In this US election season, the political argument against the Iraq war has evolved and broadened into something quite familiar. What began as a critique of an ineptly conceived and executed war has, on the stump at least, hardened into a denunciation of every facet of the Bush administration’s foreign policy. But does telling evidence brought against a war necessarily repudiate the doctrine in whose name it was fought?

Bush doctrine critics might do well to cast a glance backward, for this is hardly the first time critics have extrapolated from the particulars of a controversial war and gone too far. Two years of war in Korea convinced many Republicans that President Harry Truman’s containment doctrine was a dead letter. Even as John Foster Dulles took to the pages of Life Magazine to condemn the young doctrine, the 1952 Republican platform was attacking the “negative, futile and immoral policy of ‘containment’”. Republicans, though, would soon enshrine in official policy the same doctrine they had spent years assailing.