this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2024
1497 points (90.4% liked)
Political Memes
5483 readers
3213 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Gore voting for Iraq I was hardly a surprise, as he championed it regularly on TV. He then chastised Bush I for ending the war too early.
In the Clinton Administration, he was among the staunchest hawks. He would give speeches calling for removing of Saddam ("finish the job"). You can probably find some of those speeches with Google...cover the name over and you'd think you were seeing something from Rumsfeld or Cheney.
Contrary to myth, Iraq II was not invented by a small group of neocons. It had full bipartisan backing in Congress, and there are some who were close to Gore who believe he would have also been in support.
Here’s a speech Gore gave about Iraq War 2. You don’t need to believe whether or not he would have been in support; you can go back to contemporary speeches and find out whether he would have been in support, and he wasn’t. As you pointed out, it had pretty freaking broad support, so that made him an outlier.
Idk what you mean about “among the staunchest hawks” in the Clinton administration. It’s not the VP’s job to do policy decisions and take part in the debate about what the president’s policy should be (at least not in public). If he was making pro war statements from 1992-2000 that’s a statement of what the Clinton administration’s policy was, not what Al Gore’s policy preferences were.
He was okay with war, in general, in ways that would make him an anomaly for a progressive Democrat today, but not at all at the time. (At the time, we were still doing our own Israel-in-Gaza slaughter and torture operations all over Central and South America with, as you pointed out, broad bipartisan support with 0 of this modern level of protest or debate about whether we should be doing it.) And like I said, he definitely wasn’t brought into the Clinton administration because he was some pro war guy. I honestly have no idea what you’re even talking about with that. Anyway, I showed you the contemporary articles about why people were saying he was brought in; you’re welcome to read them, or alternatively to think what you like about it if you’re committed to your way.