THE MUCH MAILIGNED BUSH DOCTRINE

There has emerged a consensus among the liberal punditocracy that the enunciation of the Bush Doctrine - that the United States will firmly oppose those who employ terror, and the nations that harbor, aid, and abet terror - was a major blunder of the President, and that its apparent collapse in light of the Middle East crisis should provide ample opportunity for ridculing our simple-minded leader.

These critiques, however, boil down to the following:
(1) It's impossible to define what terror is;
(2) Other nations (the Europeans) find it simplistic and "moralistic";
(3) It's impossible to implement, as the past few months demonstrate.

To which the appropriate response is (1) No, (2) Who cares, (3) Not as hard you think

The first hurdle is the most overrated. Terror is the deliberate use of violence targeted against civilians in order to advance a political agenda.

It does not matter how worthwhile the cause is - surely Palestinain self-rule is more worthwhile a cause than promoting Islamic fundamentalism world-wide - doesn't matter. It's still terror. It also doesn't matter who the target is. While the Russian government has brutally suppressed the Chechnyan revolt, blowing up an apartment building in Moscow is still terror. It DOES matter however, whether or not civilians are deliberately targeted or incidentally killed as a result of an attack on military targets. Such action, while at times morally problematic, is NOT terror.

The European critique is more of their standard relativistic claptrap. There go the idealistic cowboy Americans, getting in the way of our attempts to make money with the regimes in Iraq, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. Whatever...

The heart of the criticism of the Bush Doctrine is its impracticability. Does this really mean that the U.S. is going to intervene to halt the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka or the Basque separatists in Spain? Of course not, but what it is not impracticable for the American position on each of these conflicts to be shaped in light of the Bush Doctrine. Thus, independent of the merits of the Kashmir conflict, it was critical that Pakistan stop subsidizing groups that used terror as a means of advocating their position.

The problem therefore is not with the Bush Doctrine, but with the Bush Administration's failure to employ it. September 11th should have caused a radical rethinking of our relationship with Saudi Arabia. Yassir Arafat should have been threatened with a severance of ties, and cut loose when he failed to act against terror. Instead, we have chosen to turn a blind eye to the Saudi's funding of Islamic terror world-wide, and have wavered between supporting Israel's counter-terrorism and taking the European position of condeming "the cycle of violence."

The truth is that the alternative to the Bush Doctrine is the cynical realpolitik that our nation has employed far too often as its foreign policy. As Leon Wieseltier aptly dubbed it, it is the smugness of Cheneyism - an alliance with Israel as if there were no Saudi Arabia, and an alliance with Saudi Arabia as if there were no Israel.

The truth is that the biggest obstacle for the Bush Doctrine is not its naivety, or its inherent contradictions, but the Bush Energy Policy.