During her much anticipated interview with ABC’s Charles Gibson, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin had a “deer-in-headlights moment” when Gibson asked her if she agreed with the Bush Doctrine. Surprised at the question, Palin asked Gibson what he meant. When Gibson asked, “Well, what do you interpret it to be?” Palin replied inquisitively, “His worldview?” Gibson then explained his understanding of the Bush Doctrine and asked if Palin agreed:

GIBSON: The Bush doctrine as I understand it is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense and we have the right of preemptive strike against any country we think is going to attack us. Do you agree with that?

PALIN: Charlie, if there is legitimate and enough intelligence that tells us that a strike is imminent against American people, we have every right to defend our country.

Watch it:

While Gibson did not get the Bush Doctrine wholly correct, he was at least on the right track. In fact, the Bush Doctrine is predicated on “preventive war” not “preemptive war” — a sharp distinction in which the former justifies launching war in an attempt to “prevent” a threat from emerging (i.e. the Iraq war), while in the latter case, the threat has already materialized.

“Preemptive war” is, as Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) once observed, something “the global community is generally tolerant of,” while “preventive attacks” — a policy that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has not rejected — “have generally been condemned.”

Indeed, as Matt Yglesias notes, Bush and McCain agree that the U.S. has “the right to use military force unilaterally even where there isn’t an imminent threat” and that “Palin’s view is sensible, so it would be interesting to learn her opinion of her running mate’s much less sensible view.”

UPDATE: The Jed Report posted this video of John McCain explaining the Bush Doctrine:

There’s something deeply troubling about the fact that the seventh anniversary of the September 11 attacks should mark the day on which 2008 became the deadliest year for U.S. troops in Afghanistan. After routing al-Qaeda and its Taliban hosts from their base in Afghanistan in late 2001 and 2002, in a military intervention that was broadly supported both in the United States and around the world, the Bush administration turned its attention — disastrously — to Iraq. The effort to build a stable Afghan state has suffered as a result, as CAP analysts Caroline Wadhams and Lawrence Korb showed in a 2007 report.

Dexter Filkins recently had an excellent story about the resurgent Taliban, and how Pakistan’s “largely ungoverned tribal areas have become an untouchable base for Islamic militants to attack Americans and Afghans across the border.”

There’s some indication that President Bush seems to have recognized — as always, a few years late — the severity of the situation in Afghanistan. Yesterday the New York Times reported that “President Bush secretly approved orders in July that for the first time allow American Special Operations forces to carry out ground assaults inside Pakistan without the prior approval of the Pakistani government.” While it’s necessary to eliminate insurgent bases across the border, the fact that the U.S. has to do so in the face of protests by the Pakistan government shows how poorly the Bush administration has managed that relationship over the last seven years. U.S. strikes also risk increased destabilization in Pakistan, which just underlines the fact that, after seven years of incoherent policy, we are left with few good options.

Yesterday, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen warned Congress that the United States is “running out of time” to succeed in Afghanistan, but that sending in more troops will not necessarily guarantee victory. CNN reported:

Mullen said he is convinced the Afghanistan war can be won but said the U.S. urgently needs to improve its nation-building initiatives and its cross-border strategy with Pakistan.

“We can’t kill our way to victory, and no armed force anywhere — no matter how good — can deliver these keys alone. It requires teamwork and cooperation,” Mullen said.

Mullen is basically making an argument for a progressive national security agenda here, one which encompasses more than military solutions for what are in fact economic and political problems. There’s no way that the United States can confront challenges like instability in Pakistan and standing up a state in Afghanistan all by itself, and other countries have shown that they will be less inclined to help us if we exhibit the sort of “with us or with the terrorists” nonsense that has characterized the Bush administration’s approach to national security. All this seems startlingly obvious, yet it’s not, because some people think the Bush administration’s approach has been just great.

In late July, Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) said he would introduce a resolution in the Senate to applaud the success of the surge “against enemies who attacked America on 9/11.”

Yesterday, Lieberman introduced the formal amendment (S. Amdt. 5368 to S. 3001), which “expresses the sense of the Senate recognizing the strategic success of the troop surge in Iraq.” In his statement, he linked the surge to 9/11 (via the Congressional Record):

If there is anyone in this Chamber who doubts the strategic stakes in Iraq, I urge them to listen to General Petraeus. Listen to General Petraeus who warned us in an interview published today in the Washington Post that “Iraq is still viewed as the central front for al-Qaida.” Let me repeat that: “Iraq is still viewed as the central front for al-Qaida,” which is to say by al-Qaida. Not Afghanistan, Iraq; not Pakistan, Iraq.

This is not the opinion of a Member of Congress. It is not the opinion of a politician running for office. It is the judgment of America’s most successful battlefield commander in the war on terror which began 7 years ago tomorrow when America was brutally attacked on 9/11/2001.

