Hmmmm, Allende in Chile?
Ayup. And Maurice Bishop in Grenada. And then there was that little proxy war in Nicaragua . . . The U.S. hasn’t “taken out” Castro, but not for lack of trying.
And I still suspect our hands aren’t clean WRT to the 2002 attempt to oust Hugo Chavez. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venezuelan_coup_attempt_of_2002#Allegations_of_U.S._involvement
Isn’t that obvious by now? E.g., Afghanistan is still a basket case (where many actually remember the Soviet intervention as comparing favorably with what they’ve got now), most of the world hates us, etc., etc. . . .
Kerry voted to authorize the use of military force in Iraq. And then after it became clear that Iraq did not have vast stockpiles of WMD lying around, he said that even knowing then what he knows now, he still would have voted for the authorization. So I’m not really sure how you can argue that Kerry would not have invaded Iraq.
And I’m a little confused as to how you think we could have achieved Gore’s avowed policy of regime change without invading Iraq. In the months after September 11th (and just after Afghanistan), he called for a “final reckoning” with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, called Hussein a “virulent threat in a class by itself,” and suggested the US should consider ways to oust Hussein. And then 7 months later, when Bush was actually calling for just such a final reckoning, Gore gave a speech that was [url=]pretty much all over the place. He said that the invasion of Iraq was a distraction from the war on terror, and also said:
He said that we might be violating international law because we’re invading without being threatened by Iraq, and he also said:
As to whether we should have invaded when we did or waited longer, Gore’s position was … er, uh, … both:
He also criticizes the administration’s rush to war without further discussion, and its attempts to discuss the war (which are seen as politically motivated).
In other words, it looks to me like Gore was tacking to find the most politically viable course of action. This is the type of speech that criticizes the administration from both sides, so that no matter what ends up happenening, Gore can claim “I told you so.”
In other words, it looks to me like Gore supported the idea of invasion right up until the time that Bush supported invasion. Then he chose to oppose whatever Bush was doing. So I don’t know what he’d have done. However, based on his pre-Bush rhetoric, I think he saw Iraq as a “virulent threat” with whom there must be a “final reckoning,” and I think he thought that Iraq wouldn’t be deterred from its intention to get WMD. So if he were President, and intel crossed his desk saying that Iraq had “vast stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons,” I think he would have supported invasion as a “final reckoning.”
YMMV.
I disagree with that. Ahmedinejad isn’t a puppet. He’s a famous and very popular (or even populist) politician on his own. He benefits from a large support. He isn’t a spokeperson of the “mullahs”, either. The guide of the revolution himself isn’t too thriled about him, according to many sources.
If he were to die, of course, the “mullahs” wouldn’t lose their grasp. But the new president wouldn’t be a copycat.
Also, “the mullahs” aren’t all the same, with the same views. The former Iranian president, considered more progressive and certainly more open to dialog with the west was a religious leader too. One of the most popular opposition figure, who at a time was expected to succeed Khomeyni, is also definitely a “mullah” , an early supporter of an islamic state in Iran and still basically under house arrest.
Because voting for authorization of what was (at that time) a very popular war is not the same as proposing and planning it in the first place.
“Regime change” was Clinton’s policy. It meant he supported the idea of getting rid of Saddam, but wasn’t actually going to invade and do it because he knew, as I’m sure Gore did, that it would be very complicated and not worth the cost when you consider that Saddam was not a threat to the country.
Again, Gore (who had no access to the information that Bush, or even the Senate, did) was trailing a popular sentiment, not creating policy as President.
I don’t think Gore would have received that intel. I don’t think he would have put people in place to tell him that that “final reckoning” was justified because it was already what he wanted to do.
Fair enough. But what makes you think he would not have proposed and planned it? Because all the evidence (at least, all the evidence I’ve seen) seems points to the idea that when it was suggested, he thought it was a good idea. And if he were President and he was getting the same intelligence that Bush was, even if he hadn’t come up with the idea on his own, it’s likely that it would have been proposed to him.
I never imagined that Bush came up with the idea to invade Iraq on his own. Rather, I always imagined that the suggestion came from others in the intelligence and military communities, as well as the politicos within his own admin. Obviously, I have no evidence to support this other than a familiarity with the way our government usually seems to work.
I think this is a strong point, right up until the last clause. Regime change was Clinton’s policy, and even if Gore didn’t support it, he worked for Clinton, and therefore had to support it publicly.
