Krauthammer Unwittingly Hands My Ass to Me

In yesterday's post, I invoked the "Bush Doctrine." Interestingly enough, about the same time, ABC's Palin interview also invoked a "Bush Doctrine," but it was a very different thing he was talking about.

To me, the Doctrine was our policy of treating regimes that harbor terrorists as hostile--the justification for the war in Afghanistan. To ABC's Gibson, the Doctrine was preemptive war--which he incorrectly attributes to being the justification for the war in Iraq and perhaps other future wars as well. (I say incorrectly because Iraq was sold as a preventative war, not a preemptive war. This "Bush Doctrine" was a new and controversial concept borne out of the risks of rogue states or terrorists acquiring WMD. Anticipatory self-defense/preemption applies to strikes against military forces which are poised to or are mobilizing to strike. It is not new and is widely accepted.)

But as Krauthammer points out, we're both wrong:

There is no single meaning of the Bush Doctrine. In fact, there have been four distinct meanings, each one succeeding another over the eight years of this administration -- and the one Charlie Gibson cited is not the one in common usage today. It is utterly different.

The first was American unilateralism with respect to the ABM treaty and Kyoto; Krauthammer himself coined the term "Bush Doctrine" to refer to the administration's unilateral approach.

The second was the one I used.

The third was the one Gibson used.

And the fourth--and current--use of the Bush Doctrine is nothing other than conventional tried-and-true liberalism:

...the fourth and current definition of the Bush doctrine, the most sweeping formulation of the Bush approach to foreign policy and the one that most clearly and distinctively defines the Bush years: the idea that the fundamental mission of American foreign policy is to spread democracy throughout the world. It was most dramatically enunciated in Bush's second inaugural address: "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world."

Applying that doctrine to the Pakistan issue, it would seem that the moral imperative of going after AQ/the Taliban wherever they are is much diminished in the face of the overriding priority of spreading freedom into "the Gap."

So, I was wrong. You don't suppose Gibson will admit that he was wrong too, do you?