Gore, Bill Clinton or Hillary Clinton would very likely have invaded Iraq if any had been President at the time. If a semi-”realist” and publicly isolationist candidate like Bush ends up in Iraq, certainly a liberal interventionist already engaged in a low level conflict with Iraq during the 1990s would no longer have tolerated Saddam in a post 911 world.
Further speculation:
1- Gore would have faced hostility from the far-left and probably from the Move On/Hollywood set, but not monolithically in the case of the latter. The Democrats’ dividing line would be along the lines of the Chompsky/Zinn crown who vehemently opposed Gulf War I and more so those who opposed the Kosovo intervention. He may have held the support of mainstream and even most liberal Democrats.
2. At least half (but probably not many more) Republican war supporters would now be opposing the intervention, at least after the fact as in the case of the present Democrats, on grounds that Gore/Clinton irresponsibly misrepresented the threat and got the Nation involved in a needless war in which vital national interests are not at stake. We are diverting resources from the search for Osama. These traditional Republican themes would resonate very well in a party whose isolationists instincts would have outweighed their Jacksonian instincts or “neo-conservative” (whatever that means) minority. Republican neo-conservatives would probably have supported the centrists in the Democratic Party.
3. Gore (or Clinton) may have handled the diplomacy better than Bush, who was frankly incompetent. French participation would have been at least 50/50.
4. All of the above could have had major implications for the way in which the war is portrayed in the U.S. media and the (largely derivative) European media.
Gabriel Gonzalez
