Read it and Weep

Courtesy of a post from Bob Somerby.

Here's what Al Gore had to say about the Iraq War back in September 2002 before the war was launched:

"I am deeply concerned that the course of action that we are presently embarking upon with respect to Iraq has the potential to seriously damage our ability to win the war against terrorism and to weaken our ability to lead the world in this new century.

I believe we should focus our efforts first and foremost against those who attacked us on September 11th and who have thus far gotten away with it. The vast majority of those who sponsored, planned and implemented the cold-blooded murder of more than 3,000 Americans are still at large."

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Gore's speech was carefully reasoned, point by point, with no rhetorical excesses, no cheap shots. He raised questions about the lack of plans for a postwar Iraq, about the cost of the war for taxpayers, the difficulties it would cause for diplomatic relations around the world. It's worth re-reading.

Gore's speech was regarded as utterly outside the bounds of respectable elite opinion, both on the op-ed pages and by the political class generally. Take Michael Kelly, for example, arbiter of centrist (even center-left) opinion. Here's what Kelly, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, former editor of the New Republic, Washington Post columnist, had to say about Gore's speech in a Washington Post op-ed:

"It distinguished Gore, now and forever, as someone who cannot be considered a responsible aspirant to power. Politics are allowed in politics, but there are limits, and there is a pale, and Gore has now shown himself to be ignorant of those limits, and he has now placed himself beyond that pale.

Gore's speech was one no decent politician could have delivered. It was dishonest, cheap, low. It was hollow. It was bereft of policy, of solutions, of constructive ideas, very nearly of facts -- bereft of anything other than taunts and jibes and embarrassingly obvious lies. It was breathtakingly hypocritical, a naked political assault delivered in tones of moral condescension from a man pretending to be superior to mere politics. It was wretched. It was vile. It was contemptible. But I understate."

Ironically enough, Kelly himself would be an early casualty of the Iraqi insurgency. While covering the war in Iraq in April 2003, his Humvee was fired upon by guerillas and it overturned. He drowned in a canal.

Come to think of it, Michael Kelly offers a (partial) metaphor for the way in which the Iraq War has discredited our whole political class, political and media elites alike. They all rushed us into this war, and they all (or nearly all) bear responsibility for it. And their credibility is just as dead as Kelly is. Unfortunately--and here is where the metaphor goes awry--most of the other war-boosters have managed to find other people to die for their mistakes.