Bush Doctrine Is 'Only Option,'

So says Robert Kaufman. It's not preemption he declares, but prevention:

A departure from previous foreign policy strategies, the Bush
Doctrine is the name given to national security guidelines first outlined by
Bush in a June 2002 speech. They placed greater emphasis on military preemption,
increased military strength, unilateral action, and a commitment to "extending
democracy, liberty, and security to all regions."The doctrine was formalized in a document entitled the National Security
Strategy of the United States of America."What is novel about the Bush Doctrine
to me, is the need sometimes to employ force preemptively, [which] is necessary
because of the dangerous convergence between weapons of mass destruction there
[and the] spread of radicalism," Kaufman said at the Heritage Foundation in
Washington, D.C., on Thursday...

"I remain convinced that for all our problems there, the
battle in Iraq is a vital phase of the war we are fighting ... the war against
radical regimes, radical Islamists, and terrorists who seek to destroy us not
for what we've done, but for who we are," Kaufman said."This is a war we cannot
afford to lose," Kaufman added.

I couldn't agree more. Without Bush, at best we would be trying to contain radical Islam, as we did with communism in the last century. In our multi-polar, porous border, globalized world, such a strategy would have been useless, the only other alternative being race quotas. Remember all the talk of a "Fortress America" back in the 1990's? The President has done away with this defensive mentality and taken the war to the enemy in Iraq. Its a stroke of genius, as I've always maintained.