Well that is the biggest load of drivel I've read in a long time.

Thank you for that insightful commentary.

wow, what a masterpiece of thinking, writing, and synthesis that was! Thanks for sharing it. I have never seen the "bush doctrine" spelled out that way, with such historical background, and it was very useful.

This is not to say that there are a bunch of things in it that i strongly disagree with, and some that are nonsense, but overall, one can only say "wow." smart guy.

OK, here we go:
1) First, a small rant. He brings up this stupid thing of the "elites" and "professoriate" and other tags the right has given the left over and over. This article was the work of an "elite" if there ever was one. Bush, with his Doctrine, is an elite, out in front of the people, trying to lead them. That is what elites have always done, do today, and will do forever, world without end. So let's stop playing the lame "elite" card, and let's stop pretending that republicans are non-intellectual good ole boys. sheesh.

2) Second, and more substantive. Intellectually, what I found most unsatisfying about this piece is that he doesn't deal with the ideology of our enemies. AT ALL. Ouch, big mistake. We knew why Russia opposed us -- we understood their ideology, and could go toe to toe with it. But although Podhoertz trots out the lah-blah-blah examples showing that islamists hate us, he gives ZERO reasons WHY they see us an their enemy. He does have one feeble effort at it. He writes: "After 9/11, most Americans had gradually come to recognize that we were hated by the terrorists who had attacked us and their Muslim cheerleaders not for our failings and sins but precisely for our virtues as a free and prosperous country."

And that is the most lame excuse for ideological understanding that I have ever read. Well one of them anyway. Bush has said that too, and it is just doesn't make sense. Russia didn't oppose us because we were "free and prosperous," they opposed us because they had a radically different approach to economics and the way to organize a society.

So why do the islamists hate us? What is their ideology? Don't you think we need to know that, in order to battle that ideology? What do the islamists want? What do we do, and what have we done, that allows them to make arguments to convince other people to hate us? These are not questions we should be asking to whip ourselves. They are questions we should ask because we need to know our enemy.

3) Which gets me to this: Think about the following Podhoertz sentence from the eyes of an islamist fighting against us in Iraq, flipping around the nouns to match his or her situation: "Yet just as Saddam had miscalculated in 1990-91, and would again in 2002, bin Laden misread how the Americans would react to being hit where, literally, they lived. In all likelihood he expected a collapse into despair and demoralization; what he elicited instead was an outpouring of rage and an upsurge of patriotic sentiment such as younger Americans had never witnessed except in the movies, and had most assuredly never experienced in their own hearts and souls, or, for those who enlisted in the military, on their own flesh."

Hm. This feeling of patriotism seems to be part of what the invasion in Iraq unleashed there, part of why we are having a hard time. That is a natural thing, and not unexpected. What are we to do with that? How do we turn that around? These are questions neither Podhoertz nor the Bush doctrine have answers for, but they need answers, especially if the Bush Doctrine grows legs (more on that later). Which leads to...

4) Podhoertz also trots out many times praises of the "astonishing success of the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq." Looked at in the most narrow sense of initial military battles, you can't dispute that. But I will be interested to read about Iraq in 50 years (if I am still around) to see just how much Rumsfield's doctrine of a transformed, lightening fast, few-troops-on-the-ground military contributed to the current implosion of Iraq. If there had been more boots on the ground, could we have cleaned up the arms dumps from which the resistance has armed itself, maintained security instead of allowing all of Sadr City to become dominated in a Hamas-like way by the militia, etc etc? I don't know... and I look forward to the judgement of history on that one. But my sense is that "regime change" and "techno-blitzkreig" might not belong in the same sentence.

5) Last thing, it is late and I am pooped. Podhoertz has a long, bizarre section in here that basically says that Islam is the enemy, which is just plain wrong and which shows his refusal to try to figure out who the enemy is and how he thinks. The section begin likes this: "Speaking of television, it was soon drowning us with material presenting Islam in glowing terms. Mainly, these programs took their cue from the President and other political leaders. Out of the best of motives, and for prudential reasons as well, elected officials were striving mightily to deny that the war against terrorism was a war against Islam. Hence they never ceased heaping praises on the beauties of that religion, about which few of them knew anything."

Again, the long section following this was just bizarre. All that stuff in the media about Islam was REALLY IMPORTANT. I was scared to death that Muslims were going to get rounded up or chased down by mobs and killed after 9/11. I am proud as hell of America that there were only a few incidents of that (none would have been way preferable, but there are bigots and idiots everywhere.) I think the crash course on Islam that America took was really important, and if it was a but lightweight and fuzzy-wuzzy, well... that is still better than ignorance.

After this section Podhoertz switches back to talking about "islamism," which is the name of the crazy hateful ideology, and stops blaming islam per se. i was thankful for that.

OK, nuff said. Thanks again for pointing this out!

OK - one more. There are things I really like about the Bush Doctrine. The only I don't like about it -- and I REALLY don't like it -- is that there is no framework for building up international law in it. If we are really going to live in a free WORLD, we need a WORLDWIDE democratic government. There are tons of reasons for this, but the main one is that the US cannot afford, financially, and probably politically, to spearhead intervention every time it is needed.

A muscular approach to oppressive regimes is completely appropriate, and the world cries out for one. But for such an approach to work long term, it needs to to occur in the context of an international body that works. Now that is a VISION I can live with.

bruce

The dangers of trumpeting a policy of preemptive strikes:

NY Times: August 20, 2004

Iran Says It May Pre-empt Attack Against Its Nuclear Facilities
By NAZILA FATHI

TEHRAN, Aug. 19 - Iran's defense minister, Vice Adm. Ali Shamkhani, has warned that Iran may resort to pre-emptive strikes to prevent an attack on its nuclear facilities.

Admiral Shamkhani made his comments in an interview on Al Jazeera television on Wednesday in response to a question about the possibility of an American or Israeli attack against Iran's nuclear projects.

"We will not sit to wait for what others will do to us," he said. "Some military commanders in Iran are convinced that preventive operations which the Americans talk about are not their monopoly. Any nation, if it feels threatened, can resort to that."