General Wesley Clark’s critique of the Bush presidency, to judge by the interview the general gave to Joshua Micah Marshall of talkingpointsmemo.com, is that it is too ideological. “There’s an underlying ideological drive that overrides pragmatism,” General Clark claimed. “It’s the sort of doctrinaire ideology that doesn’t really understand the country that we’re living in.”

It’s all reminiscent of Michael Dukakis’s losing claim in 1988 that the election then was about “competence, not ideology.”

But the opposite of ideology doesn’t have to be competence or pragmatism. It can just as easily be fecklessness. General Clark may disagree with Mr. Bush’s ideology, but it seems like a strange line of attack on Mr. Bush: vote against him, he’s too faithful to his principles.

It’s one thing to object to the substance of Mr. Bush’s ideology, to say, for instance, that he’s too committed to economic liberty at home or to political freedom abroad. But to criticize him for being ideological? It’s one thing to criticize the Bush doctrine, it’s another thing to criticize him for being doctrinaire.

By our lights, Mr. Bush has been not too ideological, but not ideological enough. Instead of sticking to his policy of promoting freedom abroad, for instance, he’s been inconsistent. America liberated Iraq, but the forces of freedom in Iran and North Korea still await our help. And while promoting economic freedom at home with tax cuts, he’s stopped short of achieving sweeping reform and simplification of the tax code, or of winning even a partial privatization of social security. It gives us something to look forward to in a second Bush term.

As for Mr. Clark, his comments about the Salt II treaty, disparaging the work of the Committee on the Present Danger, indicate that he has an ideology of his own. Reading of his views, you have to pinch yourself to remember the era he is talking about. President Carter landed in the White House at the end of two generations of floundering in the face of the Soviet Union, a period when the ideology that held sway was that of peaceful coexistence. The Committee for the Present Danger was the group that recognized the catastrophe that this represented to our national security and advanced the idea that the Kremlin camarilla could be confronted.

General Clark may be right that one of the seminal moments in the struggle was when it became apparent that the Senate would refuse to ratify a flawed Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty. But he seems oblivious to the fact that with a recognition of the dangers of Salt II, came the recognition that the wiser policy was an end to mutually assured destruction and the beginning of the idea of missile defense. With this came the notion that Communist hegemony could be rolled back.

Following from all this came the peaceful, triumphant American victory in the Cold War. These great strategic decisions were made by the most ideological president in recent times, Ronald Reagan, leading a bipartisan Congress to stand, in the end, with him. If what General Clark means to stand for is the idea that these great decisions were in error, he is going come to be associated with an idea no grander than to a return to Carterism.