What hath G. Walker wrought? Like Richard Nixon after Watergate, the ‘doctrine’ and its expositors have been arrested in progress and discredited in fact, but still lurk in the wings — waiting, plotting, wheedling, clutching for any toehold to allow the administration’s sultans of sophistry to reassert it.

Analysts across the political spectrum say the Bush Doctrine — preventive war, choking the roots of terrorism by planting democracy, and brandishing power to force others into line — has failed. Bush’s lofty goals, shared even by his critics, have been set back, perhaps decades, by the Iraq occupation.

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“The kind of thing people in the administration prided themselves in understanding, namely the use of power, was actually the very thing they proved not to be able to use effectively,” said David Holloway of Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, which conducts research and training on issues of international security.

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World opinion, dismissed by top Bush officials, has undermined U.S. clout, said Joseph Nye, a professor of international relations at Harvard University.

Bush’s emphasis on force has cost goodwill around the world — nowhere more than among Muslims — and squandered the sympathy that empowered the United States to invade Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks.

“A president has to be able to combine the hard power of military force with the soft power of attracting others to want to follow us,” Nye said. “In fighting a struggle against terrorism — where everything depends upon winning the hearts and minds of moderates — that loss of soft power is very expensive. The key to diplomacy is to divide your enemies, and Bush has in a sense united our enemy.”

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Said former Bush State Department official Jon Alterman, “It seems to me the key aspect of the Bush Doctrine is moral clarity. The problem with moral clarity is: How do you achieve better results in the here and now and not in the afterlife?”

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“For many decades, the United States was considered a model democracy and was an inspiration for democracy activists all over the world,” said Mike McFaul, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and a professor of political science. “Today, it is most certainly the case that being affiliated with the U.S. is no longer necessarily a positive for democratic activists. You see this particularly in Egypt. You see it particularly in Iran.”

Larry Diamond, a former adviser to the U.S. provisional government in Iraq now at the Hoover Institution, agreed.

“There’s a very broad view among not only the established pro-American regimes — the Jordanian regime, the Moroccan regime, even the Egyptian and Saudi, and Qatar and Kuwait even more so — and among many secular democratic forces in the region, that we have just messed up very badly, and strengthened Islamic forces, and strengthened the instinct of a lot of these regimes to resist.”

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But the broad consensus is that staying the course is not working. The Iraqi death rate of the last two months translates to 40,000 a year, Diamond said, and “if that isn’t civil war, I don’t know what is.

“I literally do not know anyone outside the administration who thinks that simply staying the course we’re on now is going to work,” he said. “I know people who think we need to do a lot more. I know people who think the current level of troops is about right, but we need a very different strategy in terms of how we use them and proceed politically. I know people who think we need to start heading for the exits.” Article

Related:

…if the rhetoric of the Bush revolution lives on, the revolution
itself is over. The question is not whether the president and most of his team still hold to the basic tenets of the Bush doctrine—they do—but whether they can sustain it. They cannot.…

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The reversal of the Bush revolution is a good thing. By overreaching in Iraq, alienating important allies, and allowing the war on terrorism to overshadow all other national priorities,Bush has gotten the United States bogged down in an unsuccessful war, overstretched the military, and broken the domestic bank. Washington now lacks the reservoir of international legitimacy, resources, and domestic support necessary to pursue other key national interests.

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Whether Washington’s European allies, or anyone else, for that matter, accepted the administration’s logic was thought largely immaterial. According to the administration, success in Iraq, which few top officials doubted, would have a positive spillover effect elsewhere in the Middle East, at which point U.S. allies would start to come on board. U.S. leadership, the thinking went, consisted not of endlessly consulting pessimistic allies to see what they had to say,but of setting out a bold course, decisively following it, and winning over allies through victory rather than persuasion. revolution meets reality Needless to say, everything has not turned out as planned.

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Accordingly, the new direction of Bush’s foreign policy is far from irreversible. Although the Bush team has been forced by reality to work more closely with allies and to set aside the doctrine of regime change by military intervention, many in the administration still believe that the threat of terrorism allows—or even requires—the United States to operate under different international rules from everyone else, limiting the degree to which the administration can continue to adapt. Moreover, powerful figures within the administration—not least the vice president—will continue to argue against the new pragmatism. Indeed, part of the “revolutionary” premise of the foreign policy of Bush’s first term was the notion, harking back to the Reagan administration, that determination, optimism, and U.S. power would eventually prevail, regardless of what Democrats and foreign critics might assert.It is a convenient thesis,but one that does not allow for self-correction; it paints any lack of domestic or international support as a badge of honor and apparent failures as only temporary setbacks rather than as reasons to change course.

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Still,it would be rash to exclude a returnto a more radical approach, especially from a president who believes he is on a mission and who has time and again proved willing to take massive risks and surprise his critics. If such a return happens, brace yourself—because there is no reason to believe that round two of the Bush revolution would be more successful than round one. Indeed, without the resources, international legitimacy, and degree of political support Bush had the first time around, it might be considerably worse. Article