<p>dstark, did you catch the date of that speech? 2002!!! He was **not **a candidate and we was NOT against the war from the beginning as this speech shows - he was actually one of the first to begin to beat the drum FOR war. Hence my disdain and disgust for the man without a shred of principles. A principled position would be:</p>
<p>“While I admit that I counciled for war against Iraq and I admit that the intelligence at the time of the Clinton/Gore administration regarding WMD was consistent with what the Bush administration has found, I now realize that I was wrong in this advice.”</p>
<p>Unfortunately, the funding of alternative energy clearly represents what OUR citizens care about. The only time they worry about energy is when the pump prices inch towards 3.00 per gallon. Citizens want cheap oil to fuel their SUVs and could not care less about its source. How many citizens would be more positive about the Iraq war if we were to steal and ship all the oil to our shores for a 50 cents break? Millions! </p>
<p>And for the record, while it was expected from a Bush/Cheney government to ignore alternative energy, the news was NOT better under Clinton/Gore reign as many important programs were savagely cut and replaced by lip service. Chart the temporary successes and retreats of alternative energy in our country, and you’ll be hard pressed to see any differences between the political leaders, except for the degree of hypocrisy.</p>
<p>“While I admit that I counciled for war against Iraq and I admit that the intelligence at the time of the Clinton/Gore administration regarding WMD was consistent with what the Bush administration has found, I now realize that I was wrong in this advice.”</p>
<p>What all this proves is that the Republocrats clearly cannot be trusted with the lives of our children.</p>
I would love to track his evolution in thinking about the war and plot it against public opinion polls at the time. I do recall that in early 2002 when he gave that speech that Bush’s popularity was at an all-time high and a war in Iraq was not even on the public radar screen. However, as war became more likely, the country divided into two semi-equal camps and it was no longer a political liability to be against Bush or the war - hence it was no great act of courage to come out against the war. </p>
<p>However, I would love to see a speech from him when he came out against the war that would square with his thinking earlier in the year when he was very much for the war. My bet is that he hoped that no one was noticing what he was saying earlier.</p>
<p>Democrats, Republicans and the American people have all failed when it comes to alternative energy.</p>
<p>Going forward, there are more candidates that will be open to funding alternative energy sources than others. Even with the failings of the Clinton administration in this area, I believe Gore would be one of those (not that he is running).</p>
<p>Ethanol is not the answer. It takes as much energy to produce the energy. You don’t get anywhere. I am very wary of candidates that talk up ethanol.</p>
<p>“My bet is that he hoped that no one was noticing what he was saying earlier.”</p>
<p>I didn’t notice. :)</p>
<p>I can’t read his mind or why he became anti-war, but I think he was right.
He supported Howard Dean and in retrospect, I think Howard Dean was right.</p>
<p>I would rather have a person in power that flip flops and is right than a person that never changes his mind and is wrong.</p>
<p>So to me Al Gore is right, Bush is wrong.</p>
<p>I was in favor of the war (I was wrong). I thought there were WMDs. (I was wrong). I thought we were under imminent threat. (I was wrong). I relied on the president to know what is going on. (I was wrong). </p>
<p>I don’t like being wrong that many times. :)</p>
<p>An ex-CIA analyst Iraq think tanker testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations committee a couple of weeks ago estimated that the entire Iraqi military and police forces contained no more than 5000 members who were both adequately trained and reliably loyal to the Iraqi Green Zone government.</p>
<p>From a purely American standpoint, I’m still trying to understand how it is in our national interest to keep militant Shia militias and Al Queda funded Sunni terrorists from killing each other. Seems to me that we get a two-for-one deal by just stepping aside and letting them go at it.</p>
<p>If the Saudis want to pour money into Iraq supporting the Sunnis and Iran wants to pour money into Iraq supporting the Shia militias, great. It’s money they can’t send to Hezzbollah and Bin Laden. Heck, maybe we should fund weapons purchases for both sides…oh, wait, we’ve probably already been doing that from the reconstruction budgets.</p>
<p>“From a purely American standpoint, I’m still trying to understand how it is in our national interest to keep militant Shia militias and Al Queda funded Sunni terrorists from killing each other. Seems to me that we get a two-for-one deal by just stepping aside and letting them go at it.”</p>
