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.