KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE PRIZE, HOLD ON. My buddy Lawrence Kaplan tries to salvage the Bush Doctrine from the Iraq war. His argument is that critics of the war risk learning too much from the failure in Iraq: the antidote to tyranny is democracy, even if it didn't turn out so well in Baghdad, and dangerous dudes will still need to be preempted. One really, really important -- and revealing -- aspect of this argument is shown by its very absence. A word that doesn't appear in Lawrence's piece is al-Qaeda. You remember them: they killed 3,000 Americans on 9/11, and they're into killing many, many more. The Bush Doctrine started as a way to stop them. In his January 2002 State of the Union, Bush opted to conflate the threat from al-Qaeda into a threat from Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong-Il and Ayatollah Khameini. It wasn't just cynicism, it reflected a misdguided but deep belief, as Doug Feith later put it, that "Terrorist organizations cannot be effective in sustaining themselves over long periods of time to do large-scale operations if they don't have support from states." It doesn't take a genius -- much less the "the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth" -- to see that this is simply wrong: al-Qaeda doesn't have Afghanistan, or even Iraq, and it's plenty dangerous. The heart of the matter is this: Yes, the Bush Doctrine needs to die an unmourned death in Iraq, along with the thousands of U.S. troops and Iraqis that it's killed. It has obviously failed as a counterterrorism strategy, and doesn't have any successes to speak of. Lawrence may define it on the level of platitude -- democracy good, bad people bad -- but if that's the case, any number of saner strategies can still incorporate the aspects of it he likes. Let's get back to work.
--Spencer Ackerman
