Time: grasping at straws

The author or authors of this article either totally don't understand the Bush administration, or badly needed material for a cover article. You decide. What follows is a long quote and then my destruction of their argument.

"In the span of four years, the administration has been forced to rethink the doctrine by which it hoped to remake the world. Bush's response to the North Korean missile test was revealing: Under the old Bush Doctrine, defiance by a dictator like Kim Jong Il would have merited threats of punitive U.S. action. Instead, the administration has mainly been talking up multilateralism and downplaying Pyongyang's provocation.
The Bush Doctrine foundered in the principal place the U.S. tried to apply it."

This implies that behind closed doors, Team Bush is sitting down and having a heart to heart. Rummy leans over to Cheney and says, "Gosh, Dick, that whole unilateral War on Terror thing just didn't pan out. We're going to have to take a different approach."

I don't think so.

This "new" approach to North Korea doesn't represent a policy shift. The war in Iraq was a unique event precipitated by another unique event (9/11), and a long history (a father's invasion.) Whether or not Team Bush is taking a different approach to North Korea than the Middle East is irrelevant to it being a policy shift. Had North Korea gone forward with its missile tests before, during or after 9/11, there would never have been an invasion like the one into Iraq. (Had they shot Japan or Alaska in the face with a missile, sure, there might have been action taken. But firing a missile that failed two minutes after launch into the ocean is a different matter.)

In sum: there's no rethinking; there aren't any heart to hearts; there's no policy shift. The War on Terror was the War on Terror, and North Korea is North Korea.