I think the "Bush should have put more resources into Afghanistan" argument was wrong, as proved by Obama.
The last few years I've come to realise that for the most part, it's the system, man. As such, I find it hard these days to get too mad at either Obama or Bush, though the former is a disappointment, and the latter was an utter shit.
I am still getting more angry at George Bush every day, although perhaps I too am not singling him out as much as I used to.
I saw him talking in an ad on Discovery for some 9/11 festival or sumpin, and I wanted to punch out the tv instantly.
Katrina?:He ethnic-cleansed New Orleans and stole the reconstruction money.
Economy? He, Bernanke, Geithner, Paulson, and Obama sold us out to the banks in October 2008.
There was a recent SCOTUS decision that says prosecution requires specific, credible threats against public officials, and yet I would rather keep my dark fantasies to myself, or use metaphors like "getting all fucking medieval on his ass"
To my grave, Shrub. Past my death, let these archives haunt your grandchildren.
For the most part though I think a lot of Bush's presidency looks even worse to me now than it did at the time. In particular, the tax cuts were way way worse than I realized at the time (which isn't to say that I ever thought they were a good idea), and not only was the war in Iraq a terrible idea (which took me too long to realize) but I'm now retroactively against the war in Afghanistan (and proactively against whatever the next war is).
4: This may sound crazy, but I'm half convinced we would have had an Iraq war even with a Gore presidency. Probably no tax cuts, though.
2:We sustain or erode the system with acts large and small every day. It is not something outside us.
This post, this thread, these comments are small acts.
Show us the way, bob. Take us to the Squirrel Prince.
1: My belief was always that Bush should have focused more on Afghanistan because then he could have killed Osama relatively quickly, which should have been the point of the war. Based on recent events I still believe this. Expanding the goal of the Afghan war to nation-building was and still is a disaster and was not sold to us as the original goal of the invasion.
I don't see any reason to reevaluate Katrina v-a-v Bush. Remember Florida in late 2004, when federal aid was standing by in full readiness, for election reasons? Proper response was not beyond administrative capacity; it was all the Bush-enabled and -inspired slurry of politics, racism, and incompetence.
Not quite "unfair," but I think quite wrong all the bloggy invocations of Reagan as somehow better than Bush, usually citing tax policy. I'm pretty sure if the two had been president at opposite times, things would have happened the same, as they represented the same movement at different stages. (Less so with foreign policy, possibly.)
Whoever was actually out there saying "Bush = Hitler" was dead wrong. Turns out he's not Hitler, but someone entirely different.
I can't think of anything I personally thought about him that I'd back off in retrospect -- anything that's changed about my political beliefs since '08 has been that I think worse of Democrats, not better of Republicans.
Remember Florida in late 2004, when federal aid was standing by in full readiness, for election reasons? Proper response was not beyond administrative capacity; it was all the Bush-enabled and -inspired slurry of politics, racism, and incompetence.
This.
Remember too that W put Karl Rove in charge of Katrina reconstruction, and that Karl Rove's goals are all political. So where before we had a major city that was majority-black and strongly Democratic (albeit corrupt), we now have a city that is less black and less Democratic.
Mission Accomplished.
No, my hatred for W has not lessened one jot. He earned it fair and square in he first place, and I shall never forget nor omit to give the ignorant swaggering AWOL torturer his due.
5: Dsquared agrees with you. In his case, I attribute it to brain damage from parasites transmitted in owl pellets.
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Looks like the Libyan war might be concluded any minute. AJE has reports that Gaddafi's presidential-guard brigade has surrendered, and that Saif al-Islam Gaddafi has been captured.
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12: My reasoning for it is that, whoever the president was, there were some extraordinarily powerful interests (Oil, Israel, MIC, etc) that had been advocating regime change long before most Americans had ever heard of W. It was not a specifically GOP thing. The centrist wing of the Democratic party of which Gore was part was infected to the core with that crap.
12: I'm not saying it's a lock, but I don't think the idea is unsupportable.
Huh. There's going to be an interesting question if it turns out well (in the war's over, rebels won, we stop doing anything military sense, not requiring anything more onerous than that for 'well'). Do we give the administration credit for having shown good judgment when they decided to get involved, or do we think they got lucky?
My prejudices lean toward "got lucky", but if there's arguments the other way, it'd be interesting.
16 to 13.
To 14 and 15, I think you're ignoring the strength of the countervailing forces. First, starting a big war is a huge popularity boost for the executive -- do you think that the GOP would still have been in favor? Second, some of the Dem opposition was partisan, but a real segment of it was sincere, and that would still have been in place. Third, think of all the lying the Bush admin had to do to sell it -- could a Gore administration have pulled that off? I think internal dissension and media backbiting would have made it impossible.
It's really not that I'm convinced St. Al just wouldn't have done it (although I don't think he would have, if I were guessing), it's that a Democratic president couldn't have pulled it off.
On Katrina, it is clearly the case that under Clinton FEMA was functional and well-run and that Bush chose to turn it back into useless patronage. Now how much of the Katrina situation is FEMA's fault is certainly unclear, and there's plenty of fault to go around, but I don't see any reason to let Bush off the hook.
I see no reason to expect that the rebels will be significantly better than Gaddafi. That said the "provide air support for an already existing side in a civil war which would otherwise be losing" does seem to be an effective way to get the rebels into power. It worked in Afghanistan and seems to be working in Libya.
Is there some reason that Bush's handling of Katrina should be reevaluated? I mean, there are whole books devoted to what a cock-up the federal response was, in large measure because the people put in charge by Bush were political hacks rather than disaster-response pros. Which isn't to say that there wasn't plenty of blame to go around, enough blame even to encompass state and local officials as well. But again, that was well known at the time. Nothing has changed, has it? Nobody has stumbled across a secret cache of "new" documents demonstrating that New Orleans surrendered to the waves because the Soviets were about to enter the fray, have they?
Also worked in Kosovo. So I don't think you can call it luck. The question is whether it's worth killing another round of civilians with american bombs in order to pick the eventually winning side in a civil war.
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13,16
Farley on Libya
The Left Richard Seymour and commenters on Libya
"Kim Sengupta is reporting for The Independent that a lot of these gains are because the Nafusa Mountain based rebels, who are doing most of the leg work, are now 'receiving training and considerable assistance from Western former forces contractors, who are now planning and accompanying their missions'. So they would seem to be as much victories for various western special forces and intelligence operatives - operating as private contractors for legal reasons - as they are for the rebel forces."
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17: I think not only could he have pulled it off, it would have been easier than it was for Bush. Most of the right would have ultimately gone along - because c'mon, it's taking out Saddam, and it's two years after 9/11 - and the left would have been split, leaving only the hippies in opposition.
I don't think Gore would have invaded Iraq because I don't think Bush would have, either, had it not been for his inner circle of foreign policy advisors (Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rummy... ) who've all had hard-ons for Saddam ever since the first Gulf War was over. Needless to say, those people would not have been in positions of influence under Gore.
23: But look at how the Republicans reacted to Clinton bombing Iraq in 1998. Even after 9/11, I don't think that dynamic would have changed. They would have screamed about Gore not caring about capturing Osama, much more effectively than the Dems' similar plaints.
I remember a decent number of centrist, pro-war Democrats saying things like "we might as well invade Iraq now, because it's inevitable we'll have to do so sometime" and the Madeline Albright wing of the party was all hepped up on humanitarian intervention. For sure the war would have taken a different form, probably later and with a broader international consensus, but I'd put it at at least 50/50 that it would have happened at some point an in some way under President Gore.*
*this doesn't change my view of Bush, who was still IMO an utter disaster in almost every area. Especially Katrina.
I've been really getting back into blaming Reagan for things. It feels comfortable, even homey.
27.1: Don't you think that was rationalization? "I'm supporting this out of political self-interest, let me make it sound it sensible and inevitable?"
I didn't think about Bush much until all this Parry (sic) crap started, and now I can't believe we might do this shit once again- tragedy, farce, etc.
I'm not sure what this does to the Libya justifications. I guess I agree with "we got lucky": Obama was apparently listening to the military and/or intelligence services saying it would be a cakewalk and honestly believing them. No matter how persuasive they were, I don't see how Obama and his staff could have taken it at face value without being saps and/or willing practitioners of perpetual war.
This is all elaborate make-believe, but:
I could see an Iraq war under Gore, but I don't think it would have started the same way. I think you would have seen some kind of compromise position of aggressive inspections (if possible) combined with slow lifting of sanctions.
I don't doubt that Saddam continued to harbor bad thoughts, or whatever he was finally accused of after WMD turned in to WMD-related program activities, and so I figure he'd get caught trying to do something we didn't want him to do with the goods coming in under the more lenient sanctions. And then war. But under those circumstances, I figure you'd see a different kind of coalition.
That's probably wishful thinking, but before the war we did get, both the oil people and the humanitarian groups critical of sanctions were in favor of changing the regime.
29 -- probably in many cases. I was thinking mostly of independent analysts like Ken Pollack and things I heard in private conversations, though, not elected officials.
Oh God, Oh Damn, Oh Shit!
I'd rather be stabbed with an 800-volt cattle prod than read what you just wrote and be asked to align it to a reading and thinking and emotive person.
Your words just could not grate more. I hate you for not knowing more and knowing it better. It's all public record.
Bush was never more than a totem for a machine behind him. He did what he was told and was managed so well he never even had to speak under oath about how he was managed and how little he knew and how little he cared and when he knew or cared.
I was a senior engineer in the Federal Government (a term that used to mean something "good") under Clinton and Bush with day-to-day contact with other senior engineers in every Cabinet Level Agency and many others. The people who keep the lights on are kept to the end.
Clinton made mistakes but one of them wasn't savaging real world knowledge or undermining the utility of vast real-world experience. He kept everybody who knew anything about how everything works.
The people Clinton placed in charge had some notion of how things actually worked and spoke as if they cared about how they would serve the country -- or, Madelyn Albright anyone, the world -- at large. "Give me those ships, we can make a difference."
Bush (and the machine that came with him) quickly and thoughtlessly and recklessly replaced the top three tiers of government with courtiers and bald-faced idiots, people who believed the government should not exist and the quicker it failed at simple tasks the quicker people would vote to dismantle and un-fund it. By quickly and thoughtlessly and recklessly I mean they never paused to consider, "Is this particular function possibly something we should keep?" -- like counter terrorism or emergency management?
