They Call Him Crazy

Al Gore, from a speech to the Commonwealth Club of California on September 23, 2002:

Here's another of the main points I want to make. If we quickly succeed in a war against the weakened and depleted fourth-rate military of Iraq and then quickly abandon that nation, as President Bush has quickly abandoned almost all of Afghanistan after quickly defeating a fifth-rate military power there, then the resulting chaos in the aftermath of a military victory in Iraq could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam.
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But if Iraq came to resemble Afghanistan, in its current depleted state, with no central authority - well, they have a central authority, but their central authority, because the administration's insistence that the international community not be allowed to assemble a peace keeping force large enough to pacify the countryside, that new government in Afghanistan controls a few precincts in one city and the warlords or drug lords control the whole rest of the countryside. What if in the aftermath of a war against Iraq, we face a situation like that because we washed our hands of it? What would then happen to all of those stored reserves of biological weapons all around the country? What if the Al Qaeda members infiltrated across the borders of Iraq the way they are in Afghanistan?

I just think that if we end the war in Iraq the way we ended the war in Afghanistan, we could very well be worse off than we are today.
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Here we are in the city where the United Nations was established. Even before the U.N. was established, you look back over the last 85 to 100 years, there is lots and lots of evidence about why it's almost as important to win the peace following a war as it is to win the war itself.

You can say "he's lost his mind". I say, ARE YOU EFFIN' KIDDING ME? More like effin' prescient. Hey ya'll, don't blame me. I voted for him. And for those of you who think he wouldn't have gone after Hussein, read the damn speech. I'm not sayin' I agree with it, I'm just sayin' it's true. By the way, this sorta gives the lie to the whole "Monday Morning Quarterbacking" complain Shrubya keeps trying. He was warned by a serious person thinking seriously about the issue, well before yesterday.

I'd also like to point out that this is what I meant yesterday about idealogy vs empircism in governing. Gore didn't have to ask the lord what would happen in Iraq. He looked at the evidence, the situation in Iraq, and he looked at administration policy, and he concluded there was a danger. And then, horror of horrors, he gave a speech about it. And those little effer's at Faux News and the rest of the echo chamber mocked him for it. ARE YOU EFFIN' KIDDING ME? Eat your goddamn words you tiny peices of floating human waste.