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Is the Bush Doctrine Dead? Why the critics are wrong, including the neocons.
A good dash of perspective (with lots of quotes) in these days of darkness and doubt, I think. Moderators, this desperately wants to be p.49'd. The final paragraph summarizes the writer's point neatly.
In recent months, we have been bombarded with reports of the death of the Bush Doctrine. Of course, there have been many such reports since the doctrine was first promulgated at the start of what I persist in calling World War IV (the Cold War being World War III). Almost all of them were written by the realists and liberal internationalists within the old foreign-policy establishment, and they all turned out to resemble the reports of Mark Twain's death--which, he famously said, had been "greatly exaggerated." Nothing daunted by this, the critics and enemies of President Bush are now at it yet again. This time, however, their ranks have been swollen by a number of traditional conservatives who were never comfortable with the doctrine bearing his name and who have now moved from discomfort to outright opposition.

“... the Bush Doctrine is no more dead today than the Truman Doctrine was cowardly in its own early career. Bolstered by that analogy, I feel safe in predicting that, like the Truman Doctrine in 1952, the Bush Doctrine will prove irreversible by the time its author leaves the White House in 2008.”
But what is genuinely new, and more surprising, is the entry into this picture of a significant number of my fellow neoconservatives. As the Bush Doctrine's greatest enthusiasts, they would be much happier if they could go on pointing to signs of life, but so disillusioned have they become that a British journalist can say that, to them, "The words 'Rice' and 'Bush' have all but become the Beltway equivalent of barnyard expletives." No wonder that they have now taken to composing obituary notices of their own.

Are we then to conclude that the latest reports of the death of the Bush Doctrine are not "greatly," if indeed at all, exaggerated, and that it has at long last really been put to rest?

Posted by: trailing wife 2006-08-23
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=163821