Looking At Algore: Iraq Edition

"Yesterday, I demonstrated Al Gore's incorrigible phoniness. This is a man who pledged upon his sister's death from lung cancer to "pour his heart and soul" into taking on the tobacco industry, but then campaigned on his affection for tobacco and took campaign contributions from the industry. And this is a man whose lifestyle represents the antithesis of what would be required to make a dent in dealing with the global warning problem which has become the centerpiece of his attempt to return to the limelight.

Hoping perhaps to redeem Gore, Cenk Uygur links to a speech the former Vice President gave before the war in Iraq. Uygur calls Gore's remarks "prescient." It turns out, however, that Gore's core predictions and analysis were wrong in hearly every particular.

First, though, let's give Gore some credit. He was correct in noting that "Iraq does pose a serious threat to the stability of the Persian Gulf." He was also correct that "Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to completely deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power." Gore may have incorrect in stating that "we know [Saddam] has stored secret supplies of biological and chemicals throughout his country," but that's what our intelligence agencies had been saying for years (including during Gore's time as VP), so his mistake here was understandable.

Why, then, did Gore think we should not take military action to remove the threat he acknowledged Saddam posed? His speech asserts four main reasons, all of which turned out to be misguided.

Gore was concerned that our troops would be subject to attacks with the biological and/or chemical weapons he was sure Saddam possessed. That, of course, did not happen." [ RTWT. Like Hitchens, I find it morbidly fascinating to watch all the left's contemporary concern about OIF being repelled by Saddam's WMD being systematically vacuumed down the Memory Hole. Algore saying this as a recent ex-VP has zero excuse for the "Bush lied" vacuities -- he was privy to Tenet's briefings also. Never mind says the left, not only did Shrubbie lie to us, but we were too smart to believe him. And we'll conveniently expunge any evidence to the contrary. Not that we have any sympathy with totalitarian methods, mind you. This also reminds me of the anecdote Bernard Lewis told in his recent talk on Islam in Europe about the Soviet historian pointing out that in his country the issue was not predicting the future but the past as it always seemed to keep changing! -ed. ]