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Was the username at wikipedia who made the edits winstonsmith, by any chance?
Chris Bray -
9/16/2008
I'll buy all of that. I do think there's been a frantic effort to make it look like it was reasonable for Palin to be lost in space, and I think you're proposing an answer here that leaves her lost in space where she belongs.
Dylan Justin Hirsch-Shell -
9/16/2008
I still think that it's pointless to argue about what the accepted meaning of "Bush Doctrine" was prior to this interview.
Regardless of what definition you or anybody else wants to use, Palin didn't know any of them! And, as Alan points out above, she couldn't speak intelligently about it once it was explicitly defined for her.
I found Daniel Koffler's post on this matter to be informative:
In that post, we find out, by way of a post by Palin-apologist Cliff May on National Review Online, that Anne-Marie Slaughter, Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton, was not sure what was meant by "the Bush doctrine" when she was interviewed for a book by Alan Johnson called "Global Politics After 9/11: The Democratiya Interviews."
Johnson: What are the central differences, and what are
the elements of continuity, if any exist, between ‘the Bush
doctrine’ and the ‘grand strategy of forging a world of liberty
under law’?
Slaughter: Tell me what you mean by ‘The Bush Doctrine’.
Johnson: Let’s say a fairly aggressive strategy of promoting
democracy, a willingness to use military force, and a refusal
to be put off from using that force because you haven’t been
able to put an international alliance in place. Plus the idea
that the root cause of the threat is the stagnation – politically,
economically and culturally – of an entire region, so the only
serious response is to promote political change in that region.
You'll note that Johnson's "Bush Doctrine", while it could plausibly encompass it, does not specifically mention preventive war.
The interview took place on June 12, 2007 [ this is explicitly stated on p.241 of Johnson's book, which can be read in it's entirety here: http://fpc.org.uk/fsblob/901.pdf ].
Thus, despite the fact that, if asked this question on September 13, 2008, you and I and about a million other people would have immediately assumed that "the Bush Doctrine" meant the right of the United States to wage preventive wars against countries which pose no eminent threat, this would not have been the only plausible definition of that term, and anybody would have been perfectly legitimate in asking for a clarification from Gibson as to *which* Bush doctrine he was referring to.
Therefore, I reiterate that it's an utter waste of time to argue that the term "Bush Doctrine" only had One True Meaning.
What's more important is that Palin seemed never to have heard of this term before!
And more disturbing that that, as Koffler points out, is that her response, "His worldview?", indicates that she's completely ignorant of the history of American Presidents having Doctrines named after them.
Chris Bray -
9/16/2008
Dylan,
A few things, quickly:
Despite Krauthammer's attempt in 2008 to say that he identified the "Bush doctrine" in 2001, (his pre-9/11) 2001 essay 1.) doesn't do that, and 2.) was written as an attempt to find elements of various Bush doctrines. For example, he identified "radical new nuclear doctrine" (emphasis added) and " the new Bush nuclear doctrine." The essay makes narrow claims from a starting point of uncertainty, since it begins with the claim that the world has changed so much that "the implications have not adequately been grasped."
In his 2002 essay, Krauthammer is reacting to a formal and explicit declaration of policy.
As for the nature of that declared policy, here's my favorite clue: In the immediate aftermath of Palin's interview, the Wiki for "Bush doctrine" was suddenly edited hundreds of times. Before the edits, the page said that the Bush doctrine centered on the premise of preemption; after the edits, the Bush doctrine had suddenly taken on Talmudic complexity and exquisite nuance. Krauthammer's recent column, by the way, told readers to go look at the Wiki to understand what the thing was -- a suggestion he made after the urgent flurry of edits. See the list of edits here; compare the earlier and later versions here.
We all knew about Bush and preemption before Palin's interview. Krauthammer is an active participant in an effort to convince us to forget what we knew.
David Silbey -
9/16/2008
The big question, of course, is whether _Bush_ could talk about his own doctrine...
Alan Allport -
9/15/2008
It's far more damning that when Gibson gave his definition of the BD, Palin could think of nothing to add to the trite commonplaces that she'd been stalling with.
Failing to recognize jargon is a relatively minor sin. It's her inability to talk intelligently about it even with it's explained to her that's the worrying part.
Dylan Justin Hirsch-Shell -
9/15/2008
I'm no Republican apologist, but I think maybe you're barking up the wrong tree here.
