S

arah Palin’s stumbling response to Charles Gibson’s question, “Do you support the Bush Doctrine?” was the low point of last night’s interviews. Her posture and voice both went defensive, and she came across, as I noted here and here, as not knowing the answer.

On second thought, though, the problem may easily have been that she didn’t know which answer, not the answer. That’s because the Bush Doctrine is actually many doctrines:

• The right of the United States to treat countries that harbor terrorists as terrorists (the justification for the Afghanistan invasion)
• The policy of preventive war, or the right of the United States to depose foreign regimes that represent an immediate threat (the justification for the Iraq invasion)
• The policy of supporting democracy in the Middle East and around the world in order to squelch terrorism
• A willingness to pursue U.S. military interests unilaterally. (A hat-tip to Wikipedia, for compiling the points so succinctly.)

Let’s consider the initial substantive answer she provided:

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.

That is a credible endorsement of each of the four elements of the Bush Doctrine, all of which are directed at ridding the world of Islamic extremism, but because it was not presented as, “Yes, I endorse the doctrines because …” it has not been viewed as credible.

In my company’s media training programs, we teach executives and politicians that if they don’t understand the question, to ask for clarification, and we counsel not to guess at answers. Palin guessed at an answer last night and it came across – perhaps rightly, perhaps wrongly – that she didn’t know what the Bush Doctrine is. That’s hardly an endorsement of her foreign policy prowess – but why all the angst? There are only so many hours in a governor’s day, and they’re filled with local, state and federal issues, not foreign issues. It’s been the same with great foreign policy presidents (Reagan) and disastrous ones (Carter).

Her better response would have been, “Which Bush doctrine are you asking about, Charlie? I support them all generally, but I want to answer your specific question.” That would have set Gibson back in his chair and would have put a stop to all the prattle (here, here, here, etc.) this morning.

Update:  Charles Krauthammer – who coined the term “Bush Doctrine” – agrees. (Thanks, Christa)

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T

he other CSM has a chilly little story today rolling out the five foreign policy principles of Russia’s president, Vladamir Putin Dmitry Medvedev. Christian Scientists may have the patience to wade through the entire story to ferret out the five principles, but I know you, so:

1. Protect Russians wherever they are. What’s a Russian? Just someone with a spanking new Russian passport, like those the Russians are handing out like cheap vodka shots in Crimea, which is independent but happens to host an important Russian naval base?
2. Attend to Russia’s “privileged interests” – oil, gas, warm water ports – in Moscow’s area of influence, which we can translate as areas that used to be in the USSR but are not in Russia today.
3. Make sure the world is not “unipolar.” Hmm. That one kinda hits close to home. I’d sure like to see the tactics they’ve penciled out in support of that goal.
4. Do not be isolated. Russian boots tromping through Georgia, Russian policy chiefs controlling the flow of much of Europe’s energy resources – yeah, that’s keeping Russia out from behind its walls.
5. Oh, and in case you’re getting a little hot and bothered by now, let’s wrap up with principle #5: Comply with international law. Ahhh! All better!

The other CSM casts this news rightly:

Is this Cold War II? It’s more like a throwback to the 19th century, when great powers carved up the world like a pot roast.

That was an era in which Czarist Russia expanded into the Caucasus, Central Asia, and across Siberia. When America told Europe “hands off” in Latin America. When Europe’s monarchies sliced up colonies in Africa and Asia.

That era is over, or so the world thought.

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B

ill’s stewing. He wanted to give a big, broad speech (not a big broad speech, if you catch the difference), but the Obama camp has told him to stick to the theme of the evening, “Securing America’s Future,” and talk about foreign policy. Sez Politico:

While Bill Clinton remains angry about how he and his wife were treated by both Obama backers and the news media — and he is particularly resentful at what he sees as unfair allegations that he tried to exploit racial divisions for political advantage — he has made the decision that he will put forward a positive face for Obama’s benefit at Denver.

