Perhaps more pathetic than the ignorance defense (“No one truly knows what the Bush Doctrine is!”) is the editing defense, which just draws attention to parts of the Palin interview that were included in the online transcript but were cut out of the televised version, no doubt at least partly to avoid redundancy and save time.  There is also probably a desire to find the most succinct and relevant answers that do not ramble on.  Selective editing of this kind can be a favor to the person being interviewed.  In this case, you have no idea how much better it was for Palin for some of this stuff to have been left out of the broadcast.   

Is it “bias” to include her remarks about going to war to defend an expanded NATO, but not include her claim that she doesn’t want a new Cold War?  It seems to me that the latter is boilerplate and is directly contradicted by her comments on NATO and Russia.  If you have to pick one, don’t you choose one that is more newsworthy?  Everyone says that they don’t want a new Cold War, but not many people go as far as saying that we would go to war with Russia over new NATO members.  Besides, those who don’t want a new Cold War don’t want to expand NATO again, but Palin was sticking with the McCain line that you can expand NATO and not worsen relations with Russia, since I have to assume she does not see the inherent contradiction between those propositions.  If you ask me, ABC did her a favor by cutting things out for the broadcast that would have made her seem even more programmed and unfamiliar with the relevant issues.  To say that they edited out “key parts” of her interview is misleading at best and ridiculous hackery at worst. 

For example, here is an excerpt from one of the “key parts” on Iran:

GIBSON: But, Governor, we’ve threatened greater sanctions against Iran for a long time. It hasn’t done any good. It hasn’t stemmed their nuclear program.

PALIN: We need to pursue those and we need to implement those. We cannot back off. We cannot just concede that, oh, gee, maybe they’re going to have nuclear weapons, what can we do about it. No way, not Americans. We do not have to stand for that. 

“We do not have to stand for that.”  Ah, the language of diplomacy.  Would including this make Palin come off sounding better than she did in the broadcast version, or would it make her sound like an aggressive nationalist with no grasp of the difficulty in curtailing Iran’s nuclear program?  Do her supporters really want to draw attention to statements such as these?  To take another example, her answer on the Bush Doctrine was actually much worse than you would have thought from watching the broadcast version, so once again ABC did her a favor by cutting out answers that drove home even more just how poorly she understood the question.  The parts that have been cut out are in bold:

GIBSON: No, the Bush doctrine, enunciated September 2002, before the Iraq war.

PALIN: I believe that what President Bush has attempted to do is rid this world of Islamic extremism, terrorists who are hell bent on destroying our nation. There have been blunders along the way, though. There have been mistakes made. And with new leadership, and that’s the beauty of American elections, of course, and democracy, is with new leadership comes opportunity to do things better.

GIBSON: The Bush doctrine, as I understand it, is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense, that we have the right to a preemptive strike against any other country that we think is going to attack us. Do you agree with that?

PALIN: I agree that a president’s job, when they swear in their oath to uphold our Constitution, their top priority is to defend the United States of America.

I know that John McCain will do that and I, as his vice president, families we are blessed with that vote of the American people and are elected to serve and are sworn in on January 20, that will be our top priority is to defend the American people.

GIBSON: Do we have a right to anticipatory self-defense? Do we have a right to make a preemptive strike again another country if we feel that country might strike us?

PALIN: 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.

So she evaded his question on the Bush Doctrine not once, not twice, but three times without providing an answer that anyone would recognize as a meaningful response.  After asking whether Gibson was referring to Bush’s worldview, she fell back on a generic statement about defending the country.  So, thanks, media-bias paranoiacs!  You’ve just helped drive home just how uninformed your favorite candidate is.  For that matter, the full context of Gibson’s own statements show that he is referring to the President’s own understanding of “pre-emption” when he speaks about a country that “might” strike.

