According to Robin Wright, the Bush Doctrine is about to take its place alongside Super Train, Manimal, and Pink Lady and Jeff in the annals of swift and spectacular flops.

In going to war 15 months ago, the president's Iraq policy rested on four broad principles: The United States should act preemptively to prevent strikes on U.S. targets. Washington should be willing to act unilaterally, alone or with a select coalition, when the United Nations or allies balk. Iraq was the next cornerstone in the global war on terrorism. And Baghdad's transformation into a new democracy would spark regionwide change.

But these central planks of Bush doctrine have been tainted by spiraling violence, limited reconstruction, failure to find weapons of mass destruction or prove Iraq's ties to al Qaeda, and mounting Arab disillusionment with U.S. leadership.

"Of the four principles, three have failed, and the fourth -- democracy promotion -- is hanging by a sliver," said Geoffrey Kemp, a National Security Council staff member in the Reagan administration and now director of regional strategic programs at the Nixon Center.

The president has "walked away from unilateralism. We're not going to do another preemptive strike anytime soon, certainly not in Iran or North Korea. And it looks like terrorism is getting worse, not better, especially in critical countries like Saudi Arabia," Kemp said.

As a result, Bush doctrine could become the biggest casualty of U.S. intervention in Iraq, which is entering a new phase this week as the United States prepares to hand over power to the new Iraqi government.

The worst aspect of all this (aside from the loss of life, of course) may be the fact that this administration's almost willful incompetence in Iraq has discredited some policy ideas -- preemption and, uh, coercive democracy promotion, in particular -- that a future president may need to be free to pursue. American lives could very well depend upon it, in fact. Unfortunately, that president will, in all likelihood, be leading a country still in the grips of what its pundits will no doubt call the Iraq syndrome; as a consequence, those tools may well be unavailable to him. And the disaster that could result is unlikely to be one about which we'll all feel better after a collective, Dick Cheney-like "f*** you" -- though a loud and unmistakable one this November just might help us avoid that unhappy fate.

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