It seems our friends over at
PNAC and
AEI, those fine folks that brought you the Iraq war, find the recent election a complete vindication of their policies. So what's next? Surely we need to get rid of the evil Iranian and North Korean governments, of course, but those are small fry. We need to put some meat behind the Bush Doctrine. Time to take on something a little more interesting, don't you think? Something that actually might be a bit of a challenge. That's right, there are over a billion pinko commies that must be liberated over in China! No more Mr. Nice guy America anymore! Down with Panda huggers!
I would be worried about starting WW III, but these bozos think we think we are already in
WW IV.
Anyway, here's the article:
DID HE JUST SAY "PANDA HUGGERS"? An American Enterprise Institute panel this morning on foreign policy in the second Bush administration was full of predicable calls for regime change in North Korea and military strikes against Iran, and the usual hosannas for Ahmed Chalabi. But from Thomas Donnelly, AEI's military affairs guru and PNAC's deputy director, we hear a different rumbling: It's time for a more aggressive China policy! The voters last Tuesday, you see, demanded nothing less.
According to Donnelly, those who voted for Bush overwhelmingly considered the war in Iraq and Afghanistan to be one and the same; that, is they are both part of the larger war in terror. This fact, sayeth Donnelly, suggests that Americans have come to accept the activist role America must play in the post-Cold War world. The election proves that the goals set forth in the Bush Doctrine essentially reflect what most Americans want their government to do.
With this mandate, the goal of the second administration is to put actual meat behind the lofty goals expressed by the Bush doctrine. By Donnelly's estimation, this means expanding the Bush doctrine beyond the greater Middle East and -- here's the kicker -- integrating our China policy into the Bush Doctrine. While the Bush administration confronts rogue regimes in the greater Middle East, the likelihood of a future great-power confrontation with China is increasing substantially -- so we must act.
Can we expect a robust debate within the Bush administration that weighs the merits and dangers of a more hard-line approach to the People's Republic? Not if Donnelly has his way. In a revealing moment during the question-and-answer session, Donnelly displayed his utter contempt for those "panda huggers" (his term; presumably, he meant the State Department) who he claims hijacked the first term's China policy. "Negotiating with ourselves over China," said Donnelly, "is even dumber than negotiating with Democrats over social security or tax reform."
Since Wednesday, Bill Kristol and others over at the Weekly Standard have been claiming that Bush's victory indicates popular support for the war in Iraq, so it wasn't all that surprising to hear their ideological brethren at the AEI broaden this theory and portray the election as a referendum on the entire Bush Doctrine, to which they subscribe. With the president's victory, we can expect more of Donnelly's line of reasoning to emerge from the neo-con hordes. Be warned: They now seem primed to use Bush's victory as justification that voters approve of their pet hard-line and radical approaches to Iran, North Korea, and China, and elsewhere.