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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
In a speech to MoveOn.org, former Vice President Al Gore admonishes Bush and says "something basic has gone wrong in our country."
Aug 8, 2003 | Ladies and Gentlemen:
Thank you for your investment of time and energy in gathering here today. I would especially like to thank MoveOn.org for sponsoring this event, and the NYU College Democrats for co-sponsoring the speech and for hosting us.
Some of you may remember that my last formal public address on these topics was delivered in San Francisco, a little less than a year ago, when I argued that the president's case for urgent, unilateral, pre-emptive war in Iraq was less than convincing and needed to be challenged more effectively by the Congress.
In light of developments since then, you might assume that my purpose today is to revisit the manner in which we were led into war. To some extent, that will be the case -- but only as part of a larger theme that I feel should now be explored on an urgent basis.
The direction in which our nation is being led is deeply troubling to me -- not only in Iraq but also here at home on economic policy, social policy and environmental policy.
Millions of Americans now share a feeling that something pretty basic has gone wrong in our country and that some important American values are being placed at risk. And they want to set it right.
The way we went to war in Iraq illustrates this larger problem. Normally, we Americans lay the facts on the table, talk through the choices before us and make a decision. But that didn't really happen with this war -- not the way it should have. And as a result, too many of our soldiers are paying the highest price, for the strategic miscalculations, serious misjudgments, and historic mistakes that have put them and our nation in harm's way.
I'm convinced that one of the reasons that we didn't have a better public debate before the Iraq war started is because so many of the impressions that the majority of the country had back then turn out to have been completely wrong. Leaving aside for the moment the question of how these false impressions got into the public's mind, it might be healthy to take a hard look at the ones we now know were wrong and clear the air so that we can better see exactly where we are now and what changes might need to be made.
In any case, what we now know to have been false impressions include the following:
(1) Saddam Hussein was partly responsible for the attack against us on September 11th, 2001, so a good way to respond to that attack would be to invade his country and forcibly remove him from power.
(2) Saddam was working closely with Osama bin Laden and was actively supporting members of the al-Qaida terrorist group, giving them weapons and money and bases and training, so launching a war against Iraq would be a good way to stop al-Qaida from attacking us again.
(3) Saddam was about to give the terrorists poison gas and deadly germs that he had made into weapons which they could use to kill millions of Americans. Therefore common sense alone dictated that we should send our military into Iraq in order to protect our loved ones and ourselves against a grave threat.
(4) Saddam was on the verge of building nuclear bombs and giving them to the terrorists. And since the only thing preventing Saddam from acquiring a nuclear arsenal was access to enriched uranium, once our spies found out that he had bought the enrichment technology he needed and was actively trying to buy uranium from Africa, we had very little time left. Therefore it seemed imperative during last fall's election campaign to set aside less urgent issues like the economy and instead focus on the congressional resolution approving war against Iraq.
(5) Our GIs would be welcomed with open arms by cheering Iraqis who would help them quickly establish public safety, free markets and representative democracy, so there wouldn't be that much risk that U.S. soldiers would get bogged down in a guerrilla war.
(6) Even though the rest of the world was mostly opposed to the war, they would quickly fall in line after we won and then contribute lots of money and soldiers to help out, so there wouldn't be that much risk that U.S. taxpayers would get stuck with a huge bill.
Now, of course, everybody knows that every single one of these impressions was just dead wrong.
For example, according to the just-released Congressional investigation, Saddam had nothing whatsoever to do with the attacks of 9/11. Therefore, whatever other goals it served -- and it did serve some other goals -- the decision to invade Iraq made no sense as a way of exacting revenge for 9/11. To the contrary, the U.S. pulled significant intelligence resources out of Pakistan and Afghanistan in order to get ready for the rushed invasion of Iraq and that disrupted the search for Osama at a critical time. And the indifference we showed to the rest of the world's opinion in the process undermined the global cooperation we need to win the war against terrorism.
In the same way, the evidence now shows clearly that Saddam did not want to work with Osama bin Laden at all, much less give him weapons of mass destruction. So our invasion of Iraq had no effect on al-Qaida, other than to boost their recruiting efforts.
And on the nuclear issue of course, it turned out that those documents were actually forged by somebody -- though we don't know who.
As for the cheering Iraqi crowds we anticipated, unfortunately, that didn't pan out either, so now our troops are in an ugly and dangerous situation.
Moreover, the rest of the world certainly isn't jumping in to help out very much the way we expected, so U.S. taxpayers are now having to spend a billion dollars a week.
In other words, when you put it all together, it was just one mistaken impression after another. Lots of them.
