Bush Doctrine

The Bush Doctrine is not, and never was, rocket science. Name That Doctrine by By Michael Gerson summarizes it as presented in Bush's 2006 State of the Union address. But it had been eloquently set out in his speech at the Air Force Academy in June of 2004, where the rationale for the Iraq War was presented clearly and in detail. I find that AF Academy commencement address to be easily the greatest foreign policy speech by a president in my lifetime. (See: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/06/20040602.html )

No credible alternative to that strategic vision has ever been proposed for dealing with the long-term problem of Islamic terrorism. In comparison, arguments that our efforts should have focused on capturing Osama bin Laden, or that the Iraq War was primarily about Saddam's WMD, badly miss the point; neither of those things are, or ever were, what the effort in Iraq is about. For all his failings, Bush saw and understood the longer-term meaning of September 11th, and what would be required to avoid the future that it portended. The problem going forward was not Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein, it was the failed, oppressive backwardness of Arab societies that spawned such people, regimes, and ideologies in the first place. Without fundamental structural reform of those societies, there would be no end of bin Ladens and September Elevenths. In recognizing that, Bush got the One Big Thing right.

But the subsequent tragedy of the Bush years was the mind-numbing failure to mount a serious and prolonged effort to make the strategic case clear to the American public. Once understood, it is overwhelmingly persuasive; but it has to be understood. The fact that military pre-emption still gets identified as the entirety of the Bush Doctrine, or even as its key component, only demonstrates how completely the administration failed in its responsibility to describe what it was trying to do, and why.

Byron