So what if Al Gore had won the last election (and he didn’t - he lost, get over it)? Where would we be with Saddam now?
Should Al have taken over the reigns from Bill Clinton, where would we be with Iraq? The daily bombing runs just continue with no resolution in sight? Perhaps a renewal of inspections? By French rules?
How would Al have solved this problem?
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[sup]He would have invented a solution.[/sup][/ul]
Most likely a new sanctions regime. Possibly coercive inspections. Something appropriate to the minimal threat that Saddam presents.
To even ask the question is to make a mistake. Because the whole scale of the Iraq ‘problem’ is mostly a con job from the Bush administration.
Without their relentless hype and misinformation campaign, there would be no Iraq ‘problem’ that required a solution during a a Gore first term. Probably not during a second term.
Saddam has never threatened the US. He hasn’t threatened anyone outside his own country since he lost Gulf war I. His support of terrorism is limited to Palestine (i.e. no threat to the US). His weapons programs are making negative progress on most fronts. (i.e. he had more weapons and more successful programs 12 years ago than today). Most experts think He has no nuclear weapon program at all. And since a nuke program is the easiest type to detect remotely, this is likely the case.
Hell he hasn’t even been able to control his own airspace since the Gulf war.
A Gore administration would have given proper weight to Iraq instead of manufacturing a crisis. A Gore administration would have had the support of the world as a result of Saddam did begin to represent a realistic threat.
Oh, and Gore did win the election. He just lost the lawsuit. Though perhaps that’s what you meant. I’ll get over it as soon as we have a elected president again.
The reality in which we’d be living had Gore not been gyped out the Presidency would be very different from, and IMO noticably better than, the one we’re in now. It isn’t just that we would not be at war now, although that’s a major thing. Bush has been hard at work trying to give the religious right everything it wants. No Democratic President would try to please that particular constituency.
Good post, Tejota! I’ll never “get over” the Presidency being handed to the guy who came in second.
—Saddam has never threatened the US.—
Not technically true. Trying to kill a former president? Targeting and firing on British and U.S. aircraft policing a U.N. enforced no-fly zone?
Not exactly huge attacks on us, but certainly not a matter of sitting peacefully around either.
A former president. Who was not in the US at the time. And there’s some question whether he was really the target of that bomb in the first place. Certainly he was nowhere near the explosion when it went off. If he tried to attack GHWB, then it was personal rather than an attack on the US; He waited until after Bush left the government to act.
As for firing on US and British aircraft. They were violating his airspace at the time. Saddam (impotently) defending his airspace is never going to be a threat to the US.
‘Coercive Inspections’? What a stupid concept. And gee, new sanctions would do the trick, I bet. Nevermind that we catch undeserved flak from the unwashed masses regarding the current sanctions, lets try some more?
Problems should be resolves, not dragged along for decades. GW has the right idea. I’d like to hope that Gore would have shown similiar backbone, but who knows. He probably would have wasted more time with the UN.
So?
No, he wasn’t. It stopped being his airspace when the UN imposed the “no-fly zone” sanctions.
I never though I’d ever see someone stoop so low as to become a Hussein Apologist. At least, not until several decades after the nutjob dies.
Has Gore made any comments on the war lately?
Me too, pathetically naive statements like this one turn my stomach.
ie.
Thank God he didn’t get elected… We could have done better than Bush certainly but not with the spineless appeasement policies described here. Sanctions? Coercive inspections? Give me a break. What’s next… a group hug?
NO! the UN has never supported the no fly zone. That was a purely arbitary decision by the US and Britain. The no fly zone has no legitamancy in International Law and Iraq had every “right” to shoot at the planes violating its airspace.
As to being an apologist for Saddam, I never thought I would be until pushed by ill-informed posters and aggressive US foreign policy
I don’t know the timing of this incident of which you speak, but to my knowledge the “no-fly” zones originally were set up by the US/UK and sanctioned by the UN only long after they were a fact.
Anyone?
scm1001:
Aha! Thanx for the info.
That is the difficult part of being the only members of the Security Council who actually do anything. Sometimes we have to do things like establish our own ceasefire agreements. We contacted Cameroon, Syria, and Pakistan, they were in dispose.
Quite simply, Gore would’ve understood that Iraq agreed to UN resolutions. There are no agreements between Iraq and the US. Therefore, only the UN (and not the US) has the authority to determine if any of Iraq’s actions violate the resolutions. And more importantly, only the UN can determine whether these violations warrant any military action.
Bush understands this too. He just chooses to ignore it.
Beagle,
The US is big enough to do what it wants, e.g. invade countries, set up no fly zones etc without UN support etc. However, it should not then go on and on about Iraq breaking UN resolutions, and it shouldn’t be suprised when someone shoots back
What, nobody has said “He’d make a plan and he’d follow through / That’s what Albert Gore would do”?
No, seriously, US foreign policy would have kept on the same course it had been since 1945. Iraq would have remained an annoying but contained back-burner issue, as it had been since 1991. The anti-terror campaign, if 9/11 had happened at all (ref. Bush’s disdain for tracking the Al Qaeda threat he had been briefed on), would have been an international cooperative effort and the main focus of the efforts of the civilized world. He wouldn’t have been able to even consider a massive military campaign, because he and Clinton were engaged in gutting the military they hated back to total ineffectiveness (insert smilie here). And there would be a host of RW yammerers blasting his patriotism and integrity, while constantly on the search for gotchas.
Dammit, Al, quit screwin’ around and get yer butt back in here.
T’hell with Gore. The person we need now is Rudy.
Sua
—I never though I’d ever see someone stoop so low as to become a Hussein Apologist.—
I guess you weren’t born yet when he was our big brutal buddy, from Carter to Reagan.