Charlie Gibson, The Bush Doctrine (Strategy) And Palin (Updated)

Updates and additions to the article appear in bold lettering.

This is a rebuttal to Charlie Gibson’s question about the Bush Doctrine he posed to Sarah Palin. First I must state emphatically there there is no Bush Doctrine. ( I stand corrected, there are several Bush Doctrines according to Charles Krauthammer in an article titled Charlie Gibson’s Gaffe.) The “Bush Doctrine” is a phrase that has been much touted by mainstream media to describe Bush’s foreign policy. From Wikipedia:

The Bush Doctrine is a phrase used to describe various related foreign policy principles of United States president George W. Bush, created in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Gibson in my opinion was disingenuous when he posed the question to Governor Palin, a way to trip her up so to speak. It was as close to an unsubstantiated half truth as Gibson could come by.

Bush has never proposed a doctrine that was written into the Congressional Record. Bush’s doctrine is a pseudo-doctrine. Since it his belief in the strictest terms of the definition it is a “doctrine”, again not an “official” one.

Actually, Bush’s “doctrine” is a strategy. More on that:

President Bush’s September 2002 “National Security Strategy of the United States” declares that the U.S. “must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today’s adversaries.”

The security strategy reads: “The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction — and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack.”

There appear to be more Bush Doctrines over his eight years as president. Krauthammer defines them for us:

I know something about the subject because, as the Wikipedia entry on the Bush doctrine notes, I was the first to use the term. In the cover essay of the June 4, 2001, issue of The Weekly Standard titled, “The Bush Doctrine: ABM, Kyoto, and the New American Unilateralism,” I suggested that the Bush administration policies of unilaterally withdrawing from the ABM treaty and rejecting the Kyoto protocol, together with others, amounted to a radical change in foreign policy that should be called the Bush doctrine.

Then came 9/11, and that notion was immediately superseded by the advent of the war on terror. In his address to Congress nine days later, Bush declared: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.” This “with us or against us” policy regarding terror — first deployed against Pakistan when Secretary of State Colin Powell gave President Musharraf that seven-point ultimatum to end support for the Taliban and support our attack on Afghanistan — became the essence of the Bush Doctrine.

Until Iraq. A year later, when the Iraq War was looming, Bush offered his major justification by enunciating a doctrine of pre-emptive war. This is the one Charlie Gibson thinks is the Bush doctrine.

It’s not. It’s the third in a series and was superseded by the fourth and current definition of the Bush doctrine, the most sweeping formulation of Bush foreign policy and the one that most distinctively defines it: 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.”

Krauthammer had more to say on “The Bush Doctrine”:

If I were in any public foreign policy debate today, and my adversary were to raise the Bush doctrine, both I and the audience would assume — unless my interlocutor annotated the reference otherwise — that he was speaking about Bush’s grandly proclaimed (and widely attacked) freedom agenda.

Not the Gibson doctrine of pre-emption.

Not the “with us or against us” no-neutrality-is-permitted policy of the immediate post-9/11 days.

Not the unilateralism that characterized the pre-9/11 first year of the Bush administration.

There have been many doctrines over the years but they have been written up with the express purpose of being made a part of the Congressional Record or made part of an official record with in another governing body. Here is a small smattering of those doctrines, we should remember them from history class. Examples include the Monroe Doctrine, the Stimson Doctrine, the Truman Doctrine, the Eisenhower Doctrine, the Nixon Doctrine, the Brezhnev Doctrine, and the Kirkpatrick doctrine.

The definition of doctrine as it applies to foreign relations is this:

In matters of foreign policy, a doctrine, also known as dogma, is a body of axioms fundamental to the exercise of a nation’s foreign policy. Hence, doctrine, in this sense, has come to suggest a broad consistency that holds true across a spectrum of acts and actions. Doctrines of this sort are almost always presented as the personal creations of one particular political leader, whom they are named after.

The Eisenhower Doctrine is one example of a doctrine that was given in an address to Congress. Since it was addressed to Congress it would have been written into the Congressional Record. More on that here:

The Eisenhower Doctrine, given in a message to the United States Congress on January 5, 1957, was the foreign policy of U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The Eisenhower Doctrine required Congress to yield its traditional war-making power to the president. The doctrine stated that the United States would use armed forces upon request in response to imminent or actual aggression to the United States. Furthermore, countries that took stances opposed to Communism would be given aid in various forms.

Krauthammer had this to add to the discussion on “doctrines”:

Presidential doctrines are inherently malleable and difficult to define. The only fixed “doctrines” in American history are the Monroe and the Truman doctrines, which came out of single presidential statements during administrations where there were few conflicting foreign policy crosscurrents.

I do however think that Governor Sarah Palin’s response to Gibson in the ABC Interview was pretty good. Krauthammer agrees. He said this about Palin:

Yes, Palin didn’t know what it is. But neither does Gibson. And at least she didn’t pretend to know — while he looked down his nose and over his glasses with weary disdain, “sounding like an impatient teacher,” as the New York Times noted. In doing so, he captured perfectly the establishment snobbery and intellectual condescension that has characterized the chattering classes’ reaction to the phenom who presumes to play on their stage.

She had this to say:

“Charlie, if there is legitimate and enough intelligence that tells us that a strike is imminent against American people, we have every right to defend our country,” Palin told ABC News’ Charles Gibson. “In fact, the president has the obligation, the duty to defend, and that’s what a McCain-Palin administration would do.”

If you take this statement in context with history, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, then her answer is exactly correct. With solid intelligence if we were going to be bombed on American soil or even places like American Samoa, then we must strike because it is a real danger to our pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness.

She did stop short of accepting Bush’s strategy as one that the McCain/Palin ticket embrace fully. And for me that is fine.

Since ABC seemed to be questioning Palin’s line on the Bush strategy, McCain’s camp responded in this manner,

Asked if Palin’s bar for the use of force is higher than the one contained in the Bush Doctrine (again it is not a doctrine, it is a strategy), the McCain-Palin campaign said that it was a highly conceptual question that Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., himself may have never answered and that it was going to let Palin’s interview with Gibson stand on its own.

The McCain campaign also explained Palin’s unclear stance on the Bush Doctrine by telling ABCNEWS.com that Gibson’s question was asked in the abstract and not in the context of an Iraq war which the Republican presidential nominee has consistently supported.

McCain showed his faith in Palin tonight. A very strong stance to take despite Gibson’s half truth he and others in the media have perpetuated over the years since 9/11. Bush has no doctrine, he has a strategy!

Maybe it is time for some continuing education units on journalism, Charlie Gibson, maybe then your interview would be considered unbiased and truthful!