DEMOCRATIC DERANGEMENT MOMENT OF THE DAY

Former Vice President Al Gore: Remarks to MoveOn.org (New York University, August 7, 2003)

The direction in which our nation is being led is deeply troubling to me -- not only in Iraq but also here at home on economic policy, social policy and environmental policy.

Millions of Americans now share a feeling that something pretty basic has gone wrong in our country and that some important American values are being placed at risk. And they want to set it right.

The way we went to war in Iraq illustrates this larger problem. Normally, we Americans lay the facts on the table, talk through the choices before us and make a decision. But that didn't really happen with this war -- not the way it should have. And as a result, too many of our soldiers are paying the highest price, for the strategic miscalculations, serious misjudgments, and historic mistakes that have put them and our nation in harm's way.

I'm convinced that one of the reasons that we didn't have a better public debate before the Iraq War started is because so many of the impressions that the majority of the country had back then turn out to have been completely wrong. Leaving aside for the moment the question of how these false impressions got into the public's mind, it might be healthy to take a hard look at the ones we now know were wrong and clear the air so that we can better see exactly where we are now and what changes might need to be made.

In any case, what we now know to have been false impressions include the following:

(1) Saddam Hussein was partly responsible for the attack against us on September 11th, 2001, so a good way to respond to that attack would be to invade his country and forcibly remove him from power.

(2) Saddam was working closely with Osama Bin Laden and was actively supporting members of the Al Qaeda terrorist group, giving them weapons and money and bases and training, so launching a war against Iraq would be a good way to stop Al Qaeda from attacking us again.

(3) Saddam was about to give the terrorists poison gas and deadly germs that he had made into weapons which they could use to kill millions of Americans. Therefore common sense alone dictated that we
should send our military into Iraq in order to protect our loved ones and ourselves against a grave threat.

(4) Saddam was on the verge of building nuclear bombs and giving them to the terrorists. And since the only thing preventing Saddam from acquiring a nuclear arsenal was access to enriched uranium, once
our spies found out that he had bought the enrichment technology he needed and was actively trying to buy uranium from Africa, we had very little time left. Therefore it seemed imperative during last Fall's election campaign to set aside less urgent issues like the economy and instead focus on the congressional resolution approving war against Iraq.

(5) Our GI's would be welcomed with open arms by cheering Iraqis who would help them quickly establish public safety, free markets and Representative Democracy, so there wouldn't be that much risk that US soldiers would get bogged down in a guerrilla war.

(6) Even though the rest of the world was mostly opposed to the war, they would quickly fall in line after we won and then contribute lots of money and soldiers to help out, so there wouldn't be that much risk
that US taxpayers would get stuck with a huge bill.

Now, of course, everybody knows that every single one of these impressions was just dead wrong. [...]

The 2001 winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics, George Akerlof, went even further last week in Germany when he told Der Spiegel, "This is the worst government the US has ever had in its more than 200 years of history...This is not normal government policy." In describing the impact of the Bush policies on America's future, Akerloff added, "What we have here is a form of looting."

Mr. Gore lives in an America to which the rest of us are not privvy. The case he lays out for the war appeared nowhere, so is hardly worth treating. But the belief that the American people will by impressed by an unknown professor's opinion, expressed in a German mnewspaper no less, reflects a man so out of touch with the American people that one wonders what he's been doing--and where he's been living--for the past two and a half years. Wasn't he going to try to reconnect with the people of TN? Running against the war and on the editorial policy of Der Spiegel he'd lost to George W. Bush by an even wider margin next time.

MORE:
-Illiberal Imagination (Daniel W. Drezner, 08.06.03, New Republic)
-Rice Touts Democratic Hopes for Iraq: National Security Adviser Likens Iraq Path to Civil Rights Struggle (Scott Lindlaw, 8/07/03, Associated Press)

Rice has faced sharp criticism for allowing Bush to assert in Bush's January State of the Union that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Africa, and the journalists in Dallas questioned her actions Thursday.

Rice and other aides have defended themselves in part by pointing to the fact that doubts about the intelligence appeared in a footnote, written by the State Department, buried deep in a top-secret National Intelligence Estimate. That footnote was thus not read by Bush, Rice or other top aides, said a senior White House said last month.

But Rice said Thursday she had read the NIE "cover to cover, a couple of times."

She reiterated her remorse for the episode, saying that "whenever something like this happens to the president, I feel responsible because I am his national security adviser."

But she also repeated her contention that that element of the speech was not critical to Bush's case for war.

"The most appalling thing about this whole incident was that it for a two-week period had us discussing whether Saddam Hussein tried to get yellowcake in Africa, when of course the president did not go to war over whether Saddam Hussein tried to get yellowcake from Africa," she said.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 7, 2003 8:25 PM