<p>Oil. Permanent military bases in the Middle East outside of Saudi Arabia. That’s what it has been about from day one.</p>
<p>The interesting thing is that the Shia-Sunni thing was created by the U.S. when they decided to allocate spots in the provisional government according to ethnicity. (Rajiv Chandrasekharan is an excellent source on this.) The Iraqis on all three sides thought they were nuts! Other than the former high-ranking members of the Baath Party, they all had much more in common with each other than differences. Both the south Shia (Arabs) and the Kurds (Sunni, non-Arabs) had been gassed under the conditions of the Rumsfeld handshake. The non-Baathist Sunnis had nowhere to go, and were prepared to deal. There was no Al-Qaeda. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, the Iranian Shia support Sunni Hamas and the Sunni Kurds, the Sunni Syrians support the Shia Hezbollah.</p>
<p>What they all have in common in Iraq is that they all think it is a good idea to kill Americans. They didn’t always believe that. Four years of brutal occupation will do it.</p>
Don’t be so sure of that - the decision was not one of going to war versus maintaining the status quo; if those were the options on the table going to war was certainly a mistake. However, maintaining the status quo was a very unlikely option.</p>
<p>
You are in very good company on that one</p>
<p>
I can’t say that I ever felt like it was an imminent threat - I really don’t know where Edwards and Rockefeller came up with that one.</p>
<p>
If it’s any consolation to you, the previous president also agreed with the decision; as did the leaders of Britain, Spain, Italy, Australia and other sundry countries. In fact of the major countries that didn’t agree, most were found to have been on Saddam’s payroll.</p>
<p>“clearly represents what OUR citizens care about.”</p>
<p>How many citizens cared about Saddam Hussein and his WMD’s before the president told us that all our lives were in danger? And how many cared about it AFTER the president stood up and said that our children’s future depended on this fight?</p>
<p>It’s called leadership. Presidents don’t just say, well, the people aren’t demanding change, so I’m just going to follow the polls. Presidents stand up and tell the people that they need to focus their attention on a new problem. And if they do it well, the people follow the leader. Bush has shown that he knows how to do this; it’s just a question of where he’s choosing to direct our attention.</p>
<p>Frankly, the decision to invade Iraq and the rationale for it are water over the dam at this point. Interesting from an historical perspective, but neither here nor there going forward.</p>
<p>Saddam is gone. There were no WMDs. A gleaming pillar of democracy ain’t going to happen. So, we can just scratch those of the list.</p>
<p>The important question: What is the rationale for a continued military effort in Iraq? What vital US security interests are being served? </p>
<p>These are the questions I have not heard our President address, beyond vague “domino theory” considerations. I suspect that the President’s perceived vital security interest centers around the prevention of a Shia government in Iraq. That seems to be the driving principle behind our entire post-war occupation efforts. If that is the case, then he should explicitly state it so that we can understand and evaluate his motivation.</p>
<p>I really wonder about the WMDs. I mean that. I really wonder. If it’s so plausible that so many people in so many countries got so much wrong once, who’s to say that it couldn’t/didn’t happen again. What if there were WMDs or programs in some fashion that were moved somewhere else (Syria? Russia?) and we find out the hard way that the conventional wisdom imposed upon us by the mainstream media without too many questions was not the whole truth, either? Again, this is something I wonder sometimes at 3 am or when sitting through yet another disaster drill in Times Square. I do, however, believe that history will present a very different picture of this period in our nation. What that will be, I don’t know, but I do think that the media has failed to live up to its mission of questioning and investigation and, instead, have been an advocacy group for a particular point of view. Which does no one any good.</p>
<p>How do we jump from funding of alternative energy to Hussein, WMD’s, and lives in danger? The truth is that our country is happier when our leadership prefers to ignore the international scene and concentrate on domestic issues where the laissez-faire works wonders for a lackluster president. Sometimes it takes the pressure resulting from a loose zipper to look abroad for dissipating a rising crisis. </p>