Just for added fun, here are some excerpts from that Atlantic story I mentioned last night to make clear that if Gibson doesn’t know what the Bush Doctrine is it is also the case that McCain doesn’t know.  First, Jeffrey Goldberg talks about Philip Bobbitt, author of Terror and Consent, which McCain reportedly regards as the best book on terrorism he has ever read:

The most controversial of Bobbitt’s assertions is that the absence of actual stores of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq does not undermine the need for America to “preclude”—he prefers preclude to preempt—certain countries from developing WMDs in the future. Bobbitt writes:

 

The war against a global terror network, al Qaeda, is in an early phase. Yet already owing to the Coalition invasion of Iraq, terrorists from this network or any other cannot someday call on Saddam Hussein to supply them covertly with weapons with which to attack the West when he would not have dared to have done so directly, and when he, but not they, had the resources to buy into a clandestine market in WMD.

Note Goldberg’s acceptance of Bobbitt’s replacement of the word pre-empt with the word preclude (which means prevent)–this is a common replacement made by advocates of preventive war, who want to draw on the legality of real preemptive wars to justify what they propose but who have redefined all of the relevant terms to mean something radically different.  

Goldberg then concludes the piece with McCain’s own views on what both he and McCain call pre-emption (even though it is absolutely clear that everyone here is talking about what can only be called preventive war):

I asked him in Columbus to describe a situation in which preemption might be required. He [McCain] offered a scenario in which Iran provides the terrorist group Hezbollah with weapons of mass destruction to use against Israel.

“While we don’t go around launching preemptive strikes all the time, we can’t afford to wait until a terrorist organization, or a nation which is an avowed enemy of the United States, has the capability to use weapons of mass destruction—or even uses them,” McCain said. “If we knew with absolute certainty that the Iranians were going to support Hezbollah to make sure they got a weapon of mass destruction in southern Lebanon—would we just wait until Hezbollah attacks Israel with that weapon? Well, first of all, I don’t think the Israelis would wait, but I’m not sure. The consequences, as we know, are catastrophic.” (In May, when I asked McCain why the defense of Israel was an American national-security interest, he said, “The United States of America has committed itself to never allowing another Holocaust.”)

But McCain, though stalwart in defense of preemption, is not obtuse about its unpopularity; he knows that the idea of preemption has taken on a negative cast.

“With preemption, the connotation is that the cowboy just wants to go out and attack people,” he said. “The country is in one of our occasional periods of isolationism, a reaction to what [the public views] as failure, even when we are succeeding in Iraq—and we have succeeded in Iraq. There’s still going to be a greater reluctance than there was” before the Iraq War to try to stop an adversary from gaining possession of weapons of mass destruction.

As he said this, he seemed depleted by the discussion of preemption. It’s not the first unpopular cause he’s adopted, but it might be the most difficult one to sell to the American public.

If Gibson was wrong to refer to pre-emption in connection with the Bush Doctrine, Bush and McCain have consistently made the same error.  The difference is that they have talked about pre-emption when they meant prevention in order to provide a patina of legitimacy to a kind of warfare that is absolutely illegal and unjustifiable.

In terms of plain, unadorned experience, Palin compares favorably with Theodore Roosevelt (who, of course, was a genius), Ulysses S. Grant, and Woodrow Wilson. ~Lawrence Henry

Really?  Palin compares favorably with Roosevelt (Assistant Secretary of the Navy, president of the NYPD commissioners’ board, governor of New York), and Grant (commander of the Army of the Potomac)?  Unless we are talking about sheer time served, this is ludicrous.  The most comparable of the three is Wilson, who had been governor of New Jersey for approximately the same amount of time Palin has been governor of Alaska when he was elected, and his administration was an unmitigated disaster for America.  For some reason this comparison is supposed to be make Palin look better.

