime soon.<\/p>\n

In other words, five years and three iterations later, there really isn’t a Bush Doctrine to speak of, unless you include “we’re making this up as we go along” a principle of government.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Atrios raised a point yesterday that I’ve been thinking about for a while. This has been bugging me for some time but I can’t possibly be the only one who has noticed. Internet connection is too crappy to look into this deeply right now, but has anyone else noticed that our media allowed the “Bush […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4323"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4323\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}