It is harder to do that when the topic is foreign policy and national security, which lends itself to restrained, rather than boisterous, partisan rhetoric.

“That puts him in a terrible bind, because you can’t give a ringing endorsement when you’re talking about foreign policy,” a longtime Clinton adviser said.

Help me understand this. Isn’t all the Bushitler, WMD, War on Terror in quotes stuff nothing if not boisterous, partisan rhetoric? What’s the bind? Any speaker capable of even a minor barn-burner, and Clinton is much more than that, should be able to get the Dem convention to break into zombie-like chants of “Obama! Obama! Obama!” just by mentioning GOP foreign policy. You know, taking on terrorism, promoting democracy, all that stuff the Dems hate so.

But the same former Clinton adviser quoted above did say something I find utterly above reproach:

“Obviously, the hard thing to talk about with Obama is commander in chief, of all his many talents.”

Yup. Because he has no commander in chief talents. Teleprompter-reader in chief. Looking pretty in chief. Saying a lot of words that say nothing in chief. But not commander in chief?  No, the Clinton guys have that right; no way.

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J

ohn McCain is enjoying his foreign policy superiority over a confused and halting Barack Obama this week, but he’s in serious danger of overplaying his Georgia card and should back off until he gets his mouth right.

The biggest risk of too aggressive a stand against Russia is that a war-weary American electorate will fear McCain will drag them into another conflict, while the doves of peace that dreamily circle around the haloed head of Obama signal peace, brothers and sisters. Yet McCain’s speeches yesterday, replicated in today’s WSJ op/ed, look too much like a scattering of the doves. Are we in fact all Georgians, as McCain says? Or do we wish this little nowhere rough-edged democracy would just leave us alone? Quite a lot the latter; a bit of a stretch on the former.

McCain needs to be careful here, vetting his comments so they appear deeply knowledgeable on foreign policy, tough enough to stand up to trouble, but wise enough to read the truth in every situation he faces. The lead of his op/ed totally blew that image out:

For anyone who thought that stark international aggression was a thing of the past, the last week must have come as a startling wake-up call.

This most unfortunate sentence got an immediate drubbing down from the Left. Yglesias is as good as any for this illustration:

We all recall, of course, John McCain’s outrage when the United States violated this rule back in 2003.

Rule: Don’t hand-feed laughers to the left. Words are important, and here the important words “against democratic nations” are missing. Iraq was the disposition of a tyrant who was killing his people after years of international diplomatic efforts to bring about peaceful change; Georgia was a crushing military attack against a (weak and flawed) democracy carried out as a surprise without so much as a head fake to the diplomats. But McCain ineptly let the left focus on this canard instead of getting to the meat of the issue: How do the candidates respond to international crises?

Later in the op/ed he did articulate the thought correctly:

The world has learned at great cost the price of allowing aggression against free nations to go unchecked. (emphasis added)

McCain may be a maverick, but he still needs a message deck that tames the maverick enough so he doesn’t throw away his strength now or cause international incidents later, should he win in November. The conservative blogs are full of praise for McCain on all things Georgian. I started there, but I’m afraid McCain is playing his Georgia card more worrisomely with each passing day.

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I

t is, in the end, all Bush’s fault.

Isn’t it always? 9/11, Iraq, gas prices, and now the Russian invasion of Georgia, to the Bush-hating left, there is a common cause for all this, and its middle initial is W. Here’s the position, as espoused by Fred Kaplan in Slate:

Regardless of what happens next, it is worth asking what the Bush people were thinking when they egged on Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s young, Western-educated president, to apply for NATO membership, send 2,000 of his troops to Iraq as a full-fledged U.S. ally, and receive tactical training and weapons from our military. Did they really think Putin would sit by and see another border state (and former province of the Russian empire) slip away to the West? If they thought that Putin might not, what did they plan to do about it, and how firmly did they warn Saakashvili not to get too brash or provoke an outburst?

