Roger’s assertion that had Al Gore been elected president in 2000, he’d be in Iraq now, just like Bush, and suffering the same opprobrium, is a statement of faith, and a misguided one at that. The rationale behind it is that US presidents are constrained in their actions by geopolitical realities. While that sounds perfectly reasonable, to be taken seriously it needs to be supported by history, and the fact is, it is not. Carter and Reagan faced the same geopolitical realities and yet acted very differently. Clinton faced the same geopolitical realities as Bush, but perceived the situation differently and acted differently. Clinton launched a war over Kosovo, but prosecuted in it a completely manner than Bush has prosecuted the war in Iraq, and garnered a very different reaction from the press and a large segments of the public. To go further back, Johnson and Nixon took different approaches to Vietnam. Past history will reveal other examples.
All these differences have been critical to the outcomes for our nation. To pretend that who is President does not matter because geopolitical realities do our governing for us is to take a dangerously mechanistic, not to say foolish and naïve, view of how things work.
