Posted on 09/12/2008 1:11:06 AM PDT by jeltz25
What Exactly Is the 'Bush Doctrine'? It's being taken in some quarters as revelatory of inexperience that Sarah Palin sought clarification when ABC's Charlie Gibson asked her about the Bush Doctrine. To review, here is the passage from the transcript.
GIBSON: Do you agree with the Bush doctrine? PALIN: In what respect, Charlie? GIBSON: The Bush -- well, what do you -- what do you interpret it to be? PALIN: His world view. GIBSON: No, the Bush doctrine, enunciated September 2002, before the Iraq war. PALIN: I believe that what President Bush has attempted to do is rid this world of Islamic extremism, terrorists who are hell bent on destroying our nation. There have been blunders along the way, though. There have been mistakes made. And with new leadership, and that's the beauty of American elections, of course, and democracy, is with new leadership comes opportunity to do things better. GIBSON: The Bush doctrine, as I understand it, is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense, that we have the right to a preemptive strike against any other country that we think is going to attack us. Do you agree with that?
Gibson should of course have said in the first place what he understood the Bush Doctrine to be--and specified that he was asking a question about preemption. Palin was well within bounds to have asked him to be more specific. Because, as it happens, the doctrine has no universally acknowledged single meaning. Gibson himself in the past has defined the Bush Doctrine to mean "a promise that all terrorist organizations with global reach will be found, stopped and defeated"--which is remarkably close to Palin's own answer.
Consider what a diversity of views on the meaning of the Bush Doctrine can be found simply within the archives of ABC News itself:
September 20, 2001 PETER JENNINGS: . . . Claire, the president said at one point, 'From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.' Should we be taking that as the Bush doctrine? CLAIRE SHIPMAN reporting: I think so, Peter,
September 21, 2001 CHARLIE GIBSON: The president in his speech last night, very forceful. Four out of five Americans watched it. Everybody gathered around the television set last night. The president issued a series of demands to the Taliban, already rejected. We'll get to that in a moment. He also outlined what is being called the Bush Doctrine, a promise that all terrorists organizations with global reach will be found, stopped and defeated.
September 21, 2001 CHARLIE GIBSON: Senator Daschle, let me start with you. People were looking for a Bush Doctrine. They may have found it when he said the war on terror will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped or defeated. That's pretty broad. Broader than you expected?
December 9, 2001 GEORGE WILL: The Bush doctrine holds that anyone who governs a territory is complicit in any terrorism that issues from that territory. That covers the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Second, the war on terrorism is indivisible, it's part of the Bush doctrine.
December 11, 2001 GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Two years ago, September 1999, Bush gave his first speech when he was running about terrorism. And his first--had the first explanation of the Bush doctrine, that if you harbor a terrorist, you're going to be attacked. The Bush White House is putting this out, saying it shows that Bush was very prescient, but that was only one speech given in the campaign.
January 28, 2002 BOB WOODWARD: This is now the Bush Doctrine . . . , namely that if we're attacked by terrorists, we will not just go after those terrorists but the countries or the people who harbor them.
January 29, 2002 GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: It was striking and significant that the president really expanded the Bush doctrine. If a nation builds a weapon of mass destruction--Iraq, Iran or North Korea--we will reserve the right to take out those weapons even if we're not attacked or even if there's not a threat.
March 19, 2004 TERRY MORAN: That was the Bush doctrine we just heard. On this one-year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, President Bush offered a very broad justification of American leadership in the world under him since 9/11. Not just since one year in Iraq. For American voters as an argument that the country is safer, but more as you point out, for the world, which has been divided by his leadership, that Iraq is knit, in his mind, very firmly into that war on terrorism. One omission which I believe will be noted around the world, he made no mention of the role of multilateral institutions, the UN and others, in this fight against terrorism. In his mind, it's clear it's American leadership with others following along.
May 7, 2006 GEORGE WILL: Now the argument from the right is the CIA is a rogue agent because it has not subscribed to the Bush doctrine. The Bush doctrine being that American security depends on the spread of democracy and we know how to do that. The trouble is, Negroponte, who is considered by some of these conservatives the villain here and an enemy of the Bush doctrine is the choice of Bush, which makes Bush an insufficient subscriber to the Bush doctrine.
I'll stop there, although anyone with a Nexis account can find far more where that came from. Preemptive war; American unilateralism; the overthrow of regimes that harbor and abet terrorists--all of these things and more have been described as the "Bush Doctrine." It was a bit of a sham on Gibson's part to have pretended that there's such a thing as 'the' Bush Doctrine, much less that it was enunciated in September 2002
Gibson: What do you think of the Constitution?
Palin: Could you be more specific?
