Last week, in a speech to the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, former Vice President Al Gore formally came out against the pre-emption policy of President Bush. Among other things, he said, \After Sept. 11, we had enormous sympathy, goodwill and support around the world. We've squandered that, and in one year. We've replaced that with fear, anxiety and uncertainty, not at what the terrorists are going to do but at what we are going to do.""
The fact that Al Gore weighed in on Iraq is no surprise. He certainly knows something of foreign affairs in general, and of the Iraq situation in particular'both as the former senator who voted in favor of the 1991 Persian Gulf War and as the former vice president who had a front row seat for the last major military action in Iraq, which took place in December 1998. Yet, for several reasons, the timing seems to be a touch off.
For one thing, his critical analysis would have had a greater chance of being represented in the final policy if he had pronounced them a few months ago'particularly because his support would have added some weight to similar arguments being made by other critics. Then there are the obvious political overtones to Gore's address. The speech can be seen, correctly, as a play for core Democratic primary voters, who are generally dovish and internationalist. But the main reason lies in the circumstance I described in last week's column'namely, that Democrats, in the runup to next month's midterm elections, want to divert attention away from foreign policy and towards domestic concerns. His comments, when combined with the wholly justified meltdown staged by Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., on the Senate floor a week ago, have placed the Democrats' focus squarely on international affairs.
However, all of this is Monday morning quarterbacking. Gore is fashionably late to the debate, but I certainly would not exclude him on his tardiness alone.
File under ""some things will never change:"" In a recent column posted on http://www.townhall.com, Ann Coulter, the famed columnist and author, labeled the Gore speech'and the growing opposition to war'as ""traitorous."" And responding specifically to Gore's statement about the growing anxiety of the world community, Coulter wrote, ""Good. They should be worried. They hate us? We hate them. Americans don't want to make Islamic fanatics love us. We want to make them die. There's nothing like horrendous physical pain to quell angry fanatics. So sorry they're angry'wait until they see American anger. Japanese kamikaze pilots hated us once too. A couple of well-aimed nuclear weapons, and now they are gentle little lambs. That got their attention.""
Coulter has always been on the brink. But I think that she has, at long last, gone completely mad.
Can you think of a worse way to quell the rage of Islamic fundamentalists than killing a few of their brothers-in-arms? And what of the families and friends of those innocents who will be inevitably killed in the course of our good intentions? Are they going to be thankful for our righteousness? Or are they going to seethe with furious anger'the same anger that Coulter wants all patriotic Americans to harbor? And is anger, should it arise, going to lead to further attacks on our nation and therefore entirely defeat the purpose of the Iraq invasion?
I could easily attempt to dismiss Coulter's commentary as a rant. But watch in the next few weeks, as this nation inches closer to war, and see how many war supporters fail to remember what was once'and supposedly still is'a central tenet of conservative doxology: An actor must consider and take responsibility for the consequences of his or her actions. Notice the number of times that the word ""treason"" is used in reference to those citizens who dare to voice their opposition to the policies of their government. If this nonsense occurs as often as I expect it to, then Coulter's insane ravings will graduate from the fringe to the mainstream.
And finally, if support for war against Iraq is as rock solid as the White House likes to think it is, then how does one account for the 375-2 blowout at Monday's town hall meeting at the state Capitol? You can come up with a pat response for the opposition turnout (the Madison peace lobby was well mobilized), but how do you explain the fact that only two people felt strongly enough about the issue to publicly lobby for war? Just a thought.