I watched senior management officials absolutely adrift at sea, unable to dial a phone on their own to reach their peers (or even know who they were) at other Agencies, unable to use a computer, unable to read a chart or comprehend a graph, unable to read. Do I really need to mention, unable to manage?
Bush replaced people who knew how things worked and cared deeply that they worked, not with people who had different yet competent ideas about how those things worked, but with people who were idiots who didn't think we should even be doing those things -- like counter terrorism and emergency management.
And by idiots I mean people who couldn't have survived by their wits anywhere. They had inherited money, and thus they were the "real" people." They had contributed money to a Bush campaign, but they remained people confused by a phone.
If you want one chart on which to place Clinton folks and Bush folks, it's possibly the ability to use a phone.
Has a serious study (even a longform news article) been done on the role of the oil+gas industry in the run up to Iraq War II? I recall the "no blood for oil" signs, of course, and a lot of Econ 101 pooh poohing of those folks by the usual Econ 101-loving suspects ("everyone sophisticated knows the oil companies could just buy the oil") but I don't recall reading anything very specific about whether big oil was in fact supportive, opposed, or neutral, and how. Does anyone else?
32: This sort of thing seems weird to me, given that it didn't happen under the Clinton administration. An argument that Gore would have started the Iraq war has to be an argument that Gore would have started the Iraq war as a direct consequence of 9/11, doesn't it? It's the only major thing that would have been different.
35: I'm not aware of any, though I'd love to read one, too. Off the top of my head I would guess the difference between regime change and Saddam was the difference between western oil companies getting contracts to extract the oil, and the Iraqi national oil company extracting the oil.
36: Yes, but to quibble on the causation, the relevant interest groups wanted the war. After 9/11 they smell blood in the water and decide to get the current occupant of the White House to set one in motion.
34 voices my thoughts, though mine don't come with personal experience to back them up.
The Obama administration may be disappointing, but one doesn't get the sense that it's been staffed by idiots in quite the same way Bush managed to, say, fuck up FEMA and, post-9/11, rather completely screw up the formation of the Dept. of Homeland Security by pulling resources -- in terms of both funding and staffing -- from other, quite critical, federal agencies.
I don't cut Bush (and company) any slack, and indeed am more appalled by its legacy as time goes on.
I think Obama handled Lilbya in the way he felt he had to. France, England, and Italy had all made substantial contributions to our wars, ones that had very little to do with their own self-interest, and when they needed our help on something that they cared about, Obama felt that we had to step up. I'm not sure I agree with that decision, but I could see why someone who cares about our military alliance with those countries would.
Things seem to be going well, seemingly because Qaddafi really was unpopular enough that the rebels were able to (start/inflame/provoke?) another uprising in the capital city.
Do we really have to rehearse the What Would Gore Have Done? question again?
I suppose I should put my own cards on the table, I basically supported Libya, and still do, and even will, if it all goes south. I have an outcome independent support for American involvement in the war.
36: My memory (which is unreliable especially for the Clinton era which started when I was in high school) is that the course of sanctions made the situation quite different. Not so much that sanctions were different, though they might have been, but that the evaluation after 10 years was starting to look different than after 1-10 years. I seem to remember some of the Western European countries making noises about starting to life them too.
And there were people, likely war-mongerers, arguing that Saddam was just as powerful domestically as before, and he was thumbing his nose at us, and we should do something. This was pre-9/11, I think, in some newsmagazine.
I also vaguely remember Fareed Zakaria writing something, after the war, laying out a similar scenario to the one in 32. I do think that you also need 9/11 or something like it to get a Gore war. But as I say, my imaginary Gore war is not rushed like the one we got. It probably requires an imaginary Gore second term too.
Yep, it's all vague memory and wild imagination for me on this.
It's admittedly about as unimportant a question as could possibly be raised.
Further to 37: IIRC what I read in A Legacy of Ashes several years ago, the main reason for the CIA-backed Iranian coup was that the national oil company wouldn't sell petrol to the UK at below market rates.
I guess 43 is a long yes to 41, but I don't really have much else to say along these lines.
On the original post, I don't think I think about W's presidency differently than I did a few years ago, but I'm glad to say that I think about it a lot less.
41 and 44: I sort of agree, and beg your pardon; I'm a bit of a newb, and don't know what's been beaten to death here.
43: Nothing's impossible, of course. The Gore-would-have-gone-to-war-in-Iraq position mostly gets my back up because of the certainty with which it's stated -- the political situation would have been so very different, that it seems nutty to say that Gore would have invaded Iraq any more than saying he would have invaded Iran, or North Korea. Could have happened, but as you say, you need to do a lot of story-spinning to get there.
Sorry for 41. I understand that it's not an irrelevant question. real ffeJ, it has been beaten to death here, but I was being impertinent and rude.
Whether or not Gore would have gone to war in Iraq is, like all counterfactuals, a question without a definitive answer. But it's not an unimportant one, since it gets to the question of what the real motivating factors behind Iraq War II were. I bow to no one in my belief that the war was a disaster, but I still have a lot of lingering questions about how and why it came to be.
For example: (a) How much of the bad CIA reporting on WMDs were the CIA believing its own bullshit, and how much was pressure from up on high? (b) What percentage of the DC foreign policy establishment had become convinced that, ultimately, an invasion was more likely to bear fruit than continued sanctions? (c) What, in fact (not merely in theory) was the role of various interest groups, including the Israel lobby and the oil companies in pushing for the war?
I don't really know the answers to any of these questions, but they are presumably the kinds of things historians of the war will look at, and thinking about whether or not counterfactual President Gore would have invaded Iraq is a helpful way to frame the analysis.
48: Well, would the political situation have been so very different? This sort of gets to the broader question underlying this specific one: how much does the president matter, really?
35:Serious study? Whatever
The story of Cheney's secret (in that minutes have never been released) meeting with oil execs in summer 2001 that included a map of Iraq's underdeveloped oilfields is very well known.
...
My gut feeling now, backed by some reading and thought, is the Trans-national capitalism requires pseudo-democracy to savage the social welfare systems and maximise exploitation. Dictators are too vulnerable, too populist, too unpredictable, too easy a target for counter-hegemony. Better elected representatives that rip-off the people and work cheap enough that they can be bought and sold.
Egyptians lived better under Nassar.
(a) How much of the bad CIA reporting on WMDs were the CIA believing its own bullshit, and how much was pressure from up on high?
It really had to be pressure, didn't it? So much of it was silly to even a marginally attention-paying layperson.
50: Now you're imagining a world in which historians do extended counterfactuals. Although actually, I think that - aside from economic history, which is sort of its own discipline now - military history is the place you're more likely to find it. We can thank Hitler and the perennial "if no Hitler, then..." question* for that one.
*But what caused Hitler???!! Oh noes, it's all counterfactual all the time.
Read here. The guy teaches at a U.S. military academy. I met him once on a tour from DoS. He radiates knowledge and his wish you shared it.
Slip back into the archives. It's history for god's sake. Learn if you can, learn if you dare, they say.
http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com/
54 -- actually, a certain regular here, or maybe it was his co-blogger, convinced me that counterfactuals are basically necessary to doing decent history and it's a shame that many historians don't realize that.
56: If he hadn't convinced you of that, what kind of a comment would you have made?
51: The political situation would have been very different. It's very easy to blithely say that all politicians are the same, and on some moral level it's perfectly true (depending on what exactly you mean by 'all'), but different things happen depending on which party is in power pushing which policies.
56: Yes, I was thinking of that same post. (It was his co-blogger.)
I'm persuaded that it makes sense according to how we understand causation, but there are so many ways to put together implausible alternatives for comparison purposes that it's hard to see how people in favor of counterfactuals could sustain the work long enough for workable norms to develop. There would be just so much resistance, all pointing to counterfactuals gone awry as a means of dismissing them rather than refining them.
I suppose the Dubster got more shit than he ought, in some sense, to have got for his steely-eyed-rocket-man*-Texan-cowboy-who-clears-brush-yet-is-afraid-of-horses-on-his-campaign-ranch strutting and posturing. Getting all worked up over a politician's personal demeanor, no matter how flimsily imbecilic, seems pretty stupid now.
* A diamond would seem opaque compared to the subtext out of Peggy Noonan's word processor.
58: Sure, clearly there's a difference between the GOP and the Democrats. But the question is, is there sufficient daylight between their propensities to war to have rendered a significantly different outcome? Experts disagree!
53: It really had to be pressure, didn't it?
Sure seems like it. I guess the question is where the pressure came from: the administration, or global corporate powers? It's of course difficult to separate these, but if there's anything I'm understanding in full, for real, during the course of the Obama administration, it's that the US government has a hell of a lot less power than we like to think it has.
Obligatory mumble about campaign finance reform, capitalism, etc.
The Bush administration's capitulation and, frankly, pushing of the Iraq invasion made it seem like a tool rather than a protesting party.
...and, is there sufficient daylight between their amenability to the war-loving interest groups?
But it's not just difference in their propensities for war that makes a difference. All the political alliances and players are different if you switch parties, not necessarily better, or worse, but different. Gore may be just as bloodthirsty and bad a man as Bush, and might have wanted war just as much (this is not my guess, but I can't rule it out), but he couldn't have gotten to war by anything like the same political route.
All the political alliances and players are different if you switch parties
The extent to which this is true is highly debatable.
65: On some esoteric level, that may be true. On the surface, it's not, and the surface level requires political management.
(Dumb question -- the presence of the word 'real' in your name suggests that you're presenting yourself as someone whose name should be familiar? Should it be? And if so, from where?)
I would not of been surprised if we would of ended up at war with Iraq even under a Gore presidency, I also wouldn't be surprised if we hadn't. I agree with LB that the political coalition, the goals out side the removal of Saddam, and the path to war itself, would of all been substantially different. I'm also open to either 9/11 wouldn't of happened at all, or Afghanistan/Al Quaida would of sucked up all the administrations energies, or at least changed the diplomatic atmosphere enough to change positions on Iraq. (Saddam also didn't like Islamic radicals.)
67: He used to run the zoo in Ohio and take the animals on Letterman.
67: No, it's just a dumb joke from my twitter id. Someone signed up with my name already, so I appended 'real' to it, as do some celebrities on twitter to indicate they're the 'real' one. I, however, am very much not a celebrity, thus the joke.
I actually googled, and was wondering if for some reason the singer-guitarist from what Bush I referred to as the Nitty Ditty Nitty Gritty Great Bird was commenting here. I mean, no reason why he shouldn't, assuming he's alive.
71: Yeah, he's without a doubt the most famous member of our tribe, which doesn't speak well of the rest of us.