I hope she got up from the foreign policy session and said to her aides, “Dammit. That wasn’t good enough and I’m not letting it happen again. I’m not going to allow myself to be so under-prepared for another high-profile interview again.” ~Rich Lowry

Via Ross

Then again, she might take the approach that George Bush did towards press conferences in his days as a candidate and early in his Presidency: avoid them like the plague.  Back then, his handlers recognized that public speaking was his weakness and so they made sure that he did so only on their terms, and it wouldn’t be shocking if they handle Palin in a similar fashion.  Meanwhile, all of the people flacking for Palin and insisting that it makes no difference whether she knows certain things aren’t doing her any favors.  Indeed, the obvious lowering of standards for Palin is exactly the kind of thing that would be considered disrespectful and condescending if it were being done by her critics.  Some conservative pundits and bloggers are not just showing partisan loyalty in their defense of her, but are actually demeaning Palin by making excuses for her in such a way as if to admit that she really is an unqualified diversity hire.  Whatever my other criticisms, I have enough respect for Sarah Palin to hold her to a high standard, and more than a few of her defenders should be embarrassed by their instinct to explain away her performance.  If anything, her defenders are sending the message to her that real Americans don’t need to know policy details–it’s just those pretentious media and Washington elites who care about this “policy” stuff, so it doesn’t matter.  (As a purely electoral matter, it’s probably true that the average voter is not as concerned about some of these things as I am, but demonstrating competence is important to a great many voters.)  One can only hope that she is smart and serious enough to ignore the ridiculous cheering section on her side and take some criticism.

We should bear in mind that prior to the Gibson interview her critics were complaining about the limited media access and regarded her giving one major interview to be insufficient, but for the most part Gibson did enough to put our concerns about how she would be questioned to rest.  Right now her supporters are breathing sighs of relief that she just had to make it through this one.  It didn’t help her cause at the time that Gibson kept introducing the program as the interview, which gave the exchange far more significance than it would have had if she had been doing one of these every day since she had been nominated.  The thing that is perhaps most troubling for Palin supporters is that her answers in the interview on most every subject were not that much more detailed or elaborate than the things she said in her announcement speech or in her convention speech, and her delivery was halting and nervous in a way that bodes very ill for the VP debate, which takes place in just 19 days.  There was some new ground on foreign policy, yes, but her answers scarcely went beyond the talking point level, and on economic policy and the budget I don’t think she could have said any less without simply repeating the phrase “finding efficiencies in agencies” in a continuous loop.  What should bother Palin supporters is how little new information there was and how small a difference being ensconced for a week with McCain’s advisors seems to have made.  

Then consider what will await her in future interviews, and just imagine how painful it would have been to watch her go on Meet the Press when Russert was still hosting.  Her supporters, especially those who are honest enoughto acknowledge how poorly she did, should be furious with McCain for doing this to a woman they admire.

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 the grandly proclaimed (and widely attacked) freedom agenda of the Bush administration. ~Charles Krauthammer

And then I and most other reasonably well-informed people would say that Krauthammer, his adversary and the audience also did not understand what the Bush Doctrine was.  Also, Palin apologists should get their story straight–if the “freedom agenda” is the first thing that would spring to everyone’s mind on hearing the phrase, why do so many of her defenders think otherwise? 

The main innovation of the Bush administration in U.S. foreign policy, the one for which he will be remembered for good or ill, is the placement of preventive war as a means of nonproliferation and antiterrorism at the center of national security strategy.  Related to this is the abandonment of traditional concepts of deterrence and containment.  Democracy promotion as stated U.S. policy dates back at least to the Carter administration, and the “freedom agenda” has rhetorical precedents as far back as Kennedy’s Inaugural.  What Bush did with democracy promotion that was distinctive was to marry this terrible idea to his existing terrible idea of waging preventive war against “rogue” states.  The “freedom agenda” did not replace and eliminate the earlier iteration of the Bush Doctrine, but formalized the administration’s mad ideological fixation on democratization as an addition to that Doctrine.

Suffice it to say that this line of defending Palin can only underscore how little she knows, since her defenders seem to want to emphasize how complicated and, Heaven help us, nuanced the subject is, which just drives home how unsatisfactory it is that she had to wait to hear Gibson’s definition (which essentially used the President’s own words) in order to say anything coherent about it.  If Gibson is wrong, as Palin’s defenders are so happy to point out, her parroting of his definition is doubly embarrassing, since it shows that she had no definition of her own and she also couldn’t recognize Gibson’s mistake.  Rather like the line of attack from Obama supporters against Palin’s inexperience, which just reminded everyone how relatively inexperienced Obama was, ridiculing Charlie Gibson as clueless is just makes it painfully obvious how much more clueless Palin is. 

