(1) Charles Krauthammer Is An Idiot; (2) There Is No Bush Doctrine

I only read about two sentences of this, but Krauthammer is such an idiot that I simply can't read him anymore. Of course he's never been good for anything but entertainment value...but my stupidity tolerance is currently way down. These are unhappy days indeed for those who don't suffer fools gladly. What's particularly nauseating about the stupidity that permeates political discussions is that it's largely avoidable, freely-chosen and self-inflicted. Take Krauthammer, for example. Dude seems to be a person of roughly average intelligence when he is not willfully distorting the facts, bending them to the breaking point so that they fit his preferred view of the world.

The topic of his newest screed seems to be that Obama has accepted "the Bush Doctrine." This alleged development should be cause for celebration for anyone who genuinely accepts said "doctrine." For Krauthammer, however, as for so much of the American right these days, everything is political. (We might call that the Rove Doctrine...) So this is yet another opportunity for praising Bush and prosecuting the case that he was too a great president!!! Of course, they really ought to get to work first on trying to generate a minimally-plausible case that he wasn't the worst president of the last hundred years... That proposition's going to be hard enough to defend.

But let's try, again, to get something straight about the so-called "Bush Doctrine":

1. Nobody's sure what it is, because it was never clearly formulated, and because Bush's policies were not based on any clear principle.

2. Liberals have, for my entire life, argued that we should promote human rights and democracy in our foreign policy. They have generally been opposed by conservative so-called "realists" who argue that our foreign policy should be based only on national interest. Liberals, it was said, were naive, and wanted us to be "the world's policeman."

3. Bush--or, perhaps more accurately, Cheney--did not invade Iraq in order to promote democracy. We still aren't really clear why we invaded. Many bogus, nonsensical "justifications" were given.

4. The neo-con crowd (PNAC et. al.) seek to spread democracy as a means, and not as an end. They're still "realists" (i.e. national ethical egoists) at heart. Promoting American interests are the real goal; democracy in other countries is just a means to that end. (Not that our interests were actually promoted in Iraq, of course...) Lots of ink has been spilled over the question "what's the difference between a liberal hawk and a neo-con?" The answer is: liberal hawks take democracy and human rights as worthy of promotion for moral reasons, and not (or not primarily) because they are good for America, and they think that sometimes military force is the best way to promote these goals. Neo-cons see democracy and human rights as good...but good primarily because they promote the interests of America--and they think that military force can be used to promote the interests of America.

5. The one really distinctive thing about Bush's approach in the Mideast is that it involved a really, really stupid and counter-productive use of military force. If anything, the Bush Doctrine seems to be something like: do not take any sensible, moderate steps at all in order to promote democracy; instead, do something enormously costly and counter-productive first.

Obama's position is consistent with long-standing liberal approaches to foreign policy, and is best understood as part of that pattern. The attempt to construe it as an instance of the incoherent and largely fictional "Bush Doctrine" is just more deranged partisanship from Krauthammer and company. These people really have gone off the bloody deep end. They just aren't even worth reading anymore.