The management of matters post 9/11 would surely have been different, i.e. not bungled quite as horrifically. Would we have had Rumsfeld as Sec'ty of Defense? Had the Iraq invasion occurred under Gore anyway, would his Defense Secretary have adopted the policies and approaches Rumsfeld did? This seems unlikely.
OT: "Do you love me?" is the saddest question in the world, even if you don't ask.
Would we have had Rumsfeld as Sec'ty of Defense?
This sounds like a known known: no.
Here's a link to an in-depth, social-scientific analysis of the "would Gore have invaded" question that answers the question "yes." Dsquared has linked to it before; it looks somewhat persuasive but I'm not gonna read and analyze it in detail right now.
And I wouldn't feel nearly as bad about my propensity for coming out with strings of rhetorical questions which I answer with things like "Goodness no."
76: Okay, that's from a country that Dsquared admits is imaginary.
61: But the question is, is there sufficient daylight between their propensities to war to have rendered a significantly different outcome?
I somewhat hate having this conversation again and again, but the obvious question has to do with US policy regarding Iran. The neocons (still lurking out there somewhere, and we should probably keep tabs on them) have exerted pressure toward hostilities; Obama has declined. Neocons exerted pressure on Clinton back when, for that matter, to engage Iraq; he declined.
The "not a dime's worth of difference" position has some merit in a variety of ways, but not every way.
79: But Clinton did engage Iraq, repeatedly. Also, I think there might be a big, 9/11 shaped hole in your analysis.
but he couldn't have gotten to war by anything like the same political route.
This. I just can't see Fox news going all out as Al Gore's propaganda machine.
53: It really had to be pressure, didn't it?
Yes, things like the freaking *tubes* which was all bullshit. This is is a long read (and has a lot of redactions) but in the end totally damning (the footnotes are often where the action is). Or go to the end--conclusions 29-42 are about the tubes.
If only we had a war started after 9/11 by a Democratic president in an oil-rich country so that we could compare actual Republican reactions to our hypotheticals.
76: I don't feel like reading it either. Appears to be from a right-leaning "nonpartisan" think tank (who appears to have written their own wikipedia page, making it useless), FWIW.
It really had to be pressure, didn't it?
I don't care to speculate what sort of pressure was enacted on Colin Powell, but our recent history might have been very different if the Dubster had had somebody of lesser repute than Powell to present the WMD bumf to the UN. I hope Powell is happy with his mess of pottage.
84: Or a motor casing for a short-range rocket.
80: I don't understand. This is a little hazy now, but weren't there stories about a letter from, uh -- I'm blanking on the names of neocon operatives beyond Richard Perle at the moment -- importuning Clinton to invade Iraq? And he declined? Sorry, I'm about to make dinner, and my memory is lacking on the details, but surely there was something about this.
I think there might be a big, 9/11 shaped hole in your analysis
I don't know what you mean by this. I thought we were talking now, per your 61, about the difference between the GOP and the Democrats in general, and how they respond to events, the actions they wind up taking, what you termed their propensities to war. Obviously I need to eat something.
88: Clinton launched missile strikes, and enforced the sanctions long after it was clear they were having an utterly ruinous effect on Iraq's people. He signed a resolution from Congress advocating regime change. That's just about as harsh as you could have been on Iraq - before 9/11.
OT: The new Conan movie is pretty bad.
90: I fully agree that the sanctions were inhumane.*
9/11 had nothing to do with Iraq, though. I fail to see that a hypothetical Clinton (are we taking Gore to be Clinton II?) would have invaded Iraq due to 9/11.
* Please don't take my remark about Clinton to mean that I endorse everything he did. Don't take my remark about Obama to mean that I endorse everything he does, either.
Looking into it further, but still not in a particularly serious way, the author of that Gore paper (his work, judging from a quick scan) doesn't seem to fit easily into the American political spectrum, which is good. It's probably a benefit to be not an American in taking up the topic.
That should have been "(or rather, his work...)".
94: I'm arguing that 1) powerful interest group motivation for regime change was already present throughout 90s, and was heeded by elected officials at the highest levels, but 2) there's no way in hell the American public would have supported outright invasion of Iraq, out of nowhere. 3) 9/11 rendered public support for an invasion plausible.
I'm outie. It's past 3am here in GMT+1 land.
There's a double dactyl about Benjamin Harrison who came between Clevelands and
Apart from this trivial
Idiosyncrasy
Didn't do much.
This is truer of most Presidents than we're willing to admit. We demonize (or angelize) individual Presidents, but, by and large, they don't do much. Clinton, Bush or Obama.
Anyone else up for a drink? Man.
OT: Bookselling is weird. Things have been nuts at the shop for the last month, and I've had enough for now: I will not be coming in tomorrow, sorry. So I have just emailed my partner.
Not only am I astonished by the premium law students place on non-highlighted books (again with the highlighting!), but I can't help but note how many people there are out there buying (a) law books, and (b) education, as in teaching, teacher training, books.
100: Has any sector gone dead cold? Are some categories especially seasonal (I remember my mother and her friends buying cookbooks on vacation often)?
101: Depends on what you mean by dead cold. What's not viable (unsaleable books) are ones that have been published in mass quantities.
Your mom may buy cookbooks, but it's likely that they sell for $10 or less, and you can't really sustain a bookselling business with $10 books. There's an insane downward price spiral in online sales.
Some categories are certainly seasonal, but trying to be a generalist bookseller is a bad idea any more, so you wouldn't need to track what's popular in the mass market anyway. Unless you're prepared to deal in quantity, which most of us aren't.
The most sobering thing I've learned in the last 10 years of doing this is that sustainable enterprises ultimately have to pitch themselves to the money. In the bookselling business that means either antiquarian selling (collectors are either wealthy or obsessed enough to shell out), or in our case, specializing in academic books, where the customer base simply has to buy these books in the course of their work.
riddle me this: what should i infer if a girl's favorite author since she was 12 is nob okov. also, i'm on the edge of 1/2+7. and were discussing poetic imagery. this has happened with two people.
100-101: I went to a used bookstore today, picked out some books to buy, got in line, then after a delay*, decided to buy nothing. The selection was pretty bad for my interests, and I wasn't sure if I really wanted to weigh down my luggage even more for books I was only peripherally interested in.
*The people in front of me wanted to sell a box of books and the guy at the register went over to a table to price them out. No one else came to the register and I didn't know how long they'd be (no one acknowledged that I'd been in line). I walked off a bit, then came back a couple minutes later when I heard them finishing up and saw the guy who had been at the register already walking off elsewhere in the store. So I left the books on the counter. This was probably irrational, but eh, it's usually a good thing when I don't add books to my piles of unread books.
I am not sure I answered the question initially posed in 101. Was it asking whether there are books nobody wants to buy any more?
.103: You are going to meet Chris Hansen.
Not only am I astonished by the premium law students place on non-highlighted books
Why is this astonishing? I totally placed a premium on non-highlighted books when buying used as an undergrad (grad school was all photocopied course packets). Reading a pre-highlighted book is extremely distracting. Also, the previous owner had always, always, highlighted the wrong things.
104: That's a bummer. They should totally have a separate person looking at books people want to sell. These are two separate functions, geez.
I think people overlook how hard it was for Bush to make the Iraq War happen.
I think people overlook the fact that Gore publicly opposed the war in real-time, for all the right reasons, in a manner that did nothing to repudiate his prior stance on Iraq.
I think people overlook what Republicans are like when a Democrat is president. Not only would the Republicans have pointed out the ludicrous nature of the WMD charge and the connection-to-bin-Laden charge, they would have pointed out Gore's well-known desire to destroy American white people by trying to help brown people. Not one of Bush's rationales for war would have worked for Gore, and Bush used up all the possible rationales.
And to return to my first point: Do people really not remember how much work Bush had to do even after 9-11 to get that war? And hey, as long as we're in counterfactual land, 9-11 didn't actually have to happen. It wasn't destiny. It's possible that Bush only started putting incompetents in key roles after 9-11, but I don't believe it.
103 what should i infer if a girl's favorite author since she was 12 is nob okov
Depends how she ranks the various books, of course.
107: I understand. I mean that people are paying $40 above the in-print price in exchange for the guarantee that there's no highlighting.
And to the original post: I think post-Katrina-Afganistan-Iraq, Bush was genuinely chastened and fucked up relatively few things. I suspect he started asking his old man for advice. In any event, he started appointing people like Gates and Bernanke - guys who are tolerable to traditional conservatives like his father, or like Obama.
I assert counterfactually: Not only would Gore have avoided a ground war in Iraq, George HW Bush would also have done so.
Also counterfactually (and also in response to the original post): Gore would have presided over a similar financial disaster. Unlike the war in Iraq, where support had to be built by a right-wing nut, pretty much everybody who mattered was in favor of wiping out the economy.
In any event, he started appointing people like Gates and Bernanke - guys who are tolerable to traditional conservatives like his father, or like Obama.
This does make sense in retrospect. I was dubious about it at the time. Not that it helped much, except just barely conceivably in keeping us out of Iran.
You can have your blog back now.
except just barely conceivably in keeping us out of Iran.
I cannot stress how important this is.
All the claims that Bush a) had stolen the 2004 election and/or b) was planning to cancel the 2008 election were cheap shots.
110: If her favorite Nabokov is Pale Fire, you may be dating Ron Rosenbaum.
The author of 103 should back off the nob okov girl.
109
I think people overlook what Republicans are like when a Democrat is president. Not only would the Republicans have pointed out the ludicrous nature of the WMD charge and the connection-to-bin-Laden charge, they would have pointed out Gore's well-known desire to destroy American white people by trying to help brown people. Not one of Bush's rationales for war would have worked for Gore, and Bush used up all the possible rationales.
I don't believe this is how the Republicans would have reacted at all. I think they would have quickly started howling for blood and claiming Gore's responses were too weak and timid more or less independently of what Gore actually did. So Gore might have decided against attacking Iraq but if he decided to go for it I don't see the Republicans stopping him.
109 speaks for me.
I think it's not an unimportant question for a different reason. It is most frequently posed, nearly always I think, by people who have an agenda of diminishing the differences between the parties. In the 21st century. The parties are hugely different right now, even if they are not exact opposites in every sense.
121 -- Even if he hadn't caught Osama? I don't think he'd have been able to pull that off. They'd have been all over him for allowing 9/11 to happen (clearly the result of Dem weakness etc).