Update: For whatever it’s worth, the cover story for the new Atlanticis overflowing in discussion of McCain’s support for pre-emption, which is what McCain calls it, and the Bush Doctrine, which supposedly no one knows how to define.

The latest example of the mismatch between ideology and reality is the housing crisis.  The party’s individualist model cannot explain the social contagion that caused hundreds of thousands of individuals to make bad decisions in the same direction at the same time. ~David Brooks

It could if Republicans were willing to acknowledge the role of the Fed in creating the housing bubble in the first place through low rates and cheap credit.  Consumers took advantage of the conditions created by reckless monetary policy, which led to many people buying houses they could not afford and going into debt they could not repay.  People were responding to incentives, as we all do, and some made poorer choices than others.  Of course, probably the only thing more powerful than the cult of Palin is the cult of Greenspan, who has never done wrong, so instead let’s complain about the baneful influence of Goldwater.

Reihan complains that critics of Palin on her Bush Doctrine answer probably could not define it very well, either.  Whether that is true of other critics or not, I cannot say, but before taking a stab at it I will reiterate my point that the existence of divergent interpretations of the Doctrine does not excuse not knowing anything about it.  Clearly, Palin knew nothing, so the fact that other people disagree about what exactly falls under this Doctrine is neither here nor there when discussing Palin’s answers.  Indeed, the argument made in her “defense” is that Gibson also got it wrong.  The telling part of the interview, then, is when Palin agreed with the definition Gibson gave, which Palin’s defenders are insisting was wrong.  She didn’t know this definition was wrong, because she had no idea what it was.  So what is the right definition? 

The Bush Doctrine evolved somewhat between late 2001 and September 2002 with the National Security Strategy of that year.   Before September 2002, the Bush Doctrine would have been understood to mean that the U.S. government would treat terrorist-sponsoring nations as culpable for any acts carried out by the groups they sponsored or harbored, and that they would be treated as enemies of the United States accordingly.  This initial form of the Doctrine served well enough to make sense of the intervention in Afghanistan against both the government and the terrorist group they were harboring.  Indeed, you could say that this first draft Bush Doctrine was tailor-made to support what we were doing in Afghanistan.  The 2002 strategy statement was really the first official statement of a doctrine during the Bush years.  Mr. Bush enunciated the Doctrine at West Point.  In that statement, the government claimed the right to launch wars against states that might pose future threats to the United States:

And, as a matter of common sense and self-defense, America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed [bold mine-DL].  We cannot defend America and our friends by hoping for the best. So we must be prepared to defeat our enemies’ plans, using the best intelligence and proceeding with deliberation. History will judge harshly those who saw this coming danger but failed to act. In the new world we have entered, the only path to peace and security is the path of action.  

This is preventive war, which is illegal under any form of international law known to man, but it was routinely defended by calling it pre-emptive war, which is permitted under certain circumstances.  What is often linked to the Bush Doctrine, but which is not necessarily part of it, is the democracy promotion element of the so-called “freedom agenda,” which holds that democratic governments are inherently more peaceful, less likely to sponsor or harbor terrorists and more likely to maintain good relations with the United States, so that there is a national security interest in promoting democracy.  None of these propositions is true, but that has been the rhetoric.  This democracy-promotion element was an ancillary justification for the invasion of Iraq based on the “drain the swamp” theory espoused by many of the President’s backers, but it acquired full force in the Second Inaugural, even though events in the last three years have largely made a mockery of the pretensions of that speech.     

One might forgive Gibson for confusing the Bush Doctrine with support for pre-emptive war, when this is what President Bush said we were doing in Iraq.  In June 2002, Mr. Bush said:

And our security will require all Americans to be forward-looking and resolute, to be ready for preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives. 

