A writer over at the WaPo has come up with possibly the most tortured “defense” of Sarah Palin’s inability to define the Bush Doctrine, and compiled an article based on the idea that her ignorance highlighted the “ambiguity” of the concept.

Peter D. Feaver, who worked on the Bush national security strategy as a staff member on the National Security Council, said he has counted as many as seven distinct Bush doctrines. They include the president’s second-term “freedom agenda”; the notion that states that harbor terrorists should be treated no differently than terrorists themselves; the willingness to use a “coalition of the willing” if the United Nations does not address threats; and the one Gibson was talking about — the doctrine of preemptive war.

That’s the thesis of the article, but packed inside it is a massive error in judgment that pulls back to why Palin’s answer was so far off.

When the phrase “The Bush Doctrine” is used, we aren’t talking about his general theory on the world. It’s like the Powell Doctrine, a concrete theory that will forever be Bush’s legacy in the world of foreign policy. You can’t just go examining his various beliefs and start wrapping them up in the idea of “The Bush Doctrine”, because that’s just not what the term means. A political science 101 course will teach the idea and no, it has nothing to do with coalitions of the willing and “freedom”. It’s nearly a synonym for preventative warfare.

I’d like to make a side note that we’re not talking about “pre-emptive war”. Pre-emptive war means we’re attacking a country that is going to attack us, so we’re beating them to the punch. Preventative war, which the Bush Doctrine is based upon, posits that the United States can attack countries which don’t even have any plans of attacking us, but are hostile towards the US and must be dispatched before they even think about attacking. That’s how Iraq worked, that’s what’s going on with Iran. That’s the Bush Doctrine.

Back on topic, the problem with Palin’s answer (or non-answer) was actually exactly what the WaPo article is highlighting. It wasn’t that she didn’t know what the Bush Doctrine was, it’s that she didn’t know that it was. When Gibson asked her if she agreed with the Bush Doctrine, she thought he was just asking a general question, a less wordy version of “do you agree with how President Bush views the world and conducts policy?” She was completely unaware that it was a specific idea.

If she and Gibson had debated on which version of the Bush Doctrine he was talking about, maybe then I could cut her some slack, and then the WaPo defense would apply. But to not even be aware that there is such a thing, that’s like having a VP candidate during the runup to Vietnam asked if they believe in the Domino Theory and they ask what that means, and then their response is “well it’s the idea that if you have an effect in one country, eventually others will feel it” and some dipstick reporter defends them by saying “oh it’s ambiguous”. No. It’s not. It’s a single idea (though it has a number of facets to it), and to not even be aware that it exists is the problem, not that she got what it was wrong.

Okay? We got that?