Digby provides a good analogy for the Bush Doctrine.
In other words, you can kill your neighbor “in self defense” because you know he hates you, he has weapons in his house (and has talked about getting some more!) and you can't just wait for the smoking gun to be a mushroom souffle. Invade his home and kill him. (Oh and hold a gun to his kids' heads and force them to pick a new daddy for the family. That way, it'll be their decision.)
While I wouldn't choose the Bush doctrine, it is not fundamentally unsound. Like so much we have seen from this administration, the big problem is not their words but the enormous gap between those words and their actions.
ReplyDeleteSince when does "imminent threat" include a country which:
a) has never expressed the intent to attack the US
b) was quickly trounced last time we attacked them
c) lacks the means to attack the US
Regarding "c" we can let the whole WMD issue go and the point still stands. Even if we decide to be gracious and say that the administration had a good-faith belief in Iraqi WMDs, the Iraqis still would have no means of using them against us. There was never even an allegation that Iraq had delivery systems capable of reaching the US, much less any actual evidence.
The actions don't match up with the doctrine. Witness similar problems with "rule of law," "no child left behind," et al.