To Hell with Gore.

Michael J. Smith makes a good point, one that I have tried to make again and again on this blog: the assertion that Democratic Party rule, while no panacea, would be measurably, substantively better than Republican Party rule places the onus of proof on the asserter. And yet I find myself far more often than not trying to wrap a succinct reply around the unanswerable rejoinder to my pox-on-both-houses-ism: Are you saying that Al Gore would’ve done such-and-such if he’d been president!?! Smith takes the birdshot to the face of this epistemological vapidity, so to speak, and in the broad sense he’s exactly correct to note that it is, in the end, a secondary-at-best consideration, far eclipsed by the question of what precisely a reempowered Democratic Party would do upon settling into a new sinecure as Washingtonian Top Dog.

Still, I think Smith misses an opportunity to get all George C. Scott-as-General Buck Turgidson and scream a hearty "Hell yeah!" at his skillfully maligned interlocutors.

So for the record: Yes, I believe that if Al Gore had been elected/appointed/whatever in 2000, these United States of America would indeed be at war in Iraq right now, even as we speak. Like most Democrats of consequence, Gore converted to Iraq-peacenik only after the venture went south, and his critiques, though full-throated, remain in the firmly proceduralist Democratic mainstream: not that it was inherently wrong to fight a war of aggression against another nation in order to depose its leaders and install a new regime, preferably an amiable and aesthetically democratic client, but that it’s taking so goddamn long and costing so goddamn much money to get it done. His critique, in other words, is not of the bank robber for robbing the bank, but of the bank robber for shooting wildly and hiring a slow getaway car.

The line to neoconservative foreign adventurism runs right through the Democratic party. Paul Henry Nitze was not a Republican. Gore is as much the intellectual heir of the Cold-War threat-pornographers as any Democrat alive today. In his Congressional career, he staked out a place as one of the most “pro-defense” Democrats, staunchly opposing base closings, forever approving of bombing campaigns abroad. (He also opposed abortion and said that fags are nasty and dirty, but who’s counting?) He was a major proponent of Operation Desert Fox, as well as the decade of disastrous sanctions which further punished the Iraqi people for having the temerity to live under a US-sponsored dictator. (Indeed, missing from most analysis of the genesis of the Iraqi insurgency is mention of these sanctions and their toll as an inchoate motivator of popular anti-Americanism.)

The Occupation has gone very, very badly, and consequently Voterus Americanus has turned against it by degrees. I do not question that Al Gore’s transition to antiwar advocate is more or less heartfelt, but I do question the logic the projects his current opposition to the manner and execution of occupation backwards in time to retroactively abrogate his extremely hawkish views prior to bold display of vicious "incompetence" (a misuse of that word I despise, but there it is) in the Middle East. Recall that in 2000 it was George W. Bush running against the adventurism of his Clintonian opponent, claiming that you could count on him, the folksy GOP candidate, to do the work of compassionate conservativism at home and speak more modestly abroad in this new, post-cold-war era of strong international institutions. The essential project of liberating Iraq is as much a dream of Clinton-Gore as Bush-Cheney. That Bush-Cheney found in an unrelated terrorist attack a clever MacGuffin to actually institute that policy is hardly proof—or even suggestion—that Bush’s defeated opponent had anything else in mind.

So yes. Had Al Gore been President, we’d be in Iraq right now. The difference? It would have gone more smoothly; the transition from invasion to occupation would’ve been handled with less "audacity of hope," to crib a phrase from coreligionist Barack "I’m Partly Black! It’s AWESOME!" Obama and more hard-tacks police-statism. The insurgency would’ve taken longer to get underway. Opposition would still be confined to those of us on the fringe who believe that unprovoked foreign invasions are categorically and not merely particularly bad. Democrats would be cheering our forward policy, and Republicans, including current war-pimpers, would be lamenting the One-Worldism and foreign interventionism of those damnable Democrats who, they would remind us, also got us into Vietnam and fucked it all up.

In short: It is clear neither retroactively nor predicatively that Democrats will engage in a sounder or more ethical foreign policy given the opportunity. Committing the same errors, but in a different order, hardly seems a remedy to our current woes.