Take a fresh look, and you'll notice that in Krauthammer's December 2002 column the words "of preemption" appear immediately after both of the instances you cited where he refers to "the Bush doctrine."
Krauthammer could legitimately claim that he included those two extra words specifically in order to distinguish this new doctrine from the two other, previously defined, Bush doctrines -- the doctrine of American unilateralism and the "with us or against us" doctrine.
In other words, based solely on the quotes you've provided, his two columns are entirely consistent with each other.
Nevertheless, it was still painfully obvious that Palin didn't know what on God's green earth the words "Bush doctrine" could possibly have been referring to.
I'll accept Krauthammer's claim that there are four distinct meanings of "Bush doctrine." But even if that makes Charlie Gibson look kind of like a turd, it doesn't make Palin look any better. It just means she was 0 for 4 instead of 0 for 1.
David Silbey -
9/15/2008
John McCain is older than Krauthammer's Pulitizer Prize.
Chris Bray -
9/14/2008
Yes, all of that proves that his columns are honest.
William Hopwood -
9/14/2008
"Against stiff competition, quite possibly the most obviously dishonorable pundit in the business."
A rather harsh sentiment not universally shared, it would appear.
From: http://www.postwritersgroup.com/krauthammer.htm
"Charles Krauthammer, winner of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary,.. named by the Financial Times as America's most influential commentator... now appears in more than 180 newspapers..The late Meg Greenfield, longtime editorial page editor of The Washington Post, called Krauthammer’s column “independent and hard to peg politically. It’s a very tough column. There’s no ‘trendy’ in it. You never know what is going to happen next.” Which explains why he has been honored from every part of the political spectrum for his bold, lucid and original writing -- from the famously liberal People for the American Way (First Amendment Award) to the staunchly conservative American Enterprise Institute (Irving Kristol Award)...Says Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor of The Washington Post: "Krauthammer's weekly essays on the war on terrorism, bioethics, the Middle East, anti-Semitism in Europe and other complex and contentious issues cut through the cant and the muddy thinking in a way that many other columnists can only envy." ...(Krauthammer) was educated at McGill University, majoring in political science and economics, Oxford University (Commonwealth Scholar in Politics) and Harvard (M.D. in 1975). ...He practiced medicine for three years as a resident and then chief resident in psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital...came to Washington to direct planning in psychiatric research for the Carter administration, and began contributing articles to The New Republic. During the presidential campaign of 1980, he served as a speech writer to Vice President Walter Mondale.... He joined The New Republic as a writer and editor in 1981. He writes a monthly essay for Time magazine and contributes to several other publications, including The Weekly Standard and The New Republic. He is the recipient of innumerable
awards, including the National Magazine Award for essays and the first annual ($250,000) Bradley Prize.... "
Nathanael D. Robinson -
9/14/2008
Is not that the symptom of an administration that could not articulate its foreign policy vision, but instead put platitudes forward? It bodes poorly if the next administration is equally inarticulate.
Nathanael D. Robinson -
9/14/2008
Given that the government no longer has the capacity to practice it, the Bush Doctrine has been reduced to justifying Iraq retroactively.
Jonathan Dresner -
9/14/2008
From my quote file:
"Leibniz laid down exact definitions, which deprived him of the agreeable liberty to misuse his terms upon occasion." Fontenelle, in Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft, p. 175.
"Shortly after assuming the presidency, Saddam summed up his political philosophy: keep opponents off guard. `What is politics?' he asked top officials. `Politics is when you say you are going to do one thing while intending to do another. Then you do neither what you said nor what you intended.'" -- Saddam Hussein, NYTimes 3/18/03
Chris Bray -
9/14/2008
It is pretty funny as a defense: Oh, the Bush doctrine? Man, that thing has so many different meanings that, like, who can even say?
We are utterly incoherent, sir, I assure you!
Jonathan Dresner -
9/14/2008
In his defense -- a little bit -- the original Bush Doctrine, which was the grounds for our invasion of Iraq, got kinda buried in the subsequent "omigod-we-didn't-find-WMD-need-reason-for-invading-anyway" shuffle....
On the other hand, as a professional pundit, Krauthammer should know that.
One might think that the difficulty he's having defining it now might tell him something about the administration's foreign policy record....
