I found this letter from a guy named Charlie from Colorado in the comments section of an article on rogerlsimon.com about the freedom movement in Iran. It is one of the best ways to explaining the Bush Doctrine that I've ever seen. Check this out
.... The real mistake is in believing the Bush Doctrine is "we'll just kill the furriners." The Bush Doctrine is, in real life, "we'll make terrorism too costly for states to support." He's putting the methods of terrorism off-limits, and saying he'll use the US military to enforce it. He's saying that terrorism will no longer be something for states to use against their enemies, while maintaining "plausible deniability" about the results.
This isn't, by any means, unprecedented. In fact, it's exactly what Jefferson did about the Barbary Pirates. In 1750, piracy was a common way for countries to make war without committment, and a way for the Barbary Pirates to extract a little cash from whoever came by. In 1801, it started getting costly, and in 1815 it got to be too expensive. In 1854, the Declaration of Paris officially ended the practice, and it had died about by about 1870.
Did it end because they ran out of people willing to be pirates? Of course not; occasional piracy happens to this day. But it meant that pirates no longer could expect to have friendly home ports, logistical support, and the protection of another nations sovereignty. Similarly, the Bush Doctrine is saying "We will treat this tactic not as a deniable action, but as a direct act of war, and will respond to it; don't expect the results to be sufferable."
Does this mean that people will never ever go blow themselves up? Of course not -- any more than WWI solved the problem of the Serbs and the Croats. What it does mean is that states that might have tried to use terrorism for their own purposes -- as the Talib in Afghanistan did, as Saddam Hussein certainly did, as Khaddafi we know did -- will see that the costs are not worth the benefits.
The Talib and Saddam had to have it explained to them in some detail; Khaddafi, at last, figured it out without such pointed instruction.
It means something else, too: it means the US is once again becoming a symbol of the freedom to live out from under the rule of authoritarian thugs. The mullahs won't last much longer, and now the Iranian people can see that there are nascent democracies on either side of them. They no longer expect that their rights will be sold in the coin of "stability above all."
When it comes down to it, that's the real Bush doctrine: the idea that freedom for others means safety for ourselves. And that idea -- that other people, too, desire freedom, deserve freedom, and can be free -- is the most powerful weapon of all.