Kos: OMG SHE DOESN’T KNOW WHAT THE CONSTITUTION IS!!!!
I am pleased with Sarah Palin’s responses to Charlie Gibson’s questions.
The America public has seen a lot of Obama’s stammering and stuttering in the past two months and by comparison Palin comes off as knowledgeable and forthright on the issues.
The mainstream media might believe in their minds that Palin made a bunch of mistakes, but the American Public will see Palin as someone who can handle herself.
Once again Mainstream Media pits Obama against Palin in the minds of the American Public.
That is not good for Obama as it is he who is running for President of the United States of America.
I didn't see the entire interview, but I think she could've answered the question as to whether we have the right to invade a country to go after terrorists, in a cogent and more eloquent fashion.
She could've said that a country harboring known terrorists posing an imminent threat to our country is in fact, aiding in that terrorist threat themselves. If they do not go after those terrorist, or allow us to preemptively go after them, that country is complicit in terrorism. That gives us the right to go after them.
> It wasn’t so much an interview as an attempt at an ambush...but a ham handed one.
It was certainly an ambush... and Charlie was the one who ended up being ambushed. The hunter became the hunted!
Sarah has stalked worthier prey than Charlie Gibson. And now she has his head mounted over her mantlepiece and his hide turned in for bounty.
S.P. is I.D.D.G.!!!
>>She could’ve said that a country harboring known terrorists posing an imminent threat to our country is in fact, aiding in that terrorist threat themselves. If they do not go after those terrorist, or allow us to preemptively go after them, that country is complicit in terrorism. That gives us the right to go after them.<<
I’ll have to give Gibson credit if his goal was to ask a question to which there is no single correct answer, and to give all the possible answers would take a week just to look up quotes and references.
No matter how she answered the question, the MSM would pick one aspect of Bush’s policies and say that she didn’t know the answer.
The best answer might have been that the phrase “The Bush Doctrine” means so many things to different people that the question is meaningless, but then the MSM would say she was dodging the question.
bookmark for later
“And this is my “you’re not as smart as me” face.”
Notice nobody ever dares to ask Obama what makes him think he's qualified to be President.
mark
A big AMEN!!!
I love that photo of her. She nailed Gibson when she asked him to qualify the question. If you listen to the interview you can hear him stumble... Love it!
I only saw the clips on YouTube and not the entire interview, but I wonder if they showed the full body, or only the waist up body of Gibson and Governor Palin.
If you watched the entire interview and it was full body, you must have noted that Gibson kept swinging his right foot back and forth. It was very deliberate and very disconcerting, but it certainly outlined his boredom with his line of questioning and the answers.
He was looking for something that he could “hang his hat on” and really attack Governor Palin. She was too smart for him.
‘I’m Charles Gibson and you’re not!’
Bush Doctrine
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President Bush makes remarks in 2006 during a press conference in the Rose Garden about Iran’s nuclear ambitions and discusses North Korea’s nuclear test.The Bush Doctrine is a journalistic term used to describe some foreign policy principles of United States president George W. Bush, enunciated in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Scholars identify seven different “Bush Doctrines,” including the notion that states that harbor terrorists should be treated no differently than terrorists themselves, the willingness to use a “coalition of the willing” if the United Nations does not address threats, the doctrine of preemptive war, and the president’s second-term “freedom agenda”.[1]
The first usage of the term may have been when conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer used the term in February 2001 to refer to the president’s unilateral approach to national missile defense well before September 11th.[2][3]
Later the phrase came to describe the policy that the United States had the right to treat countries that harbor or give aid to terrorist groups as terrorists themselves, which was used to justify the invasion of Afghanistan.[4] Later it came to include additional elements, including the controversial policy of preventive war, which held that the United States should depose foreign regimes that represented a supposed threat to the security of the United States, even if that threat was not immediate (used to justify the invasion of Iraq), a policy of supporting democracy around the world, especially in the Middle East, as a strategy for combating the spread of terrorism, and a willingness to pursue U.S. military interests in a unilateral way.[5][6][7] This represented a continuation of Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy of roll-back, as opposed to the older Cold War policies of deterrence and containment, under the Truman Doctrine; and a departure from post-Cold War philosophies such as the Powell Doctrine and the Clinton Doctrine. The “Bush Doctrine” was never enacted into law.
The main elements of one Bush Doctrine were delineated in a National Security Council document, National Security Strategy of the United States, published on September 20, 2002.[8] This document is often cited as the definitive statement of the doctrine,[9][10][11] and was updated in 2006.[12]
You do understand that Wikipedia is filled out by people just like you and me, right?
Where is Bush’s definition of the “Bush Doctrine”?
Yes
I was just trying to show how amorphous and media driven the term is.
After a FR search I did not want to start a new thread.
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