Goring the Ox

The more I've heard this "at least Saint Algore would've kept us out of Iraq" stuff over the years, the less convincing I find it. Let's at least accept as a given that Gore and his security team would have been astute enough to not blithely ignore a memo telegraphing the culprit and mode of 9/11; i.e., it would have either been prevented or (if you're a LIHOP) not allowed to happen.

(Forget the MIHOP theories; these people couldn't put their fingers together in the dark, much less steer remote-controlled jets into skyscrapers. Still, there are at least as many CYA actions as one might find around the JFK assassination, thus lending empathy if not actual credibility to the more lurid speculations out there. People may be speculating a bit too wildly, but they are probably correct in assuming that they have not been told much of the truth at all.)

Anyway, so no 9/11 perhaps, but that does not automatically translate to no war in Afghanistan and/or Iraq. The Taliban, aided by Pakistan's ISI, were in the process of committing a great many serious human rights violations in any case, well before 9/11. The country was being seriously destabilized, per Pakistan's express desires, as it regards Afghanistan as a convenient buffer state against India. It was a humanitarian crisis waiting to happen, and Gore is exactly the type who would have looked for his own private Kosovo with which to bolster his own humanitarian cred.

As for Iraq, the Clinton administration had ramped up its bombing and strafing runs there in its waning months, and had been studiously indifferent to the damage wrought by sanctions throughout the '90s. Whatever poll ratings Fatboy had managed to retain, it was more from popular revulsion at his hypocritical accusers, rather than any naturally accruing goodwill. He had little or no political capital left with which to operate outside the constraints of the Delay/Gingrich douchebags in Congress.

And that's what a hobbled-from-the-gate Gore would have been dealt anyway, had he chosen to fight a little harder for what was his. Look what insufferable winners the Baker junta turned out to be; what kind of sore losers are they? It would have been a contested victory by a candidate who lost his home state by 4%, paired up with a hostile Congress that would have scapegoated him at every opportunity because that's what they do. And Gore is exactly the type of bien pensant doofus to let himself get rolled into a bad idea for putatively humanitarian reasons.

Of course, a Gore administration would not have gone to war the way the Cheney administration did, especially without having 9/11 as a pretext. It wouldn't have been poaching laundered documents from Italian intelligence to frame Saddam Hussein, or trotting Colin Powell in front of the UN to conjure specters of havoc wrought by remote control airplanes launching out of Basra. It would have been more artfully done, to be sure. With a Chimpco production, the assumption was that the Iraqis would shower us with flowers 'n' candy; with the Gorons, we would have been the ones with treats.

But even the "success" of Kosovo is heavily qualified, with a young, underemployed, seething populace still torn by ethnic strife, no economy to speak of, and an enormous US base plopped in the center of things. It seems to be a great transition point for the trafficking of heroin and girls, but other than that, not so much.

The great thing about speculative history is that anyone can pull pretty much anything out of their ass. I don't know that Gore would have invaded Afghanistan and/or Iraq anymore than they know that he wouldn't have. But conditions in each situation were such that he could have found cause or pretext to do so, and Lieberman has proven to be a complete fucking weasel. There's no point in trying to make one side or the other attempt to prove a negative, but their unconditional presumption of impossibility is really something to behold, given Gore's own track record, and that of the administration he served.

Been close to eight interminable years of this N8r-b8ting schtick, and not once have I ever seen a tacit admission or even acknowledgement of some inescapable facts: that with Gore as president, you would also have had a dickhead like Lieberman as VP; that Gore was a bad candidate with a worse campaign, and would have entered office with absolutely zero juice and a motivated, hostile, radical congress to contend with; and most importantly, that many more registered Democrats voted for George Fucking Walker Bush than their anointed saint.