I just read the thing I linked in 76. It's well worth reading as a reminder of how the world worked in 2002-2003, and how not out-of-the-mainstream an invasion was, particularly to Centrist DC democrat types. I'm not endorsing every word, and I'd have to go back and look at the period more carefully to consider whether I agree with it completely or not, but it really is persuasive on the notion that an Iraq invasion wouldn't have been out of the question for counterfactual President Gore.
If that's all the claim is, then I can't say I'd really disagree (especially given the Gore war scenario I gave above). What I have a hard time believing is that Gore would have gotten into the same Iraq war we had, rather than a different type - but possibly, though less likely, just as bad - of war.
124 -- I read it too, and I'm not convinced at all. Bush et al knew at the beginning of March 2003 that everything they had been told was wrong, that Iraq didn't have WMDs. He launched a ground war anyway, confident that bringing "freedom," and value to contributors, would matter more to his key constituencies. Gore would have had an active opposition, wailing about wagging dogs all the up to the brink.
The 2002 vote was designed by Rove to avoid losses in the midterms. No way could Gore have gotten away with that. (I think he'd have been impeached for letting 9/11 happen . .)
The troops had to have been mostly overseas by February 2003. I think that would have been too late to stop anything without major loss of face.
119 110: If her favorite Nabokov is Pale Fire, you may want to find out if she's a Kinbotean, Shadean, or other. (If "other" turns out to be "Hazel-Shade's-ghost-ean", you're probably dating Brian Boyd.)
129 -- Yep. You'd think they'd teach how WWI got started in West Point (and how well it worked out for Russia, Germany, and France), but I guess maybe it's out of fashion.
I really don't think Gore's joint address to Congress right after 9/11 would have been an announcement that we were going to rid the world of evil. I remember being quite shocked by the scope of the mission Bush took on. I'm not saying that the personality of the president is more important than the ideological orientation of the 3,000 people he brings into office with him, but it's not nothing.
Anyway, I don't think it is certain, or even more likely than not, but I can see a post 9-11 scenario with a President Gore being pressed prove that Iraq didn't have WMD and the burden of proof on the side wanted to not invade.
132 seems beside the point because I didn't preview to see 131.
120: why? I was hoping for insight.
I really don't think Gore's joint address to Congress right after 9/11 would have been an announcement that we were going to rid the world of evil.
Yeah. Bush didn't write his own speeches, obviously, but the righteous and corrective wrath-of-god routine was distinctive of a certain mindset, shall we say.
134: If you sign "Berlusconi" and talk about sex with very young women, you make people wonder.
Lot of new states came in under Harrison, that would not have come in had Cleveland won. Makes a difference in things like annexing Hawaii and going to war with Spain, which were largely partisan (and needed Cleveland to leave office after his second term).
I wish I lived in the same area as parsimon. I'm getting rid of a number of academic books right now, and I'm just donating them to the library because I don't have time to figure out what bookseller here wants academic books.
138: Donating them to the library is fine, actually. Depending on how large the library system is, they may well sell them themselves (there are avenues for that now).
Though honestly I'd try to see if there's some kind of free-book nonprofit outfit around. Call a local used bookstore and ask if they know of one. There's one here that takes donations of all kinds, and gives the books away for free to the public. (Funded in part by the Open Society Institute, that commie Soros guy.)
140: Thanks for the advice! I have a lead on some sort of book donation place but I'm not sure what their status is; I have to phone tomorrow.
121: if he decided to go for it I don't see the Republicans stopping him.
One "fun" game during the run-up to the Iraq War was to quote Republican anti-war commentary from the Clinton years at war supporters. Almost every figure who had suddenly decided that Iraq Delenda Est under Bush had a rich and thoughtful history of opposing precisely that action, including Dick Cheney. There is zero reason to assume the Republicans wouldn't have used this routine on Gore, for the same reason as there was zero reason to expect them to support -- coming from Obama -- a healthcare plan that was essentially identical to one that one of their number had come up with.
I'm with Bob on this one. We haven't scratched the surface of coming to terms with the full criminality and incompetence of the Bush years. It looks like the American political system is simply incapable of doing so, which is doubleplus ungood, but that Obama hasn't done nearly enough to break away from this legacy does not remotely challenge the Chimperor's full-spectrum dominance as WPE.
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the Chimperor's full-spectrum dominance as WPE
I'm struggling with "WPE" here. World- ... class. No. Wipe-ass ... no. Something something End. No, probably not that either.
Parsimon, to answer your several-days-ago question about highlighting in law books: I underline or highlight when I read cases for class mostly as an aid to concentration and processing while reading (if I'm thinking about finding what's important in the case, I'll find it), and also so some of the important passages will be easier to spot if I'm called on in class. I bought a used casebook last semester and returned it immediately because I couldn't deal with someone else's highlighting (and I found a new one on Amazon for the same price as the used one). It's wasteful, but there you have it. I could probably stop the highlighting with a better note-taking system.
but that Obama hasn't done nearly enough to break away from this legacy
It's a good thing I was recently reminded of the name of litotes.
I think they would have quickly started howling for blood and claiming Gore's responses were too weak and timid more or less independently of what Gore actually did.
Only if Gore didn't go to war in Iraq. Had he done so, they would have been howling about his irresponsibility.
Come on, James, you're old enough to remember. As DS points out:
One "fun" game during the run-up to the Iraq War was to quote Republican anti-war commentary from the Clinton years at war supporters.
Does the phrase "wag the dog" ring a bell?
147: I see that. I was a little surprised that it's so seemingly universal among law students, that's all. I have no objection to people marking up their books however they like, just to be clear. People can do whatever they like with their books. I just was surprised that highlighting was so common.
I underlined and notated the hell out of my books in college and grad school. Not highlighting, though. That's just weird. Weirdo.
I say in all fondness. Because I still do remember that t-shirt you wore at UnfoggeDCon II.
as a foreigner, i have always been amazed by democrats' near complete inability to be partisans. to wit, dismissing the gore in iraq counter-factual, to a democratic partisan (if there was such a thing), has 2 easy parts:
1. invading iraq would not have happened but for 9/11 (which is obviously true); and
2. 9/11 would not have happened under president gore (which is not so obviously true but is certainly plausible for a number of reasons such as (say) prez gore might have actually done something useful on being briefed by the CIA in august 2001 in big bold letters that "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US" as opposed to Bush's reported reaction to the briefer of "all right, you've covered your ass").
that this reasoning has the advantage of being (in my opinion) correct is kind of besides the point. the fact that bush's "you've covered your ass" did not define his presidency even now is just stunning. it's all there in those 4 words; it completely fits as a just so story that stands in for all of the other dysfunctional incidents of his presidency. but democrats are so lacking in partisanship that they consider bush's failure to prevent 9/11 as somehow unfair to mention and so mostly don't.
i dunno, it just irritates me. why does this thread even exist? do you think any republicans spent any time in 2003 asking of themselves what, in retrospect, were the unfair criticisms they had made of bill clinton?
My indelible lasting impression of GWB is the sight of him smirking, showing with no cognition at all that he is admitting thereby his slug-like level of existence.
Probably too harsh on the poor slug - it at least is honest in its sliminess.
142
... There is zero reason to assume the Republicans wouldn't have used this routine on Gore, ...
With 3000 American dead the Republicans would have calculated that being on the bloodthirsty side of the Democrats was the correct place to be politically.
150
Does the phrase "wag the dog" ring a bell
Claiming a war is a political ploy doesn't work so well after the United States has been attacked with 3000 dead. You guys are living in some sort of fantasy world if you think the Republicans would have been a restraining force on Gore.
If Gore had decided to cut taxes the Republicans wouldn't have been opposed they would have said he wasn't cutting taxes enough. Similarly no matter what Gore did in response to 911 they would have said he was weak and timid and should have responded even more forcefully.
snuh has a good point. 9/11 happening under Gore strikes me as somewhat unlikely. The Clinton administration took al Queda much more seriously as a threat than did the Bushies. There was ample warning, which the Bush administration blew off.
LizardBreath @ 10
At one point towards the end of Bush's presidency, I said to my German grandmother "I think Bush is like Hitler" as a provocation to see what reaction I would get. To my surprise, my grandmother kind of chuckled and said, "yes he really kind of is. Hitler was a figurehead for Goebbels, and Bush is the figurehead for Cheney, who has all the real power." That wasn't what I was expecting at all re. either Bush or Hitler (nor do I know exactly what to make of the Hitler theory), but, at least with Bush, now I tend to see him more in that light. I still don't like him, but I see him more as a puppet being controlled by his inner circle of puppet masters than an evil mastermind.
158 gets right what history will say about Bush - not like Hitler, Cheney isn't really Goebbels - but a mediocre man and a feeble politician who surrounded himself, or permitted himself to be surrounded by some really evil people.
If memories of how bad they were seem to be fading, that's probably because most of them have had the sense to keep shtum since they left office. I bet we haven't heard the last of Rove, though.
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Richard Haass, president of the US council on foreign relations, tells the Financial Times that an international force is "likely to be needed to restore and maintain order" in post-Gaddafi Libya.
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Torture/authoritarianism chief David Addington is apparently involved with the 'baggers in some capacity.
I can't speak for Bush, but 20 years after she left power my hatred for Thatcher remains undimmed.
158, 159: An early n+1 had something along those lines:
It has come to our attention that some on the Left compare W. to Hitler. Nothing could be more wrong. It is an impossibility, a misreading of history.
No, it's our embarrassing distinction in the United States today to be that rare country which acquired a follower as its leader. The younger Bush is an adherent. He is a Believer. You don't picture him on the podium at Nuremberg. No, you see him in the third row of the crowd on the rally floor.
158,159:I was over at Lemieux talkin' bout Obama (and FDR, JFK, LBJ, etc) and I was wondering if academic and educational fashion and practice has seduced into forgetting what leadership and charisma (and power) really mean, how they work. Not quantifiable, not explicable by apparent attributes, certainly a seeming attack on the agency of followers, I kinda gathered they have been cast into the dustbin of historical analysis. Weber, and I have to reread him, was more specific about how and when , what circumstances, charisma works.
No, Goebbels and Goering (Himmler and Heydrich) were terrified and worshipful of that little twerp. And I happen to think that Cheney, Rumsfield, Delay, Blair and others were terrified of Bush.
"Cheney, we are killing Saddam and if you don't do it, I will find some silos in Kansas that will follow a Presidential order. Got it?"
