Eli Lake has an excellent piece in the New York Sun today on “What Gore Doesn’t Say” when asked about the Iraq war–mainly that U.S. forces should retreat and redeploy. According to Lake, the Oscar winning, celebrity politician “is a tag ’em and bag ’em tough guy, a former vice president who endorsed the rendition of terrorists for interrogation, not to mention the bombing of Serbia and Iraq.” Lake says, “one of the reasons he opposed the [Iraq war], was because he did not trust President Bush to stay in Iraq once the Baathist state was dismantled.” He quotes the former VP’s September 23, 2002, address to the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco:
“If we go in there and dismantle them [the Baathists]–and they deserve to be dismantled–but then we wash our hands of it and walk away and leave it in a situation of chaos, and say, ‘That’s for y’all to decide how to put things back together now,’ that hurts us.”
Lake’s conclusion:
Mr. Gore’s record in public life aside, he is also a far shrewder politician than many are willing to admit. This Nobel Peace Prize nominee and Oscar winner must know that Americans–when faced in a presidential election with a choice between a dove and a hawk–have chosen the hawk every time since Johnson beat Goldwater. . . . And at the end of the day, this may be the most inconvenient truth of all for those frantically trying to draft Mr. Gore to run for the White House.
