Time magazine claims that the Bush doctrine is dead. If so, it's because the Administration has lost its courage in the face of unrelenting defeatism from the Democrats and the press and it's kowtowing to public opinion polls that reflect the conventional wisdom.
Michael Goodwin of the NY Daily News is rightly afraid of the consequences.
. . . As Harvard Prof. Joseph Nye argues in Foreign Affairs magazine, Bush's strategy of "reducing Washington's reliance on permanent alliances and international institutions, expanding the traditional right of preemption into a new doctrine of preventive war and advocating coercive democratization as a solution to Middle Eastern terrorism" amounted to a bid for a "legacy of transformation."
The first two ideas have been repealed. The third brought Hamas into power and has so far failed to take root in Iraq or anywhere else.
I believed Iraq was the key, that if we prevailed there, momentum would shift in our favor. Now I'm not sure. We still must prevail there, but Iraq could mean nothing if Iran or Bin Laden get the bomb or North Korea uses one.
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