The Bush doctrine is fighting foreign fighters -- Al Qaeda -- in Iraq.
Only if the doctrine has morphed into nation building from regime change.
Because we have slipped the mission into nation building in the context of not finding WMDs, we gave the left an opening to undermine the doctrine. They would risk American cities to advance their dream of world gubmint.
My neighbors here in Germany actually fear Bush more than the terrorists. They openly say the world was better off with the Soviet Union to offset America. About half of America feels the same.
By any historical standard, the Bush doctrine is working. In just over three years, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein have been eradicated. Consensual societies are starting to emerge in their place. Syria and Iran are jittery, fearing new global scrutiny over their longstanding, but heretofore excused, terrorist sympathies. Libya and Pakistan have flipped, renouncing much of their past villainy. Saudi Arabia and the other autocracies of the Gulf region feel the new pressure of American idealism. For all their vocal resentment, strategically critical sheikdoms are inching toward political reform and terrorist-hunting
Before you point out the evident inconsistencies in these positions, let me hasten to observe that the "threat" of effecting regime change in Iran or North Korea, for example, is no longer very credible, even if Bush wins and this come from the historical fluke of finding no WMDs and the shameful politicization of the war by the libs. See Hanson again:
By any historical standard, the Bush doctrine is working. In just over three years, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein have been eradicated. Consensual societies are starting to emerge in their place. Syria and Iran are jittery, fearing new global scrutiny over their longstanding, but heretofore excused, terrorist sympathies. Libya and Pakistan have flipped, renouncing much of their past villainy. Saudi Arabia and the other autocracies of the Gulf region feel the new pressure of American idealism. For all their vocal resentment, strategically critical sheikdoms are inching toward political reform and terrorist-hunting.
BUSH'S PROBLEMS
Bush's popularity problems, however, are threefold, and explain the present divisions in this country over the war. First, this is an election year in the postmodern age. Two- and three-minute media streams from the battlefield are delivered with amateurish editorializing in real time to American living rooms, and are then recycled as political soundbites. Given both the wealth and security of American society, and the spectacular ability of our military to defeat enemies at minimal costs, Americans have come to claim as their birthright automatic victory without casualties. To a country that lost hundreds an hour at the Bulge and Iwo Jima, 1,000 fatalities in three years to liberate 50 million people 7,000 miles away might seem an amazing achievement; but 60 years later, voters of a far richer society, inundated with political commercials showing the missing limbs or flag-draped coffins of a few, are told that any sacrifice is tantamount to failure. We have forgotten that in war there are always setbacks like looting, Fallujah, Abu Ghraib, or the rise of a Zarqawi — but that the key is determining to what degree such reversals impair the overall success of the war. So far in Iraq, they simply do not, despite the media sensationalism.
Third, after the meteoric rise of Howard Dean's boutique antiwar campaign in the Democratic primary season, both John Kerry and John Edwards retracted their prior Trumanesque bipartisan support of the war. Instead they sensed political capital in equating daily images of Americans killed with everything from alleged Halliburton profiteering to tax cuts for the wealthy. Their efforts have been energized by millions of dollars in third-party contributions, and sensationalized by the American elite in the arts, universities, and media, who are as culturally influential as they are politically weak and envious.
http://victorhanson.com/articles/hanson102604.html