As always, there’s no effort to look at the other side. What would have happened if we hadn’t been friendly to Georgia? If we hadn’t offered military training and accepted their involvement in Iraq? If we hadn’t pushed to expand NATO to the former Russian republics slave states? My hunch: Putin’s KGB-based Russia would have attacked Georgia one way or the other.

But to the Left, the position is to see a crisis, dredge up a one-dimensional recitation of Bush policies and blame all the evil on Bush. And from that base assumption, everything the Bush administration does must be just as evil. More Kaplan:

Vice President Dick Cheney reportedly called Saakashvili on Sunday to assure him that “Russian aggression must not go unanswered.” We should all be interested to know what answer he is preparing or whether he was just dangling the Georgians on another few inches of string. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Zalmay Khalilzad, told the Security Council, “This is completely unacceptable and crosses a line.” Talk like that demands action. What’s the plan, and how does he hope to get the Security Council—on which Russia has veto power—to approve it?

Again, what is the alternative? Would Kaplan prefer Cheney call Saakashvili and tell him, “Tough luck. We’re OK with Putin sending tanks into free democracies?” Is Khalilzad supposed to tell the UN no line was crossed when Russian troops poured over the borderline? That lifts appeasement to the level of acceptance and support and no American president, not even Jimmy Carter, has ever taken such a position.

Of course Russia must answer for its aggression because of course they crossed the line. Kaplan is right that there is no military solution; heck, the military options (short of nuclear holocaust) were gone as soon as Russian air strikes started because getting a military force into Georgia is a logistical nightmare – but not as bad as the idea of fighting Russian troops on the edge of the Russian nation.

Like many of us, when it comes to Georgia, I’ve gone a vaguely supportive, lightly educated follower of Saakashvili’s democratic revolution to a fairly well read interested party, but I’m hardly a policy wonk on the issues. With that introduction, here’s what I think:

We’re on the right side. Standing up for democracies is something we just have to do, even if they’re poorly functioning. We never supported Georgia to goad Russia; we did it to encourage more democracy in the region, including in Russia.

We should continue to push for NATO expansion. Kaplan says that if Georgia were in NATO, we’d be in a shooting war with Russia now, but that’s ridiculous. If Georgia were in NATO it’s much more likely Russian troops would not be in Georgia now. So, with the knowledge that we no longer need to or should support Europe with the sort of military actions that were anticipated when NATO was formed following WWII, we should continue expansive military alliances there, just as we promote economic alliances.

We should make Russia pay, literally, for rebuilding. They’ve got the money and if we force the issue at the U.N., they’re likely to be in the unfortunate position of having to veto the action, which would be a PR disaster for them.

We should work with nations dependent on energy from the trans-Georgia pipelines to secure broad legal protections for Georgia’s control over them, not Russia’s.

We should look to the other former Soviet vassal states and see what sort of support we can give them. Some are feeling very vulnerable today, and the creation of a united front of indignant outrage that includes these states and many, many others will send a message even to Russia.

We should not spill any blood over Georgia. Our support should be broad and deep but there’s no point in sending troops into anywhere we can’t sustain them.

Russia should be dis-invited from the G8 until they learn how to behave like a civilized nation.

We should pass quite a lot of anti-Russian legislation at the federal and state level. Public portfolios should be cleansed of any Russian filth. The Air Force tanker contract should to to Boeing because it’s the only bidder that doesn’t have partial Russian ownership. No banking or trade favors allowed.

And we should pass a law that no American president can ever again look a Russian president in the eye, see his soul and deem him trustworthy. That was, in fact, a very big mistake by George W. Bush

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W

hat’s at stake in Georgia today, as Russia seeks to secure its military advances? Let’s ask the country’s president, Mikheil Saakashvili.

Most obviously, the future of my country is at stake. The people of Georgia have spoken with a loud and clear voice: They see their future in Europe. Georgia is an ancient European nation, tied to Europe by culture, civilization and values. In January, three in four Georgians voted in a referendum to support membership in NATO. These aims are not negotiable; now, we are paying the price for our democratic ambitions.

