The 9/11 attacks would probably have been aborted, because President Gore would have:
- Taken terrorism seriously from the start.
- Empowered Richard Clark
- Tightened airport security in Summer, 2001, because of his prior investigations of this issue.
However, had the attacks occurred, he would probably have:
- Put in the force to take bin Laden out at Tora Bora.
- Mopped up rest of Al Qaeda using a police/intelligence/diplomatic operation carried out in close cooperation with our allies.
- Peacefully contained Iraq.
- Tortured no one.
- Taken meaningful steps to improve the view of the US in Muslim eyes.
Had Gore been allowed to take the office he won fairly, we would now be looking at victory in the GWOT. How incredibly Bush has fucked everything up!
Thanks Bob. I’ve tried real hard not to do the what ifs, here. But it may be a helpful exercise to remind ourselves of an alternate vision from time to time.
What we can’t do is let this type of exercise draw us from the tasks at hand. I think this diary has not gotten many comments (so far at least) because so many of us are totally sick about 2000 and 2004 that we can’t even wrap our minds around it much anymore, other than to focus on getting the vote-fixing apparatchiks and their leaders and their machinery out of power.
Onward and upward, with all our might. We can still have a world something like that one if we work really hard and stay focused.
My answer to this question(s) has changed more times than I can count in the past few years. The more I learn about the situations, the more complicated it seems.
First, if Gore had won under the same circumstances, I think the outrage would’ve diminished faster. The public didn’t want to be involved politics back then. The attacks would not have happened. I don’t see it as a bunch of radical Islamic extremists carrying out a suicide mission of salvation. In my opinion, 9/11 was the exploitation of people and circumstances in a brilliant execution of organized crime. All of the players had to be in perfect position for it to work and with Gore they would not have been.
Had it happened and been blamed on bin Laden then Gore likely would have gone into Afghanistan but in this case ObL wouldn’t have had the same protection.
I think ObL would have been taken out in a strike or turned over by the Taliban to try to pursue a pipeline negotiation before 9/11 would have happened.