If Only Al Gore Had Been Commander In Chief

When chief 9-11 operative Mohamed Atta arrived in the United States in June 2000, he had good reason to believe not only that Al Gore would be the next president, but that he would also be one tough adversary.

For Atta’s benefactor, Osama bin Laden, this was just as well. He was spoiling for a fight, and his beef was with Clinton and Gore, not Texas governor George Bush.

Truth be told, the boys of summer had been annoying bin Laden for the last eight years. They had particularly irked him with their treatment of Iraq.

In fact, two of the three specific gripes in bin Laden’s 1998 “kill all Americans” fatwa dealt with Iraq and America’s “continuing aggression against the Iraqi people.”

Just a week before that fatwa, President Clinton had piqued bin Laden by warning of “the very kind of threat Iraq poses now—a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction, ready to use them or provide them to terrorists.”

As to Al Gore, bin Laden knew he would be a tougher customer than his boss. In 1991, while Clinton waffled back in Arkansas, Gore was only one of ten Democratic senators to take to the Senate floor in support of the Gulf War resolution, which barely passed 52 to 47.

At least with Gore, the Republicans would have kept the fire lit under him.

What makes you think Gore would have done anything? If the Clinton/Gore record is any indication of how they would have handled it, they would have done nothing.

The Clinton/Gore administration failed miserably when it came to their primary responsibility of protecting the American People.

President Bush is still strong on the WOT.

I look forward to reading part two when you post it.

I've said for several years now that the post-9/11 world would be much different if Gore had won in 2000 . . . but not in the way most people here might think.

If Gore had been president on 9/11, I think there is a very strong likelihood that the U.S. would have engaged in a massive military campaign to obliterate major cities in the Middle East -- including Kabul, Islamabad, and perhaps Baghdad.

What people need to understand is that a Democratic president -- as Cashill so clearly points out -- has far more leeway to engage in this kind of military action than any Republican would be. And a quick review of modern U.S. history supports this, too. Democratic presidents got the U.S. involved in most major military campaigns in the last 100 years, and have really never had to answer for any of them (including Vietnam, which is still called "Nixon's War" to this day even though it was started under a Democratic administration and escalated under a Democratic administration, and a Democratic president fouled the whole thing up).

Al Gore would have gotten far less grief for killing several million people in the Middle East than George W. Bush got when the U.S. military was caught putting underwear on the heads of prisoners.

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