“The Decider” appears to disagree with you on that point in no uncertain terms. As do a host of ideologues pimping the “unitary executive” theory.
IF 9/11 had happened had the Supreme Court elected Gore instead of Bush, I don’t believe the Iraq War would have happened. I think the Afghan invasion would have happened no matter who was president, but the Iraq war was a goal of Bush’s even before the 2000 election. He was going to get Saddam not to avenge his father but to outdo his father. But I think if Gore was president in 2001, the 9/11 plot would have been foiled and the Constitution would still be intact.
I think if Gore wanted to “secure the oil”, he would’ve found a better approach. For instance, if Saddam was screwing with the supply by turning the spigot on and off, one remedy would be for the US government to buy up exactly the amount of oil that Iraq produces. So, the oil market is stable as if Iraq were not a player at all (the US acts as a capacitor of sorts). The US can simply pump the oil into government land, where it sits until we choose to pump it out. The cost of this is less than the cost of invasion. The downside is that it means the US could be accused of enriching a brutal dictator. Still better than the current Iraq mess, I’d say.
Let me reiterate this important fact: Invading Iraq is not the only path to securing oil supplies.
As for the team concept, remember that Cheney is on the team and therefore, Bush’s administration was motivated to fuel Halliburton contracts and spend money in a costly war to feed the military industrial complex. And Colin Powell was on the team and he was convinced to present questionable evidence in front of the UN (Powell didn’t convince Bush to follow the Powell doctrine regarding lessons learned from Vietnam). Rice is on the team, and this educated former Provost of Stanford was convinced to go right along with the rest of the Bush administration.
Sorry. The ringing in your ears is not an argument.
Oil does not really “ring true” to me except as a pleasant by-product of securing the entire Middle East “for democracy” as proposed in the Wolfowitz term paper.
(And Gore would have listened to the economic folks who had repeatedly pointed out that the oil Iraq can pump is inadequate to pay off their existing debt, much less sufficient to be hijacked to pay for our war.)
That’s pretty much what I said…Saddam was not complying with hardly any UN resolutions therefore they went in to secure, sell, and protect the oil fields there for profit among other tangible and intangible reasons.
It wasn’t just the “adminstration” that failed to pay attention to the threat. It has been shown by the 9-11 commission that there were failures across the board of the entire government…info sharing between the FBI and CIA for example. I hardly think that just because Gore was in the White House that all of those problems would not have existed. All those problems didn’t crop-up in the 8 months that Bush was in office did they?
That’s what I mean too…the invasion of Iraq was destined to happen because of ALL the “pleasant” by-products of the operation. Getting Saddam. Taking the fight to AQ, securing a nice oil field, establishing a base in the ME to have a presence in the ME for the next…10 years or so…giving blood money to various businesses and countries that “supported” the invasion. All of those things sound plausible enough to me and taken as a whole it was enough to convince enough people that we were going into Iraq no matter who was president.
Er… you realize that the invasion is a miserable failure, right?
Saddam wasn’t a threat to us, AQ is orders of magnitude stronger now, it ain’t our oil, they won’t let us have a base there and screw those other countries and businesses.
Seriously, are you honestly proposing that Al Freakin’ Gore would have gone on a useless, expensive, and murderous vanity war? Al Gore would have killed upwards of 100k Iraqi’s who would be breathing right now? AG would support and create a country where AQ could rally support from across the region, creating new followers and adherents with every bomb we place off target and every civilian we accidentally shoot?
I’m gonna have to borrow that line. 
I don’t think it is as simple as what’s laid out in the OP.
However, there is that inconvenient truth that the administration Gore was a member of engaged in military action against Iraq. And the oil-for food mess, continual cease-fire and no-fly zone violations and the breakdown of sanctions was going to be a problem for whoever became president in January of 2001.
Would Gore have engaged in preemptive war? I don’t know. But a case for war existed, frankly, from 1991 onward and became stronger all of the time. I don’t think America could have dodged this for much longer in any case.
