Once again, the Bush Doctrine is NOT preemptive war.

It’s fraudulent war.

Now, as a sense of history instead of immediacy is starting to fall over the Bush years, even critics like Rachel Maddow and Peter Beinart still believe that ‘the Bush Doctrine’ was about preemptive war. Beinart:

After 9/11, Bush exploited the fact that the U.S. could not contain and deter a nonstate actor like al Qaeda to revive the right’s old argument against containing and deterring hostile states. “Deterrence,” he told a West Point audience in 2002, “means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizens to defend. Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies.”

And even if that’s true, Iraq never had those weapons and they always knew it. I can’t believe Beinart doesn’t think this is an important distinction.

And I was equally flummoxed in 2009 that Rachel Maddow didn’t get it either.