I also think the Left, especially process liberals, are dumfounded and in denial about irrationalist theories of politics and history. We have seen this in for example, Yggles and his "Green Lantern" contempt for charisma, will, and leadership and his bean counting analysis of Obama tactics and strategy.
And well, in the beautiful forum of Habermas Rawls public reason, the idea that a tall guy can say "This way, Over the cliff!" and a million will jump screws the science just a tad.
And it is so weird, because I believe that is exactly the way Obama and every other politician defines themselves in their heart of hearts, as salesmen, as manipulators, as people whose job and self-image involves making others do stuff they don't want to do by sheer force of personality and will.
You people are crazy. Please recall that, objectively, Iraq had precisely fuck all to do with 9/11. So, absent political motivation, where does the impetus to war come from? Sure, American politics was amenable to that particular mongering, but what was in it for Gore? I know this has been done to death, but that doesn't mean you people aren't crazy.
Speaking of which, has it been ages since we had a gender fight, or have I missed it during my time among the heathen chinee?
On the counterfactual quesiton, my view is that Prewsdient Al Gore would have been impeached because of his actions on September 11: Ordering the pre-dawn arrest and detention without any legal process of the "Born Again 19," a group of innocent Saudis and Egyptians who had been scheduled to catch flights later that morning. The ACLU spoke up for them immediately, and after their mass conversion to Christianity, the Republican Party joined with the few liberals in Congress to impeach and then convict the President over the case.
President Liebeman announced their release, and the bombing of Baghdad, on the same day. That afternoon, Mohammed Atta, informal leader of the 19, announced he would be joining the Colson Prison Ministry at a press confernece in his lawyer's office on the 105th floor of the World Trade Center.
...in the beautiful forum of Habermas Rawls public reason
In my experience, Habermas is completely unreadable by anybody who isn't a certified German.
156: Claiming a war is a political ploy doesn't work so well after the United States has been attacked with 3000 dead.
foolishmortal gets it right. Why on Earth would Gore go after Iraq because of this? It was completely bizarre when Bush and crew did it, and none of their excuses held up 3000 dead or otherwise. I should have amplified earlier: had Gore gone after Iraq, the Republicans would have said everything about him that IRL opponents said about them, and chances are they would have been right. (Excepting in that it's hard to imagine any other crew of people rivalling the special Keystone Kops delivery that Bush & Co. had.)
158: To the extent that Bush was a puppet, he appears to have been a willing and eager one, and he was surrounded by really evil people for the apparent reason that he himself was something of a moral vaccuum.
168: And you call yourself "unimaginative"?
153 -- No one arguing that Gore would have attacked Iraq is a partisan democrat. It's that simple.
I'm really interested in what's going on in Iceland, but the mistakes pointed out in that link's comments (e.g. saying it's a member of the EU) make me want a different synopsis.
i dunno, it just irritates me. why does this thread even exist? do you think any republicans spent any time in 2003 asking of themselves what, in retrospect, were the unfair criticisms they had made of bill clinton?
We're supposed to try to be as unthinking as we imagine the other side to be?
It wasn't the assertion that his leadership would work on his partisans that made Bush's Green Lanternism ridiculous, but the assertion that it would work on his opponents. Domestic political opponents, Iraqi insurgents, and all the rest.
174: Probably true, but I don't see why I should be partisan more than one month out of every 24.
I'm surprised no one brought up human rights issues.
176:We're supposed to try to be as unthinking as we imagine the other side to be?
Yes. The poor get food and shelter, everybody gets good educations and health care, workers have jobs, the rich get "soaked", To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women. Life ain't complicated.
It's proven by science!
In this paper, we question the close identification of utilitarian responses with optimal moral judgment by demonstrating that the endorsement of utilitarian solutions to a set of commonly-used moral dilemmas correlates with a set of psychological traits that can be characterized as emotionally callous and manipulative--traits that most would perceive as not only psychologically unhealthy, but also morally undesirable.
179: As stuff where Bush looks better in retrospect? I'm not seeing it, unless the argument is "Obama sucks too, so let's drop our standards and let Bush off the hook." I say they're both spinach, and I say to hell with them.
178 -- If 'because you adversaries both inside and outside the coalition are' isn't a good enough reason, then you should expect no more from the political system than you are getting. The fact that your view is quite common, and commoner still with 48 substituted for 24, explains a whole lot.
What mystifies me, though, is the assertion that some kind of viable third party political movement can be made up of people with this orientation.
...then you should expect no more from the political system than you are getting.
I live a city dominated by Democrats since the Depression. And by "dominated," I mean no other candidate has stood a reasonable chance of election. From this, I have learned that when they can't get be beaten, Democrats suck and they suck hard. Politically, in the long term, I am nearly as worried that we have only one party that could plausibly be trusted to govern than I am about anything else.
This particular criticism of GWB, which seemed perfectly reasonable at the time, looks a little overblown in retrospect.
181: As stuff where Bush looks better in retrospect?
Well, better in the sense of "maybe not that atypical for U.S. presidents, who all have a strong tendency to suck." We were all in a frenzy saying he was the worstest ever, more bad than we could ever imagine a U.S president being.
He was unusually shameless on the human rights stuff, which is an offense in itself. Someone torturing openly and claiming it's legal really is worse than someone secretly sponsoring torture.
Someone torturing openly and claiming it's legal really is worse than someone secretly sponsoring torture.
That actually seems like a complicated question to me.
He was also particularly brazen about the lying and the bullshit. It wasn't enough to bullshit the public, it was key to make sure that everyone not part of his little gang knew he was doing it, and then to rub their faces in the shit so his own side could laugh it up.
187: Doesn't seem hard at all to me. If you need to keep something a secret, you have to do less of it. If you can do it openly, you can do as much as you want. Someone who brings torture out into the open as an acceptable tactic makes it possible for the next guy to torture a lot.
189: If you keep it a secret, there's no movement opposing it. Somebody says they were tortured, but you deny it. What would you expect a terrorist to say, anyway?
TO the OP: I think his overall idiocy was overstated in terms of things like campaigning. When Karl Rove said he was the "perfect candidate" it was not just spin, he had: no real principles or positions of his own, a keen interest in "winning" and the mechanics of the electoral process, a certain low cunning, and the narcissistic, monstrously-twisted ego you'd expect from being the "disappointing" son of Barbara Bush.
190: Secrets are hard to keep. Information gets out.
Tim Burke on the role of shame. When torture is secret, that's usually because there are strong public norms against it. Those norms apply to administrators as well, so it might be done secretly, but that still poses difficulty at an internal level. If it's open, that means the norms against it are breaking down, which is very dangerous for human rights in general.
I'd say the publicization of torture is unicausal with the "it takes balls to execute an innocent man" guy.
187: Also, getting "legal" "justification" for torturing the ppl they most wanted to torture infected the whole security establishment. To justify CIA torturing captives they think are high level, got legal opinions saying Geneva didn't apply in Afghanistan--leads to horrors like in Bagram, low level soldiers torturing low level captives, in some cases to death. And later spreads to Iraq.
I'm reluctant to bring it up*, but I was surprised that vague allusions in 68 and 109 were the only references to the idea that 9/11 would not have happened under Gore we got in this thread until 153.
If 9/11 happened the way it did in the 616 timeline - if Gore screwed up worse than I think likely or if the attackers got really lucky or if it turned out that the real security flaws were all low-level stuff beneath the ability of the president to do anything about - then I agree with 171 about the war. Gore wouldn't want to go after Iraq until and unless bin Laden was dead and Afghanistan was well on the way to being cleaned up, the latter part of which probably wouldn't have happened before his second term, even with competent management. In fact, it's not hard to imagine (not certain, I know, but not impossible either, and more likely than under the president we had) that genuine diplomacy rather than "axis of evil" fearmongering might have made positive changes in Iraq and/or Iran without an invasion of either. Saddam was secular, remember, and Shi'ite Iran doesn't get along with Sunni terrorists much better than we do.
But if 9/11 was mostly or completely prevented, a regime change at gunpoint by ground forces in Iraq seems very unlikely. "Wag the dog" complaints by Republicans still seems more politically expedient than doubling down on bloodthirstiness, despite their general inclination. With 9/11, public support for invading someone for the fun of it would have been even lower than it was. Smart people actually saw in advance that the war would be a disaster, and Gore probably would have listened to some of them. He might have been more aggressive with airstrikes and sanctions than Clinton was, maybe even pulled some 80s-in-Central America coup attempt, but even that is a long way from what Bush did.
So would Gore have prevented it? Like I said, counterfactual, but yeah, quite possibly. Purely by coincidence I stumbled on this today. So, yes, it seems totally fair to blame Bush for that, at least in part.
* One problem with bringing it up is that it's multiply hypothetical: if he became president, if he continued certain policies of Clinton's but not certain others, if Republicans didn't mindlessly obstruct all his appointees like they've done to Obama or play politics in other ways... if if if. Impossible to prove on multiple levels. Another problem is that discussions about this kind of thing seem a lot less productive, let alone fun, than they did five years ago or so. Maybe I'm just getting old.
that he himself was something of a moral vaccuum.
Arendt's vortex theory of totalitarianism
...and the narcissistic, monstrously-twisted ego you'd expect from being the "disappointing" son of Barbara Bush.
I don't have the time or inclination to go into depth, but having at the center a figure who absolutely and unreservedly believes in his privilege (or is pathologically insecure with it) is the key to monarchy and authoritarianism. It provides all the motivation, the legitimacy for the "crafty councilors"
Eminence Grise is not about du Tremblay
I think Gore would have been better on a bunch of issues and appointments than Bush. Certainly we'd have a better Supreme Court. Of course, there's every reason to suspect that in a Gore presidency/post 9/11 timeline, he would have lost the 2004 election.
I don't think Gore would be doing much better than Obama if he was president now, though. Frankly, I'm getting pretty paranoid about everything again. I kinda doubt Bachmann or Perry could take Obama in 2012, but it's still a possibility. If I were young and unencumbered, I would definitely be considering going underground at this point.
OT (or is it?): Few things fill me with more dread for the future than Democratic presidents' high esteem for Tom Friedman.
Really, your time is more precious than just about anyone's on the planet, and you use it to read Tom fucking Friedman?
198: A president's published reading list is for signaling purposes only. It may be accurate, but only by coincidence.
That doesn't make me feel any better about it at all.
But at least you no longer despair for the wrong reason.
The narrative of why Gore would have presided over an invasion of Iraq, per the link in 76, goes something like this:
1) Sadaam was engaged in a bluffing game, trying to convince the West that he had WMDs in order to convince Iran that he had WMDs. Accordingly, Sadaam was willing to create an ongoing crisis with whatever UN inspection team entered Iraq.