Bush’s people pushed hard for the Invasion of Iraq. There was no groundswell for that war, and there was no movement in Congress to go to war. With the Republicans in Control of Congress (both Houses after the 2002 elections), they would more likely have opposed a Democratic move to invade Iraq. Not that Gore supported the invasion in the first place.
I might buy the argument that a second war with Iraq was likely (although not inevitable) to happen at some point in the future, but don’t buy the argument that it would’ve happened this quickly. More likely it would’ve been much later, if the US and Brits abandoned the No Fly Zones, SH started to re-arm, and then posed an actual threat to one his neighboring countries (Saudi Arabia, for example).
Based on what?
No, the FBI computer problems long predated Bush. However, all that was needed was leadership that would have caused the FBI management to beat the bushes for intelligence on the upcoming attack, which was actually there. Clinton did that for the LAX plot, and broke it. People do what their bosses think is important. Bush clearly thought vacation was far more important than making sure someone did something about this danger, so there weren’t even any meetings about it until September, and 9/11 happened.
The discovery by the UN inspectors that Saddam didn’t have WMDs made the case for war stronger? WTF are you talking about?
No cite, but I recall reading that when Bush took office, FEMA or some agency warned him of three possible disasters that might happen during his term and for which he had better be prepared: A terrorist attack on New York City, a hurricane striking New Orleans, and an earthquake in San Francisco.
I’m glad I don’t live in San Francisco.
I always get scared when I see this topic debated because, in the space of five years, there are always people who seem to have completely forgotten what the pre-invasion period was like. The push for war was top down and came from the administration. There was comparatively little resistance because the target was Iraq, that much is true. But there was no great shout of “hey, we need to invade somebody else!” that went up from the public. Everybody knew Iraq was bad, sure, but it was mostly forgotten at that point. Why would a Gore administration have created the same push for war the Bush administration did? ManiacMan, are you arguing the DNC would have pressured Gore to do it? Or Gore’s advisers? Why?
Not a huge priority to anyone but the neocons, who wanted revenge. There are nasty dictators all over the world.
Which we did by taking resources away from actually fighting AQ in Afghanistan and put them in a place where there was no AQ at the time, Iraq. Have you watched nothing but Faux News for the past 5 years?
which we didn’t need to secure. Oil is fungible. If Saddam sells a lot to anyone, the prices on the global market will go down. Oil production in Iraq after our incompetent fuckup is still down. If you run the numbers, you’ll find that oil could never have paid for the war anyhow - except maybe under Rummy’s assumption of a cheap, short one.
One of the reasons for the 9/11 attack was our base in Saudi Arabia. Plus,. we’d have all the bases we’d want in Afghanistan, where the invasion actually made sense. We’d no doubt be doing better against the Taliban if we weren’t in Iraq.
The businesses were not exactly Gore supporters, so I doubt he’d do anything for them. But, do you have a cite that business interests had anything to do with the invasion? Haliburton profited from it, but I doubt that Haliburton inspired it. Cheney’s insanity didn’t come from being CEO of Haliburton, but predated it.
The Hayward fault, which is about a mile from my home, causes a major earthquake about every 140 years. It is 140 years since the last one. :eek:
I hope it holds off until I retire and get the hell out of here.
As you admit, we had achieved a status quo that had held for ten years. Why couldn’t it have lasted for another ten? The Cuban Embargo, the NATO/Warsaw Pact face-off, the Korean DMZ, and the China/Taiwan divide are all potentionally hot situations that still managed to avoid crossing the line into war for decades.
Neocon War Manual. Chapter 7, page 26, third paragraph from the bottom:
“You’re looking at it backwards, the onus is to provide reasons *not *to invade a country.”
More realistically I suppose the average neocon warhawk is desperate to be absolved the stigma of wretched failure that follows this administration like Pigpen’s dustcloud. “Oh sure Iraq is a disaster, but it would have happened anyway, so we’re really not to blame. Tee Hee!”