And again:

While the United States will constantly strive to enlist the support of the international community, we will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of selfdefense by acting preemptively against such terrorists, to prevent them from doing harm against our people and our country…

Yet in the same June address Mr. Bush makes clear that he is describing preventive war:

We must be prepared to stop rogue states and their terrorist clients before they are able to threaten [bold mine-DL] or use weapons of mass destruction against the United States and our allies and friends.

In the same address when he calls for pre-emptive action, he makes it clear that he is redefining what permissible pre-emption is supposed to be:

For centuries, international law recognized that nations need not suffer an attack before they can lawfully take action to defend themselves against forces that present an imminent danger of attack. Legal scholars and international jurists often conditioned the legitimacy of preemption on the existence of an imminent threat—most often a visible mobilization of armies, navies, and air forces preparing to attack.

We must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today’s adversaries. Rogue states and terrorists do not seek to attack us using conventional means. They know such attacks would fail. Instead, they rely on acts of terror and, potentially, the use of weapons of mass destruction—weapons that can be easily concealed, delivered covertly, and used without warning.  

So it’s true that Bush administration has warped and twisted the words pre-emptive and imminent beyond recognition to serve its purposes, and confusingly referred to preventive war as pre-emption, which are the likely reasons why Gibson’s definition was imprecise.  As I have said before, when Gibson referred to anticipatory self-defense he was using the same phrase that supporters of preventive war have used to describe preventive war (e.g., in connection with bombing Iran), and the reason they use this phrase is to justify the unjustifiable.  Having muddled the definitions and engaged in misdirection, these same people now point at Gibson and laugh because he made the mistake of repeating their own words.

Palin’s remark about Russian actions in Georgia being “unprovoked” has garneredsome attention, since it is obviously untrue, but let’s remember that she is the captive of fanatics who believe, or at least claim to believe, that Georgia is an innocent lamb targeted by “Russian aggression” akin to the suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968 or the invasion of Afghanistan (when it was not being compared, naturally, to 1938).  In this view, Saakashvili is a brave, wise leader of a besieged democracy, rather than the bumbling authoritarian who plunged his poor country into an unwinnable conflict for the sake of irredentist obsession.  Remember that the standard GOP attack on Obama in the first days of the war was that he said that both sides were at fault (because, well, both sides were at fault), which was an unforgivable deviation from the official line.  However, when officials in the Bush administration are furious with Saakashvili for his blundering and you have such reliable establishment columnists as Jackson Diehl voicing dissatisfaction with old Misha, the fanatics have lost this part of the argument.  One thing we can be sure of about a McCain administration is that it will be even more stubbornly committed to supporting Saakashvili’s hold on power than Bush was in backing Musharraf, and so it was imperative that Palin conform to this position, which necessarily entails overlooking or flatly denying that Saakashvili has done anything wrong or reckless.

But to my infinite frustration, a moderate degree of hawkishness such as my own — I supported the Iraq war on international-legal grounds; I supported independence for Kosovo on grounds of honor for the US and expediency for Europe; I am a philosemitic friend to Israel, but think the challenges facing the US and Israel are not identical — is inadequate to the folks who have captured the hawk wing of the Republican and Democratic parties alike. John McCain is their prince, but Joe Lieberman is their king; and I must repeat that I feel a complete dunce for not realizing that none other than Joe Lieberman would be training Palin in all catchphrases pertaining to national security international insecurity. ~James Poulos

James shouldn’t be so hard on himself.  I think most sane people are surprised time and again by the power of the GOP’s single-issue love-affair with Joe Lieberman, and I consistently underestimated the probability of McCain selecting Lieberman as his VP, which turned out to have been remarkably and frighteningly high.  That said, whether or not Lieberman was personally involved in coaching Palin, it was inevitable that she would be turned into a McCain clone on foreign policy.  Given her lack of interest in the subject and the ideological obsessions of McCain’s advisors, there was simply nothing else that could have happened, and once the excitement about Palin died down that was bound to be revealed.  What is true in domestic politics generally is true here: those who are more obsessive and passionate about their cause will have disproportionate influence over and against those who are not.  Hegemonism and aggressive militarism are effectively without strong competition, especially in the GOP, and so these become the default views of more and more politicians.    