2) At some point, there would have to have been a crisis with the UN Inspection teams that would come to a head. That crisis was inevitable and would have made Sadaam look bad. Recall, even the Hans Blix January 2003 report said that Sadaam had not fully cooperated with disclosure.
3) The assumption of "everyone" (i.e., everyone who mattered, Democrat and Republican) in Washington was that Sadaam had WMDs and had been manufacturing them while the inspectors were kicked out of the country. There was also an assumption that UN inspectors weren't that competent. Accordingly, the broad DC consensus was that weapons were there and that something needed to be done about it. UN reports to the contrary would have been dismissed.
4) Once the crisis with the inspectors came to a head, the choices were basically (a) kick the can down the road and ignore the WMD issue; (b) do something like Operation Desert Fox, a bombing operation, or (c) invade. (a) was not the Democrat establishment foreign policy view, and a view that Gore himself had strenuously rejected in the Clinton administration; (b) had already been tried in the 1990s, with Gore's heavy support, and failed to produce results, so that left option (c).
5) Gore was not disinclined, either by background or his past positions, to be particularly resistant to the idea of an invasion. And there would have been plenty of pressure both within the Democratic establishment, the humanitarian interventionist left, and from elsewhere, to invade.
6) Thus, an invasion seems very possible, although in a Gore presidency it most likely would have come following additional inspection attempts and with broader international support.
I'm not 100% convinced by this story, but it's certainly plausible.
If I ever become president, I'm going to have my press secretary tell everybody that I read nothing but WKRP fan fiction.
192: Often too late. Years later we find out about torture under the Bush Presidency --"How horrible! Good thing we don't torture anymore!"
202: Items (1) and (2), and into (3), confuse me: I thought the UN inspection teams were this close, this close, to concluding their inspections and issuing a report which they expected to say that there were no WMDs to the best of their knowledge. Didn't Hans Blix say that after the fact?
Yes, Sadaam was being recalcitrant, as any national leader may have to be in order to salvage pride when his nation is being inspected by Others, but this is the first I've heard of any incipient crisis with the UN inspection teams.
Note also that the story in 202 doesn't require 9/11 to have happened for an invasion of Iraq to have been somewhat plausible. But 9/11 certainly made it more likely that any US President would respond to a potential threat of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons in Iraq with an invasion -- not because of the insane Iraq/Al Quaeda linkages, but just because it would have generally increased the belligerent mood in the country.
Iraq was contained. There was no threat, and really I donut see any basis at all to conclude that Gore would have been soft on a land war in Asia. More bombing? Sure. Liberation/transformation? In the face of GHWB's memoir?
This was the last word from Hans Blix prior to the invasion. It is pretty equivocal on the issue of Iraqi cooperation.
The real question for the story in 202 is Number 1: Would Sadaam have continued to bluff and/or failed to cooperate in such a manner as to raise ongoing questions abut the existence of WMDs? Absent ongoing bluffing by Sadaam, the story in 202 falls apart. On the other hand, Sadaam had shown himself willing to bluff for years and apparently told interviewers that he was much more worried about Iran than the USA, which he assumed (wrongly) ultimately wouldn't intervene decisively.
208 was me.
To 207, Gore strongly supported the Iraq Resolution of 1998, calling for Sadaam's removal by force, and as late as 2002 was calling GHWB's failure to invade Iraq in 1991 as a tragic mistake that America needed to rectify. He also had all kinds of speeches describing the threat posed by Iraqi weaponry. Gore was definitely not committed to any strategy of containment -- all the public evidence, aside from his 2002 Commonwealth Club speech*, points to the opposite conclusion.
*Given after he'd clearly lost the Presidency, of course. But, also, that speech affirms that it's likely that Sadaam had WMDs; Gore's arguments against an invasion then were (a) that it was a distraction from Al Quaeda and (b) that maybe Sadaam would use the WMDs and (c) that the doctrine of preemption was generally dangerous. Even that speech doesn't argue for containment.
205.1: I'm not sure what I think on Gore and Iraq, but I think it was the impending invasion that got Saddam to desperately give Blix's team the real access that let them come to that conclusion.
I mean, here is what Gore said in February, 2002. It sounds like he was committed to a smarter invasion, not containment:
Even if we give first priority to the destruction of terrorist networks, and even if we succeed, there are still governments that could bring us great harm. And there is a clear case that one of these governments in particular represents a virulent threat in a class by itself: Iraq.
As far as I am concerned, a final reckoning with that government should be on the table. To my way of thinking, the real question is not the principle of the thing, but of making sure that this time we will finish the matter on our terms. But finishing it on our terms means more than a change of regime in Iraq. It means thinking through the consequences of action there on our other vital interests, including the survival in office of Pakistan's leader; avoiding a huge escalation of violence in the Middle East; provision for the security and interests of Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the Gulf States; having a workable plan for preventing the disintegration of Iraq into chaos; and sustaining critically important support within the present coalition.
In 1991, I crossed party lines and supported the use of force against Saddam Hussein, but he was allowed to survive his defeat as the result of a calculation we all had reason to deeply regret for the ensuing decade. And we still do. So this time, if we resort to force, we must absolutely get it right. It must be an action set up carefully and on the basis of the most realistic concepts. Failure cannot be an option, which means that we must be prepared to go the limit. And wishful thinking based on best-case scenarios or excessively literal transfers of recent experience to different conditions would be a recipe for disaster.
210: Ah.
To 209 and 211: Okay, I'm uncertain now (on the Would Gore have invaded question), so okay.
Ahem, at least we can say -- hope? -- that we've learned a few things about hubris since then. ?
I read Gore's list of conditions as preclusive of invasion. Just as I consider nearly any Dem support for the 1998 resolution as (a) political only and (b) meaningless. What actions did the Clinton Administration take to execute it? That's what it meant to them.
Might Gore have ended up doing in Iraq what we're doing right now in Libya? I suppose you can construct a situation where that's possible. It has to be about more than just Saddam continuing a decade-long bluff. Maybe a viable opposition movement to do the groundwork (like Kosovo or Libya, or, at the outset, Afghanistan) or a provocation (like invading Kuwait) that cannot be ignored. What was Iraq going to do? Nothing.
I think the Iraq invasion as more an Iranian intelligence operation gone relatively well than a transnational capitalist imperial venture gone horribly bad.
209, 211, 212: Here's Tim Noah saying that you're misreading that speech.
Look at this line:
To my way of thinking, the real question is not the principle of the thing, but of making sure that this time we will finish the matter on our terms. But finishing it on our terms means more than a change of regime in Iraq. It means thinking through the consequences of action there on our other vital interests, including the survival in office of Pakistan's leader; avoiding a huge escalation of violence in the Middle East; provision for the security and interests of Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the Gulf States; having a workable plan for preventing the disintegration of Iraq into chaos; and sustaining critically important support within the present coalition.
Doesn't that sound like, we should invade Iraq only if we can first recruit a unicorn cavalry of sufficient size? Or in other words, we shouldn't invade Iraq?
Or what Charley said.
And again, I'm not claiming to know certainly what would have happened in a world where Gore was president. I just think that looking at the evidence we've got and deciding that it's overwhelmingly likely he would have started the Iraq War is not supported by the evidence.
213 seems to me to be pretty egregious wishful thinking and not grounded at all in what Gore and others were actually saying and doing at the time. The conditions he set out in 2002 were not preclusive; basically, they were, "let's build some more international support for this thing first and then invade."
It has to be about more than just Saddam continuing a decade-long bluff.
Why? The perception was increasing that the ongoing situation was untenable. Even apart from the GWB crazies, the Democratic establishment agreed that the prior actions, up to and including bombing, had failed and that invasion was a last available option.
Gore clearly did not want to go and invade Iraq without building a coalition to do so, but that doesn't mean that after successive failures of UN inspection, given the climate in DC and his own past history, he wouldn't have tried to build precisely that coalition and attempted an invasion. That's entirely consistent with everything we know about his past views on foreign policy and the people he surrounded himself with. Gore was a Clinton administration hawk.
214: No, the Noah article is just about reconciling Gore's prior views with his Commonwealth Club speech. Which, by the way, included this line:
"Iraq does pose a serious threat to the stability of the Persian Gulf and we should organize an international coalition to eliminate his access to weapons of mass destruction. Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to completely deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power. Moreover, no international law can prevent the United States from taking actions to protect its vital interests, when it is manifestly clear that there is a choice to be made between law and survival. I believe, however, that such a choice is not presented in the case of Iraq."
The message of the Commonwealth Club speech was not that invading Iraq was a per se bad idea, or that Iraq didn't pose a genuine threat, it was that the timing was bad and that the international coalition hadn't been assembled. Assuming that such a coalition could have been assembled, which would have been possible with additional failures of inspection and continued intransigence from Sadaam, it's pretty clear that Gore would have been open to an invasion.
I have to say in passing to real ffeJ, if he's still reading:
Welcome to Unfogged. Yes, we are indeed capable of talking something to death, we will not let up until we're satisfied or exhausted, occasionally someone will say, "Oh, for God's sake!" but otherwise yeah, pretty much. Some people feel right at home.
216: (A) What about the apparently inconsistent Commonwealth Club speech? (B) How was he going to build a coalition, given that there actually weren't any WMDs? The trouble with building a coalition wasn't that Bush was unpopular, but Gore would have been able to get away with it, it was that there was no case for war.
'Workable plan' to prevent chaos in Iraq is a lot more than getting a coalition. Which was damn hard even with Bush and 9/11.
I think Clinton et al were a lot more interested in Al Qaeda than in Iraq.
213: A decade-long bluff that most of the inspectors had already seen through, to boot. One of the primary insanities of the whole Iraq business was the manufactured "crisis" with the inspectors, and that the WMD "crisis" as a whole was such patently obvious bullshit. (One might better theorize that the real pressure to invade Iraq came from American oil money interests, and that Gore might eventually have bowed to those. But that's far from a foregone conclusion either.)
That's one important legacy of Bush, BTW, getting back to the original question: the obviousness of his bullshit provided a handy yardstick by which to judge various people's laims to intellectualism. The whole business outed as varying degress of twit, moron or ignoramus a) the people who took the excuses seriously, or b) the people who thought there was some worthwhile political advantage in pretending to take the excuses seriously, or worse, c) simply thought it made them look Very Serious to do so, or d) the people who didn't take the excuses seriously, but had cooked up their own laundry list of interests that would supposedly be served by having the Keystone Kops invade Iraq. In this sense, Bush was useful. Before him, I was of two minds as to whether Chris Hitchens was a worthless poseur; afterward, I knew.
