Suppose they hadn’t stolen the 2000 election
You will remember that Al Gore was elected but did not get to serve because the Supreme Court first said stop re-counting ballots then after a couple of days said (5-4) that there wasn’t enough time to count ballots now.
Suppose with me for a minute that instead the court had followed the law of the land, and allowed Gore to become President.
Okay, so let’s suppose that it’s Sept 11, 2001, and the attacks on New York and Washington proceed as they did on this reality-time-stream. (That’s a big “suppose” already. Mr. Mission Accomplished took the entire month of August off and he and his team never looked at the report specifically outlining the prospective attacks. Think Gore would have done the same?)
How likely is it that in the previous months Gore would have allowed oil company executives to draft the national energy plan? How likely that he would have proceeded on the assumption that some pretext had to be found so that we could invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein? Not bloody likely.
How likely that he would have had us invade Afghanistan? A pretty good likelihood, I’d say, and I don’t see much reason why he (or anyone) shouldn’t have done so. It is well known that the Taliban who were running Afghanistan were running terrorist training camps. If you want to play that game, you had better expect some major blowback. I think we would have invaded and overthrown the Taliban, just as we did - and in that process, the really major difference begin to show themselves.
1) Would Gore likely have tried to go it alone, or with only the British? Would he have come into office on a juvenile platform that assumed that the US says frog and our “allies” (subjects?) say “how high?” Repeat after me, not bloody likely.
2) It is a NATO operation in name and should have been a NATO operation in fact. That would require the whole-hearted cooperation of our European allies. Would Gore have alienated them over the previous few months? NBL.
3) With the elimination of the Taliban from control of the Afghan government, would Gore have figured that “American can do” would be enough, or would he have sought to have reconstruction proceed under UN auspices if possible? Would he have denounced (or allowed his team to denounce) allies with different opinions? Would the Gore White House have endorsed the bozos on Capitol Hill in their idiotic demonizing, Freedom Fries and all that? NBL.
4) Would he have pretended that the attacks by fundamentalists were somehow sponsored and encouraged by the dictator presiding over a secular anti-Iranian regime? You should know the initials by now: NBL.
5) Therefore would he have invaded Iraq? If you’re in doubt, you haven’t been listening. And in the absence of an attack on Iraq, would he have done nothing? Equally NBL. What he would have done we can’t know, but my guess is that he would have treated the terrorist attacks as the criminal acts they were rather than as conventional acts of war. Belief in enhanced international cooperation is in Mr. Gore’s public record. It is not a theme of Mr. Mission Accomplished’s pathetic public life. Do you think such an approach would have bred more terrorists than the Iraqi bear trap? Left us more isolated? As isolated? NBL.
This doesn’t begin to numerate the ways in which Mr. Mission Accomplished has been a disaster for this country, and for the constitution, and for our freedoms. It doesn’t touch the unprecedented corruption, the wholesale looting of public funds, the bankrupting of the treasury, the impending inevitable destruction of our currency, the shredding of the Bill of Rights, the systematic demonization of any opponents foreign or domestic, or the deliberate strategy of polarizing the country. It speaks only of the one issue of terrorism and an illegal and suicidal war.
Even on that one issue, a partial tally of the results of a stolen election are staggering.