As for James’ moderate hawkishness, I am reminded of Ross’ complaint about the lack of realists in the GOP presidential field, and what I said then applies just as well now:

If the space filled by Paul should be filled by an internationally-minded realism, then why isn’t it being filled?  Because it is not at all clear that most of the internationally-minded realists in the GOP actually believe, for example, that the Iraq war was a mistake.  If they do believe this, there is little evidence that most realists think the answer is to withdraw from Iraq in some fashion sooner rather than later.  If acknowledging that the Iraq war was a mistake is the starting point for a realist turn away from Bushist foreign policy, realists who actually say this seem to be thin on the ground.  Perhaps I am missing some of them.  They do exist, but they are not very numerous nor are they usually very prominent, and those who tend to be prominent are prominent because they are reliable CFR types who never say anything too wildly interesting or creative.

The trouble with moderate hawkishness and the desire for some middle-ground “realist” alternative between Ron Paul and, well, everyone he ran against is that both moderate hawks and most Republican realists functionally end up aligning with or not being strongly enough opposed to reckless and destructive policies.  They have the numbers and the potential influence to serve as a meaningful check on interventionists, but they share too many of the latter’s assumptions to want to serve as a check on them most of the time.  Moderate hawks and realists should prudently be resisting these policies more vigorously than they actually do, but their desire to remain both politically and rhetorically the reasonable and moderate alternative between the extremes usually ensures that the status quo prevails.  When realists do raise their heads above the crowd (Chuck Hagel, for instance), they are ridiculed as traitors by interventionists and dismissed as opportunists by non-interventionists (and especially by me).  It is something of a thankless task, but I am one who thinks that it should be a thankless task, since the moderate hawk and realist views are, despite their greater moderation, still wrong often enough to be troubling.  James stands out among moderate hawks by drawing a reasonable conclusion (i.e., Georgia and Ukraine should not be brought into NATO) from the experience of last month’s war, but for most of these people this does not seem to be an option.  We can all see how mad it is to include Georgia in NATO, but it nonetheless remains the mainstream position espoused by all four nominees of the major parties.  Hence James’ infinite frustration and Ross’ futile search for realists among leading Republicans.

Sure, she didn’t state the academic “Bush doctrine”, but her description of the Bush foreign policy worldview wasn’t wrong. ~Kristen Soltis

As others have noted, her description was wrong because she was simply repeating back what she understood Gibson’s characterization of the Doctrine to be, which many of Palin’s defenders have insisted misrepresented what the Doctrine was.  The relevant point here is not that Palin disagrees with the Bush Doctrine, which I’m sure she will come to endorse full-throatedly once her handlers explain to her what that is, but that she had no idea what it was and latched onto Gibson’s definition so that she would have something to say.   

I would agree that her own statement of support for pre-emption to address an imminent threat based on sound intelligence was technically quite different from what the Bush administration has actually practiced, which is preventive war based on flawed, manipulated intelligence about a non-existent threat.  However, I would qualify this by noting that Gibson used the phrase anticipatory self-defense, which supporters of preventive war have adopted as one of their euphemisms, so someone who accepted traditional pre-emption would find something familiar in her answer and so would a supporter of preventive war.  It is also worth noting that supporters of preventive, which is to say aggressive, war frequently misuse the word pre-emption to describe their own view.  One of these people can say that he favors pre-emption or would only approve of attacking when an “imminent threat” exists, and he can nonetheless endorse preventive war because of the deliberate conflation of the two by supporters of preventive war. 

As an aside, I would remind everyone what Benedict XVI said before the war in Iraq began (“The concept of pre-emptive war does not appear in the Catechism”), so that even if Palin merely supports pre-emption this is something that should still be worrisome and not at all reassuring.