(B) How was he going to build a coalition, given that there actually weren't any WMDs?
Saddam, for fear of Iran, didn't want anyone to know there were no WMDs. Thus, there was no proof for the lack of WMDs until after the threat of invasion by a U.S. lead coalition became a bigger fear for him than his fear Iran. I argue that the window between "enough military/political preparation to scare Saddam into allowed inspections" and "too much military/political preparation to stop" was a very small space indeed.
218: So, the Commonwealth Club speech was perfectly consistent with eight years of Clinton policy toward Iraq: "We don't like Saddam, and we want him out of power, but there's no reason to do anything about it now." And for eight years, that meant not invading. And then in the CC speech, Gore affirms that rather than making invading Iraq more urgent, 9/11 made it lower priority, and a worse idea, than it would have been in the absence of 9/11:
I don't think we should allow anything to diminish our focus on the necessity for avenging the 3,000 Americans who were murdered and dismantling that network of terrorists that we know were responsible for it. The fact that we don't know where they are should not cause us to focus instead on some other enemy whose location may be easier to identify.
I can't see why you'd read that as saying that Gore would have been certain, or even very likely, to have invaded Iraq.
222 -- There was a crisis in the fall of 2002: that Republicans might not win back the Senate.
Thus, there was no proof for the lack of WMDs until after the threat of invasion by a U.S. lead coalition became a bigger fear for him than his fear Iran.
No proof for the total lack of WMD's -- I recall the state of play, even before Iraq began to totally and unreservedly cooperate with inspections, being "We can't prove there's nothing, but there can't possibly be much." Remember, it's not as if we had a broad coalition when they thought there might be WMD's and then they dropped out when it was proven there weren't -- we couldn't get most countries on board at all, even when there still some doubt.
How was he going to build a coalition, given that there actually weren't any WMDs?
Well, even the inspectors weren't saying that definitively at the time, and it seemed implausible that Sadaam hadn't done anything in the years when the inspectors were out of the country. George Tenet, who was close to Gore and had led the CIA when Gore was in the White House, certainly seems to have believed that there were WMDs there. So did the French and the Russians -- they just disputed what should be done about it. Now, in retrospect, all these people were wrong, and the flimsiness of the harder evidence should have made people see through that, but it's hard to see Gore strongly bucking the DC consensus on that issue.
226: I'm thinking of domestic support. I don't think less international support would have been very effective at stopping it.
eight years of Clinton policy toward Iraq: "We don't like Saddam, and we want him out of power, but there's no reason to do anything about it now."
That's just not an accurate assessment of the Clinton policy in Iraq, which also included Desert Fox. Or the fact that George Tenet was present in both administrations. Or of Gore's previous speeches on the issue.
Why has nobody opened a store selling Egypt-related flavors of ice cream and called it The Dessert Fox?
Okay, the fairer version is "There's no reason to mount a full-scale invasion now". I don't think it changes the argument.
222: Yes, I think/hope that we've learned some things. The last 10 years have been a serious reality check.
228: But everything Gore ever said that's being touted as evidence of his hawkishness is coalitioncoalitioncoalition. Is there anything to suggest that he would have pushed forward an invasion of Iraq without broad international support?
233: He was, in this scenario, president of the United States.
Okay, the fairer version is "There's no reason to mount a full-scale invasion now".
That is a fairer version, but the corollary wasn't "containment is fine," it was "we will eventually have to mount a full scale invasion if the WMD program continues and measures short of a full scale invasion don't work."
And lots and lots of establishment people in Washington, Democrats and Republicans, thought that we were at that place -- where an invasion was a near-term necessity -- by 2003. The intra-establishment argument was really over whether more time for more inspections and voluntary compliance was appropriate. Gore undoubtedly would have been less precipitous and granted some more time for inspections. All I'm arguing that if Sadaam had maintained his strategy of reckless bluffing on WMDs, which seems quite likely, there's very good reason to think that Gore would have gone to war.
235: That seems to ignore the political forces that went to create that consensus; i.e., a shitload of lying about the dangers of Iraq. The breadth and intensity of the consensus, as it existed in 2003, wasn't a pre-existing cause of the war, it was at least partially an effect of a full-court press by the Bush administration selling the necessity for war.
This doesn't mean that a hypothetical Gore administration might not have created the same level of dishonest hype, but I don't see why they would.
Regardless of the embedded reservations, those quotes make Gore seem really war-happy. I don't know what the practical outcome would have been, but I certainly wouldn't trust him to not pursue a war of choice there.
Well, there was a lot of lying about the threat posed by Iraq, but it had gone on well through the 1990s and had become pretty strongly internalized, even in the person of Al Gore -- in his own words, "there is a clear case that one of these governments in particular represents a virulent threat in a class by itself: Iraq."
And, sure, I'm happy to agree that the Bush administration was both unusually dishonest and stupid and more so than a hypothetical Democratic administration. But even the less dishonest and less stupid Clinton folks had, by the late 1990s, convinced themselves that Iraq was a major problem for which an invasion was a plausible solution. There likely would have been less transparent stupidity about Al Quaeda/Iraq ties, meetings in Prague, etc. And, maybe, if UN inspections in 2003 had been given more time and had turned up little, Gore would not have gone to war. But assuming a consistent bluffing campaign from Sadaam, it's certainly plausible to see Gore pulling the trigger.
There likely would have been less transparent stupidity about Al Quaeda/Iraq ties, meetings in Prague, etc.
This is what my visceral disagreement on this comes down to. 9/11 made it easier for the Bush administration to sell the Iraq War; in fact, looking at what they had to do to get Congress and the public lined up behind the war, I'd say 9/11 was necessary for us to have gotten into the war the way we did.
Clinton and Gore certainly had a lot of hostility toward Iraq, and certainly thought it was a problem. But I can't see a Gore presidency either trying to use 9/11 to leverage us into a war with Iraq the same way, or succeeding if they'd tried. And without that leverage -- selling it as a response to 9/11 -- I don't think it happens.
I can't rule it out, of course. This argument comes down to "This counterfactual is plausible!" "No, it's possible but implausible", which is not the kind of thing that anyone's going to be able to settle.
The thing that frustrates me about the What Would Gore Have Done question in this context is that it seems to be in the service of asking whether we should let Bush off the hook. Because look: even Gore might well have done it!
This is a dangerous slide, it seems to me. No, we still cannot let Bush (et al.) off the hook, sorry.
I just knew Halford was a Bush apologist.
in fact, looking at what they had to do to get Congress and the public lined up behind the war, I'd say 9/11 was necessary for us to have gotten into the war the way we did . . . . I can't see a Gore presidency either trying to use 9/11 to leverage us into a war with Iraq the same way, or succeeding if they'd tried. And without that leverage -- selling it as a response to 9/11 -- I don't think it happens.
The paper linked in 76 is interesting on this point. Public support for the Bush Administration's position on Iraq was well north of 60% from January 2002 on, before the hard-sell had begun on the invasion. Certainly, I think it's plausible that if a Gore administration had decided to go to war in Iraq to enforce an inspections regime, they could have painted Sadaam as a Hitler figure successfully enough or the threat as serious enough to justify an invasion, and would have received strong popular support. (I don't know what the data shows for public support for Desert Fox was, but I'll bet it was high).
And the climate of 9/11 would have helped even without the lies -- the notion that you'd better be safe than sorry when it comes to foreign enemies was in the air.
I'm not letting Bush off the hook. There's no reason why (a) "Bush and his advisers are unbelievably horrible, stupid monsters" and (b) " the relatively better Democratic establishment are still a pack of warmongers given to delusions about America's use of force" can't both be true at the same time.
I believe both statements to be true.
Public support for the Bush Administration's position on Iraq was well north of 60% from January 2002 on, before the hard-sell had begun on the invasion.
This, I don't know where to find data to argue from. But I really find it doubtful that support was high before the sales-pitch started. The Bush administration was thinking Iraq from September 12 -- I don't remember offhand when they started talking Iraq, but I bet it was pretty fast.
Antrhax attacks in September(?) 2001.
Anthrax, that is. Don't forget, these were crucial in pointing us towards Iraq. If the Bush administration hadn't been in power they might not have happened at all (or, less conspiratorially, there would not have been such a push to link the two).
(b) " the relatively better Democratic establishment are still a pack of warmongers given to delusions about America's use of force" can't both be true at the same time.
What bothers me about this is thinking that it would be really, really misguided to draw conclusions about, really, anything on the basis of "What Gore would have done about invading Iraq" as a data point. Gore served in an administration that did bomb Iraq for four days in Desert Storm. And did take military action in the Balkans. And did talk tough about Iraq. And that's the data about Gore, and about 'centrist' Democrats generally.
Talking with assumed certainty about what military adventures Gore would have undertaken if he'd been in power after 9/11, and then taking that as data about what centrist Democrats in power are like, feels like double-counting to me. No one's done that explicitly, but it would bother me, and seem misleading, if they did.
246: Hah, I forgot the anthrax got blamed on Iraq.
Gore served in an administration that did bomb Iraq for four days in Desert Storm.
?
OK, you have to start the counterfactual with avenging the Cole. Which would have happened in early November, had Gore won the election. I think this shuffles the deck enough that little of the pre-2000 activity with Iraq is center stage. (IIRC, the 1998 thing was the result of neocon pressure to actually support, with money and guns, specific Iraqi insurgents: what passed was a lip service / no action compromise). I think, at the least, you get Iraq off the front burner, absent some new action from Saddam, until AQ is destroyed, whatever that ends up requiring. I'm not saying I think AQ destruction is the response to the Cole; it becomes necessary after AQ responds to the response to the Cole, whether by the 9/11 attack or something else.
We certainly can't judge anything at all about the counterfactual from statements/beliefs in 2002 without acknowledging the agency of Bush and his cohort. (And the particular Bush relationship with the Saudis [if our counterfactual includes the 9/11 attack]).
I find Gore's statement of 'regret' about GHWB's failure to go to Baghdad the exact equivalent of Clinton's 'regret' about not intervening in Rwanda: rhetoric, not a relaible measure of what he would do if given another chance.
244: FWIW, my memories of the initial weeks and even days after 9/11 were of numerous people assuming Saddam had a hand in it, and that he was going to go down. This was way before any propaganda campaign. Bear in mind though this was in the deepest, desolate nether regions of the Bible Belt.
