Saturday, September 13, 2008

Which Bush doctrine?

from Charles Krauthammer:

[Gibson] asked Palin, "Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?"

She responded, quite sensibly to a question that is ambiguous, "In what respect, Charlie?"

Sensing his "gotcha" moment, Gibson refused to tell her. After making her fish for the answer, Gibson grudgingly explained to the moose-hunting rube that the Bush doctrine "is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense."

Wrong.

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 entitled, "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.
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Krauthammer's complaint sounds in "Raffles v. Wichelhaus." How can one answer the question "do you agree with the Bush doctrine" when there are at least four Bush doctrines?

A worse situation was that of Kintisch's discussion of issues with continuation applications. Therein, Kintisch himself defined continuation applications DIFFERENTLY in different paragraphs in an article in the journal Science on July 28, 2006 at page 425. See


Kintisch article in Science challenged in Sept. 06 JPTOS

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