<p>In the end, being viewed as the policeman of the world and being expected to act on every issue does not reconcile very well with the desires of our Average Joe who is more interested in keeping his Ford 150 running cheaply and watching the Nascar races than giving a damn about Hussein, Iraqis, or whatever country he couldn’t spell correctly, let alone locate on a map. </p>
<p>As seen in the past 15 years, it is easier for our “leadership” to respond to today’s fickle demands than to preserve and protect our long term values. The “Do Nothing” policy seems to pay better dividends!</p>
<p>ID, I agree that the decision to go to war is water over the dam. However, the context of this discusion is one of the principles or lack there of in potential candidates for 2008. In this context, it is highly instructive to look back at the statements of people like Al Gore to see if he has any amount of principled leadership capability. I say that his complete turnaround from a war hawk a year before the war, to a presumed war critic just prior to the war (although I really haven’t seen any statements from him that disavow his earlier thoughts), to a Bush basher after the war started to get ugly, make him highly suspect in the area of scruples. </p>
<p>Your other question is a good one however. However, from a pure humanitarian perspective, your “solution” of letting the two sides fight to the death is a bit lacking. The unfortunate victims of the bloodshed are not the combatants but the innocent civilians who happen to share the same religious beliefs of the other side.</p>
<p>The problem, as we now know, is that the politicians and congressional leaders were presented with a bill of goods on WMD by the civilian leadership of the intelligence services and the administration. In short, the books were cooked, either inadvertantly or intentionally. When you believe that Sadaam had active WMD programs, you reach one set of conclusions. It is difficult to hold that against someone when it later is revealed that the books were cooked. The question of whether to hold it against the Bush administration is one for the history books. I know for a fact that Colin Powell’s own State Department intelligence analysts had told him that the “evidence” he presented to the UN (the aluminum tubes, the alleged yellow cake purchases, etc.) was dubious, but he made his speech anyway. The fact that the Bush White House outed Valerie Plume in retaliation for Joe Wilson’s conclusion that the yellow-cake story was bogus suggests the possibility that the adminisistration intentionally cooked the books. But, again, that’s a question for the history books. I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they were idiots, not liars. It’s all water under the dam.</p>
<p>I want to hear an articulation of a serious national interest in committing 150,000 American troops to Iraq from this day going forward.</p>
<p>I am willing to entertain a humanitarian rationale, although I have not really heard that articulated by the administration. If we accept a humanitarian rationale, then we have to question our strategy, since by all measures, Iraq is in worse shape today than it was three years ago. Clearly what we are doing is not working from a humanitarian standpoint. The figures presented to Congess last week are that 100,000 Iraqis are being driven from their homes EACH MONTH in an orchestrated campaign of ethnic cleansing. There is a serious refugee problem. But, I do not see a component of the Presidents “New Plan” that includes refugee assistance (that would require talking with Syria and Iran).</p>
<p>I am NOT willing to entertain any rationale that includes sticking our nose in between the Sunni and Shia political factions in Iraq. That just strikes me as a losing proposition. And, frankly, I’m a little tired of doing Saudi Arabia’s bidding.</p>
<p>But, in this case we are talking about Al Gore. This is the person who had access to all of the intelligence information that a President/Vice President would have. The fact that he came out so strongly in favor of war is further evidence that any “cooking of the books” would have to have been done by someone back in the 90’s. You do recall the dire calls of warning regarding Iraq that were lead by Clinton, Gore, Albright, etc. don’t you?</p>
<p>"The fact that the Bush White House outed Valerie Plume in retaliation for Joe Wilson’s conclusion that the yellow-cake story was bogus suggests the possibility that the adminisistration intentionally cooked the books. "</p>
<p>She wasn’t “outed” by the Bush White House. She was “outed” (was she ever in?) by Richard Armitage. Ms. Plame wouldn’t have been an issue if she hadn’t arranged to send hubby to Africa and he hadn’t lied like a rug in his op-ed piece and thereafter.</p>
<p>fundingfather, Gore came out strongly against the war. It doesn’t matter if at one time he was in favor of the war. He changed his mind. He publicly was against the war before the war started. You want to ignore the FACT that he publicly was anti-war.</p>
<p>If Bush had changed his mind, we would have saved thousands of lives, and a trillion dollars.</p>