Has He Forgotten?

The Boston Herald takes Al Gore to the woodshed for his MoveOn rant at NYU. An excerpt:

He never mentioned Nicholas Berg. Or Daniel Pearl. Or a single person killed in the World Trade Center. Nor did former Vice President Al Gore talk of any soldier by name who has given his life in Iraq. And he has the audacity to condemn the Bush administration for having “twisted values?”

Gore spent the bulk of a speech before the liberal group MoveOn.org Wednesday bemoaning Abu Ghraib and denouncing President Bush’s departure from the “long successful strategy of containment.”

Yes, the very same strategy that, under Gore’s leadership, allowed al-Qaeda operatives to plan the horror of Sept. 11 for years, while moving freely within our borders. . . .

And this man – who apparently has so much disdain for the nature of the American people – wanted to be elected to lead it?

That’s exactly the point. I won’t dismiss the horrible events of Abu Ghraib, and I think everyone involved should be breaking rocks at Ft. Leavenworth for the rest of their lives, including the commanding general. At the same time, the media has hyped this story beyond all belief. Abu Ghraib has been on the front pages of The New York Times every day for almost a month now. That’s simply overkill. Meanwhile the discovery of a shell containing sarin, the ongoing UN stonewalling into the Oil-For-Food program, and other events carrying far more weight are buried. The media has an agenda, and that agenda is to get rid of Bush even if it means thousands of Iraqi and American lives.

What both Gore and the media forget is that we’re not living in the September 10 world anymore. The argument goes that Iraq and September 11 exist completely separate from each other. This argument wasn’t even the one being made by the left after September 11 — remember the cries to consider the "root causes" and the need for a "Marshall Plan for the Middle East"? Well, we are considering the root causes, and we’ve just started the Marshall Plan in Iraq. Except we’ve realized that the root causes of terrorism isn’t poverty (there are poor people everywhere and nearly all of them outside the Middle East don’t decide to blow themselves up) and it isn’t American action (we’ve done far more meddling in the affairs of Latin America, and they don’t feel the need to murder thousands of Americans). It’s in the conditions of autocracy and fundamentalism that have spread across the Middle East. The only way to counter this spread is to introduce democracy, plurality, and freedom and let it do what it always has — spread from those places that are more free to those that are less.

Gore also completely ignores the fact that a country with a history of using weapons of mass destruction, a longstanding history of supporting worldwide terrorism, and a leader with messianic meglomania is going to be a threat sooner or later. This is odd, as he had made that very case himself as Vice President. Remember, on September 10 anyone who said Afghanistan would be able to attack the US would end up in the loony bin. We had a country that had almost no natural resources, a ragtag military, armor that dated to World War I, an air force that would have consisted of kites had the Taliban not banned them, and absolutely no ability to project force anywhere. Afghanistan was a country that couldn’t hurt anyone but themselves.

Or so we thought.

If a group of Arabs based out of Afghanistan could kill 3,000 Americans and shatter the national economy with 19 men and a few knives, imagine what could be done with four gallons of sarin on the New York subway. Such an attack could bring this country to its knees and kill thousands or even tens of thousands.

We’ve already seen that the concept that Hussein and al-Qaeda would never work together doesn’t hold any water – there are numerous connection that suggest they had previously, and we know beyond any doubt that they are now. So much for the theory that the "secular" Ba’athists and the fanatic members of al-Qaeda could never work together. Jihad apparently makes strange bedfellows.

What bothers me most about Gore and the left in general is that it isn’t about Iraq. It isn’t about terrorism, it isn’t about al-Qaeda, it isn’t about anything other than George W. Bush. The left has a deeply personal and visceral hatred for Bush, and that hatred causes them to ignore anything else. They can’t focus on anything other than achieving political power.

So here’s a note Mr. Gore – this isn’t about Bush. The enemy isn’t in Washington, it’s in the murderous ambitions of al-Qaeda. If you can’t see that by now it’s clear you’ve spend the last three years with your eyes firmly closed.

(Hat tip to Instapundit)