Inquiring Aussies want to know:

Has Bush changed his mind? Or was there no mind to change?

In 2000, Bush said that the Bill Clinton-Al Gore administration had been reckless in overcommitting the US, and the military in particular, to exercises in "nation building". By that he meant trying to establish institutions of democratic government and civil society.

The intervention in Somalia, for example, begun by Bush's father, "started off as a humanitarian mission and it changed into a nation-building mission, and that's where the mission went wrong". Just as with his current, nearly opposite philosophy, Bush stated the principle in the categorical terms of someone who has adopted it and checked it off his list without diving for subtleties.

Preventing starvation: good. Overthrowing the occasional dictator: well, OK. Nation-building: bad.

"Maybe I'm missing something here. I mean, we're going to have kind of a nation-building corps from America? Absolutely not. It needs to be in our vital interest, the mission needs to be clear, and the exit strategy obvious. I'm not so sure the role of the United States is to go around the world and say this is the way it's got to be. I think the United States must be humble . . . in how we treat nations that are figuring out how to chart their own course."

[...]

A man who sincerely has changed his mind about something important ought to hold his new views with less certainty and express them with a bit of rhetorical humility. There should be room for doubt. How can your current beliefs be so transcendentally correct if you yourself recently believed something very different? How can critics of what you say now be so obviously wrong if you yourself used to be one of them?

But Bush is cocksure that active, sometimes military, promotion of American values in the world is a good idea, just as he was, or appeared to be, cocksure of the opposite not long ago.

Yep, rhetorical humility. We remember being shocked when Governor Bush said in the debates that America should act with humility abroad. "That's a damn good idea", we said incredulously. "We can't believe he said that." We should have known that a Bush administration would come up dangerously short in the humility department. And that the moderate tone exhibited by the would-be president during the campaign would slide away as quick as you can say "Florida".