But Gore’s statements even after he was out of office suggested that he thought Saddam was a threat to the country. In fact, he called the threat posed by Iraq a “virulent threat in a class by itself,” and suggested that it was such a great threat that a “final reckoning” would have to occur. In the speech that I linked, Gore himself says that invasion would be complicated, but that it would be worth it because Saddam was such a threat to our country. He may not have supported it at that moment (that’s not clear in his speech), but he certainly supported it at some point, whether right then or one year down the line.
You’re right that Gore no longer had code word clearance after he left office. So it’s reasonable to assume that he didn’t see everything Bush did. But are you aware of any information that Bush had access to, but we didn’t, that would have led Gore to the conclusion that Iraq was actually not a threat? I’m not aware of anything like that.
This is interesting. Why don’t you think Gore would have received the same intel that Bush did? Do you think the CIA (as well as intelligence agencies in Russia and elsewhere) would have reached a different conclusion regarding Iraq’s WMDs if Gore was in office? If so, what are you basing that on?
Moreover, the “final reckoning” quote comes from Gore, not Bush. So either Gore had people in place telling him that a “final reckoning” was justified, or he thought that himself without anyone telling him.
As Kerry has explained time and again, during and after the 2004 campaign, he initially voted for the AUMF to put some teeth into the U.S. demand that Hussein admit UN weapons inspectors to prove he had no WMDs. He never intended the invasion should actually go forward. That ain’t flip-flopping, that’s policymaking, which is often a complex and subtle business. But all most people remember is “I voted for it before I voted against it.”
The fact that I think the Bush administration was singularly obsessed with Iraq. We know that Rumsfeld was interested in attacking Iraq as a response to September 11. As I said, regime change was Clinton and Gore’s policy for years, and while they bombed the country on a few occasions, it was clear that they weren’t going to put the policy into action by going in and overthrowing the Iraqi government.
I think Bush’s people picked and chose information to support the conclusion they wanted. If they had evaluated the evidence evenhandedly, at the very least I think Bush would have been forthcoming about the obvious ambiguities in that information. Instead, we got that “smoking gun… in the shape of a mushroom cloud” bullshit. Granted that we’re both interpreting what we saw.
I think that without the deliberate spin Bush’s people put on it, it would have been plain to see they had nothing. I don’t know why anybody would have needed a security clearance to see that the war rationale was weak, but there you have it. Despite Gore’s strong words, I don’t think we can assume he would have invaded Iraq based on that.
Gore made that speech on February 12, 2002. You know what happened two weeks earlier? Bush’s “axis of evil” State of the Union speech. Bush set the tone there.
On the contrary, I suspect that invading Iraq was very clearly Bush’s idea (prompted by Wolfowitz’s term paper and the writings of other neo-cons) long before anyone in the intelligence or military communities wanted any part of it.
Bush was on record during the campaign for the 2000 election that he thought, not only that we should have marched on Baghdad in the First Gulf War, but that we still ought to consider overthrowing Hussein. There are several reports of his response to the WTC/Pentagon attacks being one of “find the trail to Hussein” and when he was told that there was no such trail, he refused to believe it.
In contrast, the Joint Chiefs argued against an invasion and the administration had to set up the Office of Special Projects under Rumsfeld, removing it from the control of the CIA and the NSA, in order to dig up and spin enough information to set up the charade of finding probable cause in Iraq.
This was very clearly a pet project of Bush from the beginning. This is not Jack Kennedy stepping into office and gullibly believing the CIA when they told him just weeks into his term that the Bay of Pigs had been given the green light by Ike.
He did say in one of the Presidential debates, however, that he was opposed to using American troops nation-building. Actually I guess you could argue that he kept that promise. :rolleyes:
Arguably, Iran expended so much effort duping Bush into war with Iraq that they ruined their chance of ridding the world of GWB and successfully blaming it on Al Qaeda.
Regime changes have been American policy for a long time. Iran was a democratic country until 1953 when the leader said he was going to nationalize the oil fields. The CIA set up a new government to restore the fields to the oil companies.
In 1954 Guatamala was going to nationalize the farming. United Fruit managed to get the US to take over the government and restore the fields to them. Hawaii earlier in the century was taken over to aid Dole Pinapple and other American business. Regime change is to make corporations safer and richer. If the people suffer so what.