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Kelly McParland: Would Al Gore have invaded Iraq? Definitely, concludes new study
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Candidate
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| Contributor | RP |
| Last Edited | RP Dec 24, 2008 12:32pm |
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| Category | Study |
| News Date | Tuesday, December 23, 2008 06:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Current wisdom has it that if there had been a few less hanging chads in Florida in November 2000, the world would be a different place.
Al Gore would have won the presidency, the Iraq war wouldn’t have happened, and several hundred thousand people who perished in that war would be alive today. That conclusion is based on the generally unchallenged belief that Iraq is George W. Bush’s war: that he and a cabal of like-minded right-wingers conceived and executed the invasion for their own ideological motives. Or, as Frank Harvey, a research professor of international relations at Dalhousie University, puts it: “A few powerful ideologues exploited public fears (and international goodwill) in the aftermath of 9/11 to amplify Iraq’s WMD threat as a primary justification for an unnecessary, preventive invasion.”
That view, notes Harvey, “has emerged as the dominant narrative for explaining the U.S. attack. It represents the prevailing consensus running through dozens of the most popular books on the Bush administration, and hundreds of frequently cited (and widely circulated) scholarly articles, media reports and blog entries on the invasion. In fact, casual observers engaged in a cursory review of the literature will find the same thesis repeated (and usually defended) by prominent scholars, journalists and Washington ‘insiders’ on the left and right of the political spectrum.”
Harvey believes the conclusion is dead wrong. In a new paper for the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute, he deconstructs the thesis and finds it “overlooks almost all of the relevant historical facts.” More than that, he asks a simple question: Had he been elected, would Al Gore have taken the same path as George Bush? He concludes, overwhelmingly, that he would have.
Given the prevailing mood in the aftermath of 9/11, the institutional structures that surround the president, the political and social pressures of the time, the accepted wisdom regarding Saddam Hussein and the international factors at work, says Harvey, Gore “[would have been] compelled ... to make many of the same interim (generally praised) decisions for many of the same reasons. Momentum would have done the rest.” |
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