Since the ABC interview with Republican candidate for VP Sarah Palin, the leftist jihadists have been non-stop in their holy war against Governor Palin, seizing on the question of the Bush Doctrine as Palin’s achilles heel. The exchange with Charles Gibson went like this :

GIBSON: Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?
PALIN: In what respect, Charlie?
GIBSON: The Bush — well, what do you — what do you interpret it to be?
PALIN: His world view.
GIBSON: No, the Bush doctrine, enunciated September 2002, before the Iraq war.
PALIN: I believe that what President Bush has attempted to do is rid this world of Islamic extremism, terrorists who are hell bent on destroying our nation. There have been blunders along the way, though. There have been mistakes made. And with new leadership, and that’s the beauty of American elections, of course, and democracy, is with new leadership comes opportunity to do things better.
GIBSON: The Bush doctrine, as I understand it, is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense, that we have the right to a preemptive strike against any other country that we think is going to attack us. Do you agree with that?

When I heard this question, my first reaction was ‘which doctrine?’. Free trade, the war on terror, his view of the global economy, or dealing with rogue nations ? His open borders doctrine came to mind as well.

Or, does Gibson mean the Bush Doctrine as he describes it in Sept of 2001 :

People were looking for a Bush Doctrine. They may have found it when he said the war on terror will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped or defeated.

Possibly even these two references by Goerge Stephanopolous, December 11, 2001 and January 29, 2002:

Two years ago, September 1999, Bush gave his first speech when he was running about terrorism. And his first–had the first explanation of the Bush doctrine, that if you harbor a terrorist, you’re going to be attacked. The Bush White House is putting this out, saying it shows that Bush was very prescient, but that was only one speech given in the campaign.

It was striking and significant that the president really expanded the Bush doctrine. If a nation builds a weapon of mass destruction–Iraq, Iran or North Korea–we will reserve the right to take out those weapons even if we’re not attacked or even if there’s not a threat.

How about this from George Will , May 7, 2006:

Now the argument from the right is the CIA is a rogue agent because it has not subscribed to the Bush doctrine. The Bush doctrine being that American security depends on the spread of democracy and we know how to do that.

Wow. ABC News themselves do not seem to be in accord on what exactly the Bush Doctrine is. Let’s try Wikipedia and see what the Internet community itself says about it :

The Bush Doctrine is a term used to describe various related foreign policy principles of United States president George W. Bush, enunciated in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks. The phrase initially described the policy that the United States had the right to treat countries that harbor or give aid to terrorist groups as terrorists themselves, which was used to justify the invasion of Afghanistan.[1] Later it came to include additional elements, including the controversial policy of preventive war, which held that the United States should depose foreign regimes that represented a supposed threat to the security of the United States, even if that threat was not immediate (used to justify the invasion of Iraq), a policy of supporting democracy around the world, especially in the Middle East, as a strategy for combating the spread of terrorism, and a willingness to pursue U.S. military interests in a unilateral way.[2][3][4] Some of these policies were codified in a National Security Council text entitled the National Security Strategy of the United States published on September 20, 2002.[5] This represented a dramatic shift from the United States’s Cold War policies of deterrence and containment, under the Truman Doctrine, and a departure from post-Cold War philosophies such as the Powell Doctrine and the Clinton Doctrine.
The first usage of the term to refer to the policies of George W. Bush may have been when conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer used the term in February 2001 to refer to the president’s unilateral approach to national missile defense.[6][7]
The main elements of the Bush Doctrine were delineated in a National Security Council document, National Security Strategy of the United States, published on September 20, 2002,[5] and this document is often cited as the definitive statement of the doctrine.[8][9][10] The National Security Strategy was updated in 2006.[11]

These principles are sometimes referred to as the Bush Doctrine although the term is often used to describe other elements of Bush policy and is not universally recognized as the single concept.

Oh well, nothing here absolutely definitive here either. Even more confusion on when the term Bush Doctrine was first used : “Charles Krauthammer used the term in February 2001″.

Perhaps Bill O’Reilly got it right when he recently commented “There is no Bush Doctrine”, implying the Bush Doctrine is a label given to a collection of any number of Bush policies.

The opening statement of the Wiki page, “The Bush Doctrine is a term used to describe various related foreign policy principles of United States president George W. Bush”, can this be accurately summarized as “His world view” ? Seems so to me.

It is apparent that Governor Palin’s request for clarification “In what respect, Charlie?” was right on the money, given Gibson’s own inconsistent descriptions, and the multitude of descriptions enumerated here, and elsewhere.

Or maybe, just maybe, Charlie could have been a little more specific when he phrased the question. Quite often, the depth of the answer is limited by the poorly asked question.