Second, Russia’s future is at stake. Can a Russia that wages aggressive war on its neighbors be a partner for Europe? It is clear that Russia’s current leadership is bent on restoring a neocolonial form of control over the entire space once governed by Moscow.

Saakashvili paints a story in his WSJ op/ed today of a compromise-seeking Georgia, an aggressively expansive Russia and a Europe that cried for negotiations and diplomacy, but took no overt action. Sound familiar?

Saakashvili was kind to us because he was writing in the WSJ to American opinion leaders, but he could have included us with the Europeans. President Bush has visited Georgia and praised it as a showcase of how democracy can bloom where totalitarianism once reigned. (Of course, that vision was tainted by Saakashvili’s heavy-handed treatment of opposition in Georgia’s last election.) We’ve cast our lot with Georgia, encouraged its participation in NATO, and stood by its president. Now Georgia is turning to us … and not finding much beyond words at this early hour.

The NYT’s focus this a.m., natch, was on the sort of criticism of America Saakashvili avoided.

Georgians around Gori spoke of America plaintively, uncertainly. They were beginning to feel betrayed.

“Tell your government,” said a man named Truber, fresh from the side of the Tbilisi hospital bed where his son was being treated for combat injuries. “If you had said something stronger, we would not be in this.”

He had not slept for three days, and he was angry — at himself, at Georgia, but mainly at the United States. “If you want to help, you have to help the end,” he said.

What can we do? What should we do? It’s a question that will play itself out in our election. Today, both candidates have pretty much the same position (after Obama ratcheted up his rhetoric from his early bland mumble-mouth position – see Gateway Pundit for more).

If we take this back to the Cold War, where we fought Soviet expansionism through proxies, which candidate would be more likely to provide Georgia with arms and training? McCain, of course. If it’s to be a diplomatic war, which candidate would be more likely to be able to put together an international condemnation of Russia with sufficient teeth to influence Moscow?

Good question. Obama is the international darling so the answer should clearly be him. But would his appointments be the ones that could carry out such a task? So far, it looks like Obama foreign policy will be that of Madeline Albright, which doesn’t bode well. McCain has the pugnaciousness to bare some teeth and has been drawing on a kitchen cabinet of foreign policy pros from Kissinger to Kristol that in my opinion are much better suited for this sort of affair.

Lots of questions … but one’s already being answered: The American left is going to duck the issue. Tigerhawk did the digging:

Well, as of this morning, you can find no mention of the war on A.N.S.W.E.R.’s home page. The group is addressing many other pressing matters, but apparently not the unremitting attack on Georgia. Code Pink? Nyet. Democracy Now!, which is a left-wing media group, has lots of news about American wars on its web page but nothing about Russia or Georgia. Nothing from the comrades at Peace Action. Stop the War Coalition? What war? You can search the home pages of left-wing groups until the cows come home and not find anything on the Russo-Georgia war.

For its part, Daily Kos poses a survey question this morning. No, not about Russia and Georgia, but about how the summer weather’s been this year.

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MSM Still Blowing Off Edwards Love Child Story

I

just ran a Nexis search of newspapers and newswires over the last week for “John AND Edwards AND Enquirer” and it’s obvious that the MSM are not the least bit interested in reporting on John Edwards’ affair while his wife fights cancer.

Here’s the Nexis tally for Edwards: Six stories total, appearing in the Miami Herald, SF Wrongicle, Boston Herald, The Columbian in Wash. state, the Kansas City Star and the Philly Daily News. No major papers at all, no newswires. This after the story has now been verified by Fox News.

Meanwhile, the foreign press is doing the job journalists are supposed to do. Here’s the stodgy London Sunday Times:

Sleaze scuppers Democrat golden boy

Gotcha: Senator John Edwards, whose wife has cancer, has been caught in a sex scandal that ends his vice-presidential hopes

SCRATCH John Edwards off the list of potential vice-presidential candidates. The former White House contender, who had been hoping to get the nod from Barack Obama, is in the midst of a full-blown sex scandal.

