Was Iraq inevitable, regardless of whether it was a D or R in the White House? Or, would he have resisted and doubled down in Afghanistan?
I think Afghanistan would have happened but not Iraq. GWB had a specifically apocalyptic good v. Evil mindset, in addition with all the “avenge my father” psychodrama that made him the perfect vessel for neocon villainy.
Gore might have increased troop levels in the Persian gulf and probably opened the “war on terror” on multiple fronts without the singular focus on Nation building in Iraq.
This. 9/11 allowed for unilateral political action in a way that was unprecedented since like.... honestly I can't recall. It allowed for the weird specifics of the spersonalities of the US leadership to come through in the moment.
i feel like iraq was driven so much by the project for a new american century ghouls (cheney, rumsfeld etc) in bushs administration who had been banging the invading iraq drum well before they convinced bush to do 9/11
may well have been other imperial projects but i suspect not that specific one
edit: lol i didnt mean for a throwaway 9/11 joke to spawn whatever the fuck happened here, this is just like that time i tripped over when i was doing my jet fuel delivery
oh yeah i was memeing about bush doing 9/11, but its easy to forget now how incredibly mask-off the pnac publications were about everything , including frothing at the mouth for "some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor"
i dont think they were actively involved or necessarily knew that 9/11 specifically was coming, but they had ample intelligence to know something similar was coming, and they 100% made a conscious decision to let it happen and capitalise on it rather than do anything meaningful to stop it
they 100% made a conscious decision to let it happen and capitalise on it rather than do anything meaningful to stop it
This seems more and more likely every time I read about how the FBI will wind up right-wing psychos instead of arresting them or talking them down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia
Have you seen how many planes were grounded immediately after? Five going down is a coincidence sure, but it's not a conspiracy. The same people who told you 9/11 happened then sold you on two wars because of it. These are questions we should ask.
well, "9/11 never happened" is certainly not a take i thought i would ever see lmao
It happened, it was just five isolated events and some media hysteria linking them together. Five planes can't crash on the same day? In the entire world? Knowing full well how tall the World Trade Centres were?
so according to you, two planes just happened to veer directly into the world trade centre within 20 minutes of each other?
How could 4 planes crashing into 4 high profile targets, and a 5th crashing before it had the chance to hit its target, and then Al Qaeda explicitly taking credit, as well as 20 suicide hijackers with a coordinated plan having their identities revealed, be an accident?
Because shit happens. You weren't there.
Either there was a massive plan to carry out a massive attack (highly likely), or there was a massive plan to make a highly coincidental series of crashes into high profile targets seem like an orchestrated terrorist attack (highly unlikely). Either option involves a massive plan.
Can you keep a secret between 20 friends? Coincidences happen.
Wait do you think 5 planes just accidentally crashed and just happened to be into places like the WTC and pentagon? Or that it was 5 independent occurrences that coincidentally happened on the same day at the same time?
Because both of those are a lol
Yes. 20 people independently thought they knew how to fly a larger plane than they could. Like you're perfect. You've never made a mistake.
To add to the other comments here about how Iraq probably wasn't inevitable, a full-scale invasion and occupation of Afghanistan may also have been avoidable. It would have more likely happened than not, but there's maybe a 30-40% chance that a Gore administration would have opted for (1) the pre-invasion Taliban offer to turn bin Laden over, (2) the post-invasion Taliban offer to end the war quickly, or (3) a global manhunt for bin Laden instead of an invasion/occupation.
The difference goes back to the response to Vietnam. Democrats tend to admit we lost that war, and want to avoid getting in (and losing) another Vietnam-type war. They're still fine with imperialism (even if they would argue with calling it that), they just want to do it less directly. This is still awful, but at least it's less destructive. Republicans, on the other hand, will give you nonsense like "we didn't lose Vietnam, we quit/we set too many restraints on our military/the hippies undermined the war effort." Between the exit from Vietnam and 9/11, they'd talk about how we needed to kick "Vietnam syndrome" so we could more actively (which means more destructively) do imperialism. Republicans want an honest-to-goodness American Empire; Democrats want to do neocolonialism and smaller "interventions."
