Bad Iraq news continues; Look! Over here! A Gore speech from '92

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It's interesting that the right-wing smear machine is already gearing up for Al Gore's potential candidacy. Of course, GOP shill Matt Drudge leads the way. The screen capture above is from The Drudge Report this past Tuesday. Of course, he's highlighting an Al Gore speech from 1992, part of which is below.

This speech is interesting to watch. Our country's past with Iraq and Saddam Hussein is a complicated one, and by complicated I don't mean that President Clinton is completely innocent, but he's far from the guiltiest, either.

What I found particularly poignant was Gore's Cliff-Note-tour of our country's involvement with Iraq in the 1980s. I won't get into it too much more in this piece, other than to say I've read the exact same things Gore speaks of in this video clip, lest anyone think Gore was merely spouting campaign rhetoric (the video dates from 1992).

Richard Clarke, who worked counter-terrorism under presidents Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton and Dubya, discussed in detail how Saddam brutally murdered hundreds of thousands of Iranians and Iraqis during that decade, all of which were under Republican, um, "leadership" in the White House. These facts often don't fit into the well-worn rhetoric of Republicans - that Saddam was a "brutal dictator" who "murdered his own people." Clarke details all of this and more in his stunning tome Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror, a book I highly recommend.

Sidney Blumenthal also covers our relations with Iraq in the 1980s (but less than Clarke) in his outstanding book, The Clinton Wars. Blumenthal served as President's Clinton senior political advisor during his second term.

The bottom line here is that America (Read: Ronald Reagan, and later, Bush Sr.) didn't feel the need to do anything about Iraq until the flow of oil was threatened by Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. I can still remember, with my own two ears, Bush Sr. on television declaring that "We are going to war to defend our way of life." Seems patently absurd now, doesn't it? If it doesn't, it should.

If you read about Kuwait, it's anything but a democracy, too.

Now that the neocons' grand experiment has failed MISERABLY in Iraq, setting our foreign policy back 25 years, people like Drudge are busy digging up video tape from 15 years ago in a lame, half-baked attempt to smear a undeclared candidate for president INSTEAD OF rightfully criticizing Bush's Iraq policy of perpetual war.

It's easy for someone like Drudge to dig up old video of Gore, ignoring the events of the past 15 years. What it does NOT take into consideration is what happened following Desert Storm; sanctions, no-fly zones and close monitoring during the 1990s had Saddam mostly boxed in - he had no nuclear program, and, we now know, no WMDs.

Over 3,500 hundred Dead Americans later, to say nothing of the $500+ billion in American dollars spent in Iraq, but Drudge chooses to not talk about that; instead, a Gore speech from 15 years ago takes priority.

What a pathetic canard, even for Drudge.