Every supermarket shopper knows that the preternaturally youthful former senator for North Carolina may have fathered a love child with a film-maker while Elizabeth, his saintly wife, is dying of cancer. There are sensational new details on the National Enquirer website, although most of the media have done their best to ignore them.

The tabloid magazine cornered Edwards, 55, leaving a Los Angeles hotel where Rielle Hunter, his alleged mistress, and her baby were staying, at 2.40am last Tuesday. He ran down a hallway and dived into the men’s bathroom. A hotel security guard confirmed the encounter. “His face just went totally white,” the guard said.

The story has been bubbling away for months, but so far there has been not a word about it in the mainstream newspapers, even though Edwards was John Kerry’s running mate in 2004 and has been tipped for a prominent job in an Obama administration – if not vice-president, then attorney-general or antipoverty tsar. (Read more here)

See, it’s not that hard to report this story … if you’re not an American newspaper in the pocket of the DNC.
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R

emember in 2004, when John Kerry called for unilateral diplomacy with Li’l Kim and the NoKo nuke boys, and W. stubbornly dug in his heels and defended his six-party talks? (For the faint of memory, those would be the talks that led to the recent NoKo demolition of some of its nuclear facilities.)

Well, let’s fast forward to today and check in on our candidates.

Barack “Unilateral” Obama:

“What this underscores is the need for … a clear policy that is putting the burden on Iran to change behavior. And frankly, we just have not been able to do that the last several years, partly because we’re not engaged in direct diplomacy.” (source)

John “Multinational” McCain

“Working with our European and regional allies is the best way to meet the threat posed by Iran, not unilateral concessions that undermine multilateral diplomacy.”

And here we thought Obama was the candidate of real change we can believe in! We’re not just facing Jimmy Carter’s second term; we’re looking at John Kerry’s first, as well!

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“The Iranian nation will never accept bullying. The Iranian nation is a nation of believers which believes in jihad and martyrdom. No army in the world can confront it.” – Ali Shirazi, aide to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei

W

e’ve heard similar stuff out of Iran in the past – in 1982 to be exact, when Iran’s supreme leaders sent hundreds of thousands of young Iranians in human waves against Saddam Hussein’s forces, with assurances that Allah would protect them. He didn’t.

Now, Shirazi, speaking for Ali Khamenei is talking of a jihadist population again, ready to rise up and protect Iran against any attack from Israel or the U.S. against its nuclear facilities.

“The first US shot on Iran would set the United States’ vital interests in the world on fire,” said Ali Shirazi, an aide to Iran’s supreme leader.

“Tel Aviv and the US fleet in the Persian Gulf would be the targets that would be set on fire,” he said. (BBC)

Does he think Iranians don’t remember the last time they rose in national jihad against an enemy, assured that the Supreme Leader had a direct connection to God? Does he think the hundreds of thousands of sons, brothers and husbands lost are not remembered?

Israeli air and nuclear superiority makes the threat against Tel Aviv empty, at least as long as the mullah’s nukes are in development, not on missiles.

The Iranian Navy is a cobbled together collection of retired ships from other navies and smaller missile-armed boats, not in the sense of our missile-armed destroyers and cruisers, but rather, Chinese Hudongs:

China sold Iran about 40 Hudong fast attack missile boats and more than 80 C-802 anti-ship cruise missiles during the mid-1990s, but agreed to US requests in 1998 to halt further C-802 sales.

