President Al Gore Would've Invaded Iraq As Well.

1. I say he would and a couple of websites agree with me.
   
   Conventional wisdom says
   
   President Bush invaded Iraq.
   President Gore would not have.
   
   I think that thinking is flawed and here's why:
   
   1) Al Gore was part of an administration that bombed Iraq off and own for 8 years as well as launching attacks against several other countries.
   2) Al Gore apparently endorsed regime change in Iraq.
   3) Al Gore's VP would've been Joe Liebermann, one of the most hawkish Democrats around.
   4) Al Gore would've known how effectively Bill Clinton used bombing Iraq just days before the 1996 election to "run out the clock" vs. Bob Dole.
   5) Gore would've received the same intelligence data that Bush did. And given that the CIA Director was a Democratic appointee might've taken it even more to heart.
   6) Al Gore enthusiastically supported the 1991 war against Iraq.
   
   
   
   http://www.salon.com/2011/08/30/gore_president_ir
   
   http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news...what-it-tells-us-about-syria/article14105322/

The Globe and Mail piece is a book review of one man's opinion, and the Salon article doesn't say what you claim it says.

P.S. I'm not a Gore supporter, but you'll have to do better in citing other opinions to bolster yours.

That is the way I read the Salon article. Twice. And they are known as tending to support liberals and Democrats.

So? No amount of hypothetical shitty decisions vindicate any of the actual shitty decisions Bush made here in the real world.

I disagree! Dropping a bomb might raise the global temperature
.0000000000000000000000000001 of a degree over 75,000 years.
He wouldn't dare risk that.

If you wish to defend some course of action by Y, you have to do better than "X would've done the same thing."

Because even if you can prove X would've done the same, if you haven't shown that course of action was wise, all you've done is prove that X would've made the same bad decision as Y.

(I say this as someone who supported the war.)

Yup. Classic appeal to authority.

"Might" is not the same as "would."

It's another example of the problem the far right seems to have with the nuances of English as a First Language.

http://www.gwu.edu/~action/2004/gore/gore092302sp.html

Based on Gores comments from the time I think it's hard to say where he would have gone. His attitude is very much one of any action needing to have wide international support, so I think you would have seen more time spent on UN negotiations.

Beyond that, hard to say once you get too far down a hypothetical timeline. I suspect limited bombing attacks against suspected weapons sites, but no boots on the ground.

I surprisingly agree with everyone so far, Gore would not have invaded Iraq. Iraq was Jr's payback for Iraq I.

Why would W want payback for the Gulf War? We crushed the Iraqi army in that one.

Yeah, that doesn't make much sense.

Because Sadam was supposed to be our ally in the 80s.

Yes, but we turned on him, really.

That's what some of us were trying to tell some of you back in '02, but you couldn't hear us past the War Machine.

We also reminded you of Dubya's own words:

One month to the day after 9/11. Even Dayton wouldn't argue that Saddam was responsible for 9/11.

But you guys weren't listening. You were mesmerized by Colin Powell's UN Traveling Dog & Pony Show. It's a bit disingenuous of you to play "We knew it all along" now.

The hardliners thought Poppy should have leveled Baghdad in '91 and brought back Saddam's head on a platter. Junior's whole purpose was to be writ larger in the history books or, in language he'd understand: "See, Daddy? Mine are bigger!"

He was never an ally, as he was allied to the Soviet Bloc, and an Arab National Socialist. Almost all his weapons were Russian, Chinese, or French.

In any event, I'm glad Al Gore wasn't President and thus wasn't in a position to direct a war against Iraq, because we'd all be speaking Arabic now.

Not saying it's Justin's, just going by W's logic.

I never said otherwise. Saddam invaded Kuwait, and that brought our relationship to an end.

What Bush says there is accurate and, contrary to your insinuation, Bush never made the claim that Saddam was responsible for 9/11. The War in Iraq was part of a larger strategy of addressing the radical, militant, extremist, and destabilizing pathologies in the region. That work is unfinished as the Taliban remain a force in Afghanistan, al-Qaida is reconstituting, and ISIS is growing powerful.

My position now is the same as it was then.

Wow, that's really a deeply nuanced historical viewpoint.

I don't give a shit on whether Gore would have invaded Iraq or not because he never was president so it's a pointless What If? exercise.

Al Gore was president?

I must've missed that.....

The attack on Iraq had the effect of decreasing stability and was a massive boon to extremist organisations, who are much more powerful in the region now than they ever were. This is just reheated propaganda.

What does it matter now?

Because reasons. Actually, I think Dayton started this thread because he's been getting pummeled in two other threads and he's hoping that by starting this thread he can deflect attention away from his flailings in those threads.

Still waiting for you to answer my logistics questions, Dayton.

So you're advocating for Iraq War III?

It's already happening. We're conducting ongoing combat operations against ISIS and we're sending the 82nd Airborne, because the situation has deteriorated so badly since our withdrawl from the country.

Hmmm.... As long as we're in Fantasy World™, I say that 9/11 would never have happened since President Gore would never have ignored the Presidential Daily Breifing on August 6 2001. He would've taken Terrorism Czar Richard Clarke more serious.

And it doesn't matter who was President because the Iraqis told the US to leave and refused to sign a status of forces agreement. This is largely because Malaki had Fina cial backing from Iran and Iran wanted the US out. I don't see any US President being able to change that fact.

White House and State Department bungling all but made them refuse to sign the status of forces agreement by denying their government time to work their political allies, and then Obama's envoy said a few incendiary things about it which the Iraqi media picked up and which got the Iraqi public royally pissed off. The Obama Administration followed up by making immunity the central public issue so the ministers were unwilling or unable to sign off. Of course that had been preceded by cutting the numbers of permanent US troops down to a few thousand despite the insistence of Iraq's government that that was far too few to provide any benefits to Iraq's security and stability. Instead of the carrot and stick approach, or the velvet glove approach, or the sugar and honey approach, the US left a flaming bag of dog poop on their porch.

Bush had no problem getting them to sign the SOFA in 2008, but he wasn't staffing state with high-functioning retards who are openly mocked throughout the world.

@gturner : Don't forget the Wikileaks revelation of the US warcrimes! That's why the Americans were insisting on immunity, and why they didn't get it.

Nope. Otherwise we'd have lost all the SOFA's in the region, yet it was never even an issue, and the agreement was rejected before the major Wikileaks got leaked.

Some American diplomats have said that yeah, State trying to make them take a premature stand on that issue was really stupid, and it backfired, unless losing the SOFA agreement was the goal, which is not a bit unlikely.

The US was not engaged in combat elsewhere in the region.

Wikileaks released their Iraq documents on 22nd October 2010. Negotiations failed for a new SOFA in 2011, amidst Iraqi demands that US personnel be answerable in Iraqi courts. You're lying. Again.