COMMENTARY Magazine has posted an advance copy from its December issue of an exchange between Norman Podhoretz and the letter writers responding to his September article entitled “Is the Bush Doctrine Dead?”
The first letter, from Philip H. Gordon of the Brookings Institution, is indicative of the general tone of the responses:
One has to admire Norman Podhoretz’s perseverance in continuing to believe in the viability of the Bush Doctrine long after the doctrine’s obsolescence has become apparent to just about everyone else. As he himself acknowledges, there is now “a consensus that has formed on the death of the Bush Doctrine,” one that “embraces just about every group all along the ideological spectrum . . . the realists, the liberal internationalists, the traditionalist conservatives, the paleoconservatives, and the neoconservatives.”
. . . But instead of seeing this remarkable convergence as a sign that these observers may be on to something, Mr. Podhoretz insists that the Bush Doctrine is alive and well. His refusal to allow pesky facts to get in the way of a good argument is akin to Bush’s own stubborn determination to talk as if his policies were on track even though reality clearly suggests otherwise.
Here is a portion of Norman Podhoretz’s response:
Philip H. Gordon flatters me (not, to put it mildly, that this is his intention) by comparing my defense of the Bush Doctrine to George W. Bush’s “own stubborn determination.” . . . [H]e asks how I could possibly stand out against what he . . . rightly describes as a “remarkable convergence.”
Well, the answer is that I have learned from experience that the more a given idea gets to be accepted as a self-evident truth by my fellow intellectuals, the more likely it is to be wrong.
To be specific: about 35 years ago, there was a similarly broad consensus, also confident that it was perfectly in tune with “reality,” on the idea that the Soviet Union had become a “status-quo power,” and that World War III (more commonly known as the cold war) was now over . . . . Those few of us who took issue with this “remarkable convergence” were almost universally derided as delusional and denounced as dangerous warmongers, but we turned out to be right.
The same thing happened with the Oslo Accords, whose promise of peace between Israel and the Palestinians was embraced by an even larger “herd of independent minds.” Here again, those few of us who argued that Oslo would lead not to peace but to another war were derided and denounced, only to be (unhappily) vindicated by the second intifada. . .
As Mr. Gordon’s account of the “price” being paid [in Iraq] reveals, this idea [that the Bush Doctrine is dead] is based almost entirely on the fact that the forces opposed to the Bush Doctrine are (mirabile dictu!) fighting back. Evidently the die-hard Baathists and the sectarian militias and the jihadists and their foreign sponsors do not share in the consensus on the Bush Doctrine’s failure. For if they did agree that it is already dead, why would they be waging so desperate a campaign to defeat it? . . .
Robert W. Merry takes issue with the comparison I drew between the Truman Doctrine, of whose consequences he paints an entirely positive portrait, and the Bush Doctrine, to which he ascribes nothing but one calamity after another. But Mr. Merry neglects to mention that, in addition to the Marshall Plan and the other achievements he cites, the Truman Doctrine also produced the Korean war. Korea (which cost more than 36,000 American lives as against the fewer than 3,000 in Iraq) turned out to be at least as unpopular then as Iraq is today, and Truman’s contemporaries were just as blind to the accomplishments of his doctrine as Bush’s are to his.
Yet unlikely as it would have seemed in 1952, a year in which Truman’s job-approval rating plummeted into the 20’s (fifteen points lower than Bush at his nadir), historians now rate him as a great President. I believe that the same recognition will in due course be accorded to George W. Bush.
Worth reading in its entirety, as is the September article itself.