In 1996, the China National Precision Machinery Import-Export Corporation, a state-run enterprise, delivered 60 C-802 model cruise missiles to Iran. These missiles are mounted on patrol boats for use by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Navy. The China National Precision Machinery Import-Export Corporation markets the C-802 in its sales brochure as a missile with `mighty attack capability’ and `great firepower’ for use against escort vessels such as the U.S.S. Stark. (source)

Clearly, Iran’s cruise missiles cannot be taken lightly:

Admiral Scott Redd, the former commander-in-chief of the United States Fifth Fleet stationed in the Gulf, said that the C-802 missiles give Iran a `360-degree threat which can come at you from basically anywhere.’ Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Robert Einhorn told the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee on April 11, 1997, that the C-802 cruise missiles `pose new, direct threats to deployed United States forces.’ (source)

But were Iran to use them against U.S. warships, the response would set the Iranian navy back on its heels. If it were to use them against oil tankers passing through the Gulf, the global response would be swift and definitive.

No matter how hollow the Iranian threat, it is not the threat of a nation trying to protect its right to peaceably use nuclear power for electrical generation; it is the talk that comes in defense of a clandestine nuclear weapons program.

Let’s all go ahead and acknowledge Iran’s right under international treaties to enrich uranium. Fine, let them – as long as they agree to their responsibilities under the same international treaties: Full documentation, full disclosure, complete traceability of all produced fissionable materials. No locked doors, no turned off cameras, no denying the existence of underground facilities.

Now let’s all acknowledge that we’ve basically run that route already and Iran is continuing its nuclear program despite the IAEA’s and the EU diplomats’ best efforts.

Will Bush attack before leaving office? That’s very simple to answer. It depends on who wins in November. A vote for McCain is a vote for continuing the hard push and heavy pressure through the end of Bush’s term, without an actual attack. A vote for Obama is a vote for the necessity of an attack because there will be no assurance the U.S. will continue to stand unbending against an Iranian nuke.

Keep that in mind as you vote this November.

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T

he sudden turn of events in North Korea – especially its destruction of some key nuke facilities – seems to have shocked even the NYT into momentary recovery from chronic Bush Derangement Syndrome:

North Korea’s declaration of its nuclear activities is a triumph of the sort of diplomacy — complicated, plodding, often frustrating — that President Bush and his aides once eschewed as American weakness.

In more than two years of negotiations, the man who once declared North Korea part of an “axis of evil” with Iran and Iraq, angrily vowing to confront, not negotiate with, its despotic leader, in fact demonstrated a flexibility that his critics at home and abroad once considered impossible.

The compliment couldn’t be allowed to stand too long, as the NYT quickly shifted over to John Kerry, a guy you can always count on for a bit of Bush-bashing, and he came through, with bellicosity and a typical odd view of history:

“Historians will long wonder why this administration did not directly engage North Korea before Pyongyang gathered enough material for several nuclear weapons, tested a nuclear device and the missiles to deliver them.”

He’s harkening back to his stand for single-party talks and Bush’s insistence on six-party, one of the sparking points of their debates, even though he was proved wrong. And he’s ignoring how history will write of Clinton’s utterly incompetent mishandling of NoKo through single-party nativity.

More significant that Kerry’s knee-jerk are the comments of the likes of me, conservatives, who are worried that this is just another Pyongyang puppet show, and that progress on the nuclear issue comes at the expense of the NoKo people, the world champs at enduring human rights abuses.

I cannot find much hope that Li’l Kim will be honest, forthcoming or prone to continuing progress on the nuclear matter, if for no reason than he’s got little else going for him, foreign trade-wise. And it’s regrettable that part of the deal didn’t include the start of a mechanism to better the lives of his citizens slaves.

Those feelings are pretty intense here at C-SM, but even I can see that progress on the nuke front is more critical than progress on the human rights fund; if it were otherwise, I would be a Jimmy Carter/Barack Obama supporter.

Bush’s sophisticated, tenacious approach to diplomacy, backed with the big stick cred he spent his first four years building, may give him true historical significance, on two conditions: He’ll have to keep the pressure on and accomplish even more in his final six months, and the next president will have to keep up the good work – something Barack Oppeaser appears incapable of doing.

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