THE STILL MALIGNED BUSH DOCTRINE

Jeff Hauser writes in to take issue with my defense of the Bush Doctrine.

...the doctrine is less subtle than you suggested, and so our inconsistency undermines the alleged
moralism it represents, as your Saudi Arabia point suggests; but you cannot propose the Bush doctrine while planning for it to be pro-Saudi Arabia; you don't support the Bush doctrine if you are Anti-Saudi Arabia, since the Bush doctrine means "overarching moral justification I will apply inconsistently to advance what I perceive as US interests"...

There's no debate here. The Get Out of the Bush Doctrine Free If You Have Lots of Oil Card given to Saudi Arabia threatens the entire enterprise, and severely undercuts any attempt to argue that the doctrine is anything more than Hauser claims it is.

the US is guilty under any reasonable definition (see Columbia, Turkey, Indonesia, etc.), but you wouldn't support Chile attacking the US, would you?

Wait a minute. Jeff's just expanded the definition of "harboring or aiding terror" to include giving military aid to governments whose militaries have a tendancy to violate human rights. That does make the doctrine impractical and incoherent. That being said, the United States has no business funding counter-insurgency tactics that fail to discriminate between civilians and rebels. Our record is Latin America, especially, has been abysmal on this count.

Means/Ends -- the effectiveness of attacking states for terrorism is directly related to the degree the terrorism is state dependent, a nuance the Bushies ignore, which is why the U.S. is no safer now than on 9/12, and in fact, likely the opposite (we've pissed off more than we have debilitated).

I agree with the nuance, I disagree with the conclusion. All terrorism is at least somewhat state dependent, even if it isn't state-sponsored. Al Qaeda's attack on the WTC could not have occurred without the Taliban's hosting of Bin Laden, and the Saudi Government's tacit support for Islamism directed against the United States. Granted, where the terrorist organization has a direct address (e.g. Hezbollah with Iran and Syria), an attack against the sponsoring state will be more effective. Additionally, and this is where the Bush administration has been woefully negligent so far, is the fact that simply removing terror-friendly regimes is insufficient - what is required is the spread of functional governance world-wide, to prevent environments that terror organizations can thrive in. That of course, is nation-building, and if Afghanistan is any indication, the Bush administration is flunking its first test.