252 -- Not a part of my experience in DC at all. Funny.
253: The ability to distinguish between Arabs who have antagonised the United States is not widely cultivated in the South.
244-246: I'm having a hard time believing that if Gore had wanted to go to war with Iraq following a "crisis" with the UN Inspectors, that the hypothetical Gore Iraq war wouldn't have been enthusiastically embraced within the USA. Wars are pretty generally popular here, and a "we need to go to war to guard against a dangerous dictator" would have sufficed as a reason for many. So I don't really think that you needed Bush-quality transparent lying to produce popular support for a war; maybe I'm misunderstanding your point.
251 seems like more wishful thinking to me. Again, if we assume that Sadaam would continue to bluff, what was going to happen? It seems unlikely to me that counterfactual Gore would have decided that Sadaam didn't matter just because of Al Quaeda, although it's not impossible.
208: This was the last word from Hans Blix prior to the invasion. It is pretty equivocal on the issue of Iraqi cooperation.
But utterly unequivocal on the progress made and pretty equivocal on saying there was no freaking existential threat that needed to be addressed in the next month or two. If you recall, Bushco were absolutely frantic to get the invasion going when tit became clear where the inspections were going to get to.
All I'm arguing that if Sadaam had maintained his strategy of reckless bluffing on WMDs, which seems quite likely, there's very good reason to think that Gore would have gone to war.
Reckless rhetorical fluffing.
Status quo 2000/2001 with Iraq: not a crisis.
256.1: Sure, but the key there is "needed to be addressed in the next month or two." What happens if the months pass and the inspectors continue to not get results and Sadaam continues to bluff? It's that scenario that gives you a plausible Gore-War hypothetical even without the GWB rush to invade. The Democratic establishment consensus probably would have tolerated a bit more delay, in part in order to build a better international coalition, but if Sadaam continued to bluff, at some point Gore might well have pulled the trigger.
256.2: Unintentional fluffing. I meant, reckless from Sadaam's perspective. From Sadaam's point of view, it's clear that he would have been better off avoiding the bluff strategy.
255 -- It's not enough to say that we need to guard against a dictator. If you want invasion/occupation, anyway, rather than just bombing, that is. You need an argument for the repeal of the Powell Doctrine, the conditions of which could never be met for a ground war in Iraq. Bush had a handful of magic beans, and everyone agreed that the Powell Doctrine didn't matter. Because it was so clear that our cause was just, and that God himself demanded our intervention.
And I agree with 257 personally, but one person who did not was Al Gore. At least if you look at what he said, as opposed to just assuming that he was committed to containment and didn't view Iraq as that big a deal.
We bomb people all the time. Neither party can claim the peacenik mantle, no matter what one likes to say of the other. But sending our Army in to overthrow and occupy a country, without significant local allies? That's not just a little out of the mainstream. It's way out.
Grenada. Which illustrates just how whacked out the Iraq adventure really was.
Hmm, I'm a bit confused in 208 you said, It is pretty equivocal on the issue of Iraqi cooperation. You are arguing as if you said unequivocal? In the linked Blix statement I see lamentations about Saddam not being at all cooperative back in the early '90s, but it is more in the present.
In my 27 January update to the Council, I said that it seemed from our experience that Iraq had decided in principle to provide cooperation on process, most importantly prompt access to all sites and assistance to UNMOVIC in the establishment of the necessary infrastructure. This impression remains, and we note that access to sites has so far been without problems, including those that had never been declared or inspected, as well as to Presidential sites and private residences.
Yeah, we'll just have to agree to disagree here. I don't see public resistance to military adventure being a big hindrance to a hypothetical Gore invasion. Especially after 9/11, but maybe even without 9/11 given enough provocation and international support. How many American military adventures were initially unpopular? Not too many.
261.last: Maybe we really invaded Iraq to make it safe for future American medical students to study there.*
*And at some level it was Grenada all over again--just a bigger provoking incident followed by the invasion of a larger irrelevant country.
263 -- The ones we didn't do, those are the unpopular ones.
Compare and contrast: using public statements to game out Earth-460 Gore's actions and using public statements to game out Congressional negotiations.
To 262, I'm just saying that in the context of establishment Washington -- including for the Democrats -- the Blix report was not seen as unequivocal evidence of no WMDs. Blix did not help himself with a ludicrously bureaucratic writing style; the key conclusion from his report was as follows:
UNMOVIC is not infrequently asked how much more time it needs to complete its task in Iraq. The answer depends upon which task one has in mind - the elimination of weapons of mass destruction and related items and programmes, which were prohibited in 1991 - the disarmament task - or the monitoring that no new proscribed activities occur. The latter task, though not often focused upon, is highly significant - and not controversial. It will require monitoring, which is "ongoing", that is, open-ended until the Council decides otherwise.
By contrast, the task of "disarmament" foreseen in resolution 687 (1991) and the progress on "key remaining disarmament tasks" foreseen in resolution 1284 (1999) as well as the "disarmament obligations", which Iraq was given a "final opportunity to comply with" under resolution 1441 (2002), were always required to be fulfilled in a shorter time span. Regrettably, the high degree of cooperation required of Iraq for disarmament through inspection was not forthcoming in 1991. Despite the elimination, under UNSCOM and IAEA supervision, of large amounts of weapons, weapons-related items and installations over the years, the task remained incomplete, when inspectors were withdrawn almost 8 years later at the end of 1998.
If Iraq had provided the necessary cooperation in 1991, the phase of disarmament - under resolution 687 (1991) - could have been short and a decade of sanctions could have been avoided. Today, three months after the adoption of resolution 1441 (2002), the period of disarmament through inspection could still be short, if "immediate, active and unconditional cooperation" with UNMOVIC and the IAEA were to be forthcoming.
It's not crazy (if, I think wrong) to read this as "Iraq has not disarmed, and basically still hasn't demonstrated a willingness to work with the inspectors." And, that while more dramatic action wasn't necessary then, it might have been in the near future. That is, I think, what the establishment Washington, including Democratic, view of the report was.
265 really takes the wishful thinking to a whole new level. Panama? Haiti? The Mexican War? We are not a people without a propensity to invade other people's nations, and to have those invasions be popular.
263: ONE COULD PERHAPS THINK OF A COUPLE OF EXCEPTIONS.
I've only skimmed the more recent parts of this thread, but I have to say that I'm still sticking with my make-believe scenario that has a Gore war only after a slight lifting of sanctions and Saddam getting caught trying to take advantage militarily.
Otherwise, I just don't see him going to war on a timeline all that close to the Bush war (if that indeed is what's being argued). As others have said, barring something significantly new - and confirmed, unlike the Bush admin purported evidence - I could see more bombing and the like, more aggressive rhetoric, more inspections, and so on, but not a full-scale invasion.
I was thinking post-WWII wrt wars of conquest. I'm not saying that we're not a warlike people. We don't much like loss, though, and have had to be assured in post-Vietnam conflicts that losses will be minimal. And victory certain. There was a lot of controversy about the Bosnian thing -- wingers were all excited about some soldier who got in trouble because he wouldn't wear the insignia -- but ultimately the promise that no or few Americans would be hurt was enough to get it through. I don't think Clinton would have been able to get congressional approval to go into Rwanda (it's quaint now, but people used to think you'd need it) if he'd wanted to go in, basically on Powell grounds.
I think the political and personal dynamics of the 2001-2005 US government were hugely significant in how it all played out. I'm pretty disturbed by the extent to which you would deny Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rove agency in this business, but I guess agreeing to disagree is as far as we'll get here.
I'm not denying agency to Bush. But I do think that the fact that a Gore-led invasion of Iraq is even plausibly conceivable suggests that, as a causal matter, the reasons for the invasion can't be found in neocon insanity alone (even if a lot of problems with the invasion can be blamed on that insanity). Clinton-era foreign policy, and Sadaam himself, played a big role. And it's really worth not underestimating the extent to which the Democratic party has also been the party of war. That doesn't mean that there's no daylight between the two parties, just that the simplistic narrative Gore good/Bush bad doesn't reflect reality on this issue. I'd go with Gore bad/Bush worse.
plausibly conceivable
That's a pretty low standard of evidence.
You need an argument for the repeal of the Powell Doctrine
And boy howdy, it sure would help if you could get Powell himself to present that argument.
270.1 and your previous comment about the Powell doctrine: Charley, have you read Andrew Bacevich on these matters? Perhaps you already know all about it -- I have been, and still pretty much am, clueless about internal military policy -- but I read The New American Militarism a year ago or so, and was sobered by information and analysis of changing military doctrine after Vietnam.
I recommend the book to all. Bacevich has since published other things, I believe, and blogs regularly; saw him on Bill Moyers' show a while back, before Moyers retired. Valuable, informative.
I have to admit that, despite an interest in counter-factual historical analyses, this thread seems to hint at some of the real-world limits of the method. Yes, it's possible in the first and sometimes even the second instance to test claims of causation using counter-factuals. But by the time you're saying, "Well, if this, and this, and this had happened differently, then my hypothetical might have played out like this", I think you're pretty much in the soup.
274 -- Bacevich is really, really great.
Yeah. As I said, it's sobering to realize that a lot of our my blather about these things is somewhat uninformed.
Peace among us.
Peace among us.
Sure, until one of you weaponizes anthrax.
270: I'm not saying that we're not a warlike people.
cf. "Let me win your hearts and minds...or I'll burn your damn huts down."
171
foolishmortal gets it right. Why on Earth would Gore go after Iraq because of this? ...
Not saying he would have, just that the political dynamic would have had the Republicans positioned on the aggressive side of the Democrats so that if Gore had decided to go after Iraq the Republicans were unlikely to have stopped him.
I don't think anything like "We're not very warlike" works as it stands. We are terribly averse to harm to Americans; we're right up there in the global callousness sweepstakes when it comes to harming anyone else.
It seems likely to me that 9/11 wouldn't have happened to a Gore administration. While I can't assess the odds, I find it very plausible to believe that the foiled attempt plus the Millennium Plot would make a fun club for the Democratic Party's warmongering mainstream to beat the Republicans with, accusing them of insufficient seriousness and launching a variety of war-type things in various directions. And Iraq was there as current business, what with the growing consensus that the sanctions weren't working and no general sign in official circles of the hundreds of thousands of deaths being the problem with them.
A different path into it, but one I'd find much easier to dismiss if the Clinton administration hadn't done so much to keep the violent pressure up.
