> > Ah yes, Anybody but Bush.
> >
> > A dime's worth of difference?
Eugene Vilensky replied:
> Meh. He probably needed the speaking money and was just telling the
> audience what they wanted to hear... maybe. Wait that was before the
> invasion?
> I'm fresh out of excuses.
---------------------------
No need to repent. No new revelation here. Gore's call was consistent with
the well-known (and bipartisan) foreign policy pursued by the Clinton
administration since 1998, when it committed itself to regime change in
Iraq, but through internal means - an uprising or, more likely, a military
coup backed by the CIA coupled with economic pressure resulting from
sanctions and air strikes against military bases and infrastructure. The
support of Europe and the UN was a necessary component of the strategy. This
is what both Gore and Kerry meant when they said they supported "the
overthrow of Saddam".
What was unusual - and radical - about the Bush administration was its decision to remove Saddam directly and unilaterally by invasion rather than subversion, by sending 100,000 US troops into Iraq. This was, of course, a very risky and highly controversial departure from traditional US policy since Vietnam - at least outside the Western hemisphere - and was resisted by the Democrats, the Republican foreign policy establishment, the Europeans and the UN, the international bourgeoisie and many on Wall Street who feared its destabilizing effects, and the overwhelming mass of world public opinion. We now know who was right, and it will become clear during the course of its second term whether the Bush administration has been chastened by the result.
We may not, in terms of the moral issues, see much difference between armed invasion and the more customary lower-level forms of US aggression involving selective air strikes, political subversion, and economic sabotage, which have also resulted indirectly in many thousands of civilian casualties. But the Iranians, North Koreans, Cubans, Venezuelans, and others targeted for regime change by the US clearly do, and for good reason. In the one case, they are able to retain their national sovereignity and the capacity to keep fighting against sanctions and/or subversion; in the other, they are subjected to foreign invasion and occupation and attendant destruction and chaos. These are the "large outcomes produced by small differences", as Noam Chomsky put it, and we should be wary of facile comparisions aimed at obscuring them.
MG