While the surge has certainly produced calmer streets in Iraq, it has not achieved its primary purpose of facilitating political reconciliation. The surge has essentially frozen into place “a fragmented and increasingly fractured country” and produced an “an oil revenue-fueled, religious Shia-dominated national government with close ties to Iran.”

Lieberman claimed to offer his “bipartisan amendment” (that has no Democratic co-sponsors) in hopes that the “Senate can unite” around it. But speaking in favor of the amendment, Sen. Lindsey Graham quickly politicized it: “General Petraeus said today in the Washington Post, I believe, that Iraq is still the central battlefront in the war on terror. Senator Obama has disagreed with that on numerous occasions, saying it is Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

As Yglesias explains, “An al-Qaeda offshoot only arose in Iraq in the first place because we invaded there and created an appealing venue in which to try to kill American soldiers and bleed American resources.” The current challenge is to refocus on the areas where al Qaeda poses the most significant strategic threat to the United States.

While serving as CentCom commander between March 2007 and March 2008, Adm. William Fallon consistently pressed the Bush administration for more engagement with Iran and criticized the calls for another war. “This constant drumbeat of conflict is what strikes me which is not helpful and not useful,” Fallon told al Jazeera last year.

In his new book “The War Within,” Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward details a telling White House meeting on Iran in spring 2007 (p. 334):

“I think we need to do something to get engaged with these guys,” Fallon said. Iraq shared a 900-mile border with Iran, and he needed guidance and a strategy for dealing with the Iranians.

“Well,” Bush said, “these are assholes.”

Fallon was stunned. Declaring them “assholes” was not a strategy. Lots of words and ideas were thrown around at the meeting, especially about the Iranian leaders. They were bad, evil, out of touch with their people. But no one offered a real approach.

Fallon’s advocacy for diplomatic engagement irritated administration officials, who were enamored with Gen. David Petraeus. Fallon — a “fan of transition” in Iraq — repeatedly challenged Petraeus’s personnel requests. According to Woodward, the commander was trying to ensure that the United States didn’t “send any more than necessary to the war zone” (p. 343).

In a March interview with Esquire, Fallon said that he was in “hot water” with the White House for meeting with Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. Fallon noted that such meetings were essential to making sure that regional leaders don’t get “too spun up” by the administration’s war rhetoric. In “The War Within,” Woodward writes that as soon as that article came out, Fallon offered his resignation (pp. 408-9):

Fallon was in Baghdad on March 11 when the article was made public. He realized instantly the uproar it would case. Fallon knew he already was on shaky ground. Days earlier, he had warned Gates that the article was coming. But now he called again.

“I think I need to be gone,” Fallon said.

“Okay,” Gates said.

Fallon said he would have stayed if Gates had “offered a vote of confidence and backed his commander”; that, however, never happened.

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On the morning of the 9/11, just moments after the World Trade Center collapsed from the terrorist strikes, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) went on television and immediately began focusing the nation’s attention on Iraq. In an interview with CBS’ Dan Rather on 9/11, McCain said:

To be honest with you, Dan, I never thought that an operation of this sophistication and size would take place. I just never did. But I don’t think there’s any doubt that there are countries — Iraq, Iran, Libya, North Korea and others — who we know engage in proliferation of — of capabilities and, from time to time, involve themselves in state-sponsored terrorism. But never did we imagine on a scale such as this.

The next day, on 9/12, McCain reiterated the point in an interview with Chris Matthews. “It isn’t just Afghanistan,” he said, “we’re talking about Syria, Iraq, Iran, perhaps North Korea, Libya and others.”

Just a few weeks later — on Oct. 9, 2001 — McCain narrowed his focus, arguing that Iraq was “obviously” next:

PAULA ZAHN: And as you know, Senator, the U.S. and Great Britain notified the U.N. Security Council yesterday that they reserve the right to strike against other countries in this campaign. What countries are we looking at?

MCCAIN: Well, I think very obviously Iraq is the first country, but there are others — Syria, Iran, the Sudan, who have continued to harbor terrorist organizations and actually assist them.

On Oct. 18, 2001, McCain told David Letterman, “the second phase is Iraq” while linking Iraq to the anthrax attacks. Watch it:

In Jan. 2002, McCain visited a crowd of soldiers aboard the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt and yelled: “Next up, Baghdad!”

The New York Times’ David Kirkpatrick recently noted that McCain “began making his case for invading Iraq to the public more than six months before the White House began to do the same.” The Times reported:

While pushing to take on Saddam Hussein, Mr. McCain also made arguments and statements that he may no longer wish to recall. He lauded the war planners he would later criticize, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney. (Mr. McCain even volunteered that he would have given the same job to Mr. Cheney.) He urged support for the later-discredited Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi’s opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress, and echoed some of its suspect accusations in the national media. And he advanced misleading assertions not only about Mr. Hussein’s supposed weapons programs but also about his possible ties to international terrorists, Al Qaeda and the Sept. 11 attacks.

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