The distinction has been blurred a bit in the 20 years of post-9/11 war, but it was pretty clear in the late-90s/early-00s. Gore would have at least strongly considered smaller-scale responses to 9/11, even if it's ultimately more likely than not he would have invaded Afghanistan (due to the shock of the attack, pressure from the military-industrial complex, how easily libs turn into hawks, etc.).
It seems important that Gore equals no Dick Cheney breathing down the neck of a very mediocre George Bush Jr.
George Bush did lose the election, its so fucking funny that SCOTUS still decided to make him president.
The invasion of Iraq was largely masterminded by Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the capital interests of defense and engineering contractors behind the Bush administration. Then there's the kicker of "he tried to kill my dad".
Saddam was a thorn in the side of the US, but beyond just oil, the geopolitical relevance of Iraq would be limited. I don't think a Gore administration would have invaded Iraq, but it definitely would have gone for the flex in Afghanistan of controlling central Asia, and possibly goinng further in that objective. Yemen and Somalia would probably have been treated similar to how we've seen.
I hate to say anything even passingly nice about GWB but I don't think Gore could've dodged the shoes
If Bob Dole had won in 96 and served 2 terms would he have invaded Iraq?
If Ross Perot had won, would we have gotten bigger stimmy checks?
Probably not because his state department / CIA types were not the neocons. Still monsters, though.
There's also something to be said for deliberate IC incompetence re: 9/11 that was only helped by that neocon group. 9/11, of course, being the pretext for barely-related wars of aggression and a massive ballooning of IC funding and power. No 9/11, no War in Afghanistan. No prepared neocon response to such a "Pearl Harbor" event, no War in Afghanistan.
The War in Iraq was also a neocon project by literally the same people who created and prosecuted the Gulf War. Gore would not have them in power. However, he would have surely continued the extremely capricious and violent sanctions regime that killed 500,000 children under Clinton, among other travesties.
I honestly don't know, Iraq actually seems contingent compared to usual dominance of material conditions of history.
I think on the one hand they were bound to do some action in Iraq. The Neocons were still slavering over the idea of invading Iran and Iraq was a good base for that and proof-of-concept. The other thing about it was that Iraq was getting off the petro-dollar and was trading its oil for Euros - much derided by economists at the time as a choice, but petrodollar recycling meant that if they tolerated Iraq, Iran, even later Venezuela and Libya to start trading oil in other currencies than dollars that would mean the end of the primary basis of America's reserve currency status and the cheap credit that comes from that.
I'm not even sure 9/11 still happens with Gore instead of Bush. Bush seemed more hooked into the deep state and I think there was wide spread knowledge that a terror attack on America organized by previous CIA agent Osama was in the works. These things have a heft and momentum on their own, but Presidents do have some latitude to change things they just choose not to as the sort of people coughed up after law school, business and politics get morphed into perfect cats paws for what Capital wants to achieve anyway.
Wasn't Clinton advised during his admin about al-Qaida and the potential for an attack on American soil?
I feel pretty sure Gore wouldn't have invaded Iraq, except for the petrodollar thing. It's definitely weird how we don't really care about countries like Libya or Iraq, and then when they try and challenge the petrodollar they just happen to get invaded. I would not rule out the possibility that if any oil-producing country tries to do it, even someone like Bernie would be forced by capital + CIA to do some sort of action against it.
a college professor I had (and my only polisci/IR professor who would regularly criticize US foreign policy, although still very much a lib) said that after 9/11 the invasion of Afghanistan was set in stone, although Iraq it is much more debatable whether Gore would've invaded there. Nonetheless there'd still be a whole lot of neocon ghouls pushing for it, and we probably would've found ourselves there at some point after 2003.
