LONDON: Listening to Al Gore at Hay-on-Wye last week, I wondered where we would be had the Supreme Court sided with him in 2000 instead of overturning his narrow majority in favour of George W Bush.
For one thing, Gore would not have attacked Iraq in 2003. In his speech to the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco in 2002, he said: “If we quickly succeed in a war against the weakened and depleted fourth-rate military of Iraq, and then quickly abandon that nation, as President Bush has quickly abandoned almost all of Afghanistan after defeating a fifth-rate military power there, then the resulting chaos in the aftermath of a military victory in Iraq could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam.”
He was wrong about the hasty exit from Iraq, but in all other respects, he was spot on. And it is quite possible that if the US and United Kingdom had not invaded Iraq, the West would not now be facing the threat from Iran’s uranium-enrichment programme because President Ahmadinejad would not have been given the opportunity to maximise a position only made possible by Saddam’s fall.
The ‘what if?’ conjecture underlines two things about good leadership in America. The first is that doing nothing is a hell of a lot better than reaching for your gun and firing at the wrong target. The second is that it took some courage for Gore to speak out against the martial din of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News network during that period.
Someone once said that leadership is the capacity to explain oneself to others in a way that clarifies and expands a vision of the future. There’s maybe too much of the management handbook in that, because the greatest leadership quality is to be true to what you think and to go on saying it, whatever the prevailing view.
In his Vanity Fair/Carbon Trust lecture last week, Gore explained himself and his convictions on climate change with a good deal of ease and charm. Because he is on the stump to win minds and not, as yet, votes, he is free along the way to touch on the institutionalised heartlessness of America under George W Bush, a landscape which stretches from the ruination of Appalachia by the coal industry, through the derelict city of New Orleans, to the $400bn US budget deficit.
In the background looms America as it is today — the TV networks run by six corporations (as opposed to 50 when Ronald Reagan first stood for president), political funding of parties ($500m at the last count), the interesting fact, given its quality, that an average American spends more than a fifth of his life watching TV, and the recent decision by Congress to vote for an increase in the US national debt to $9 trillion. Whether he runs for the presidency in 2008 or not, Gore beckons to the ingenious, open-hearted and staunch nation that has been shouted down these past few years.
That seems to be leadership of a very desirable kind. I cannot say whether he would be a good president, but he is infinitely more impressive than the leading Democratic contender, Hillary Clinton, who voted for the war, has visited Baghdad twice since 2003 and is allowing Rupert Murdoch to hold a benefit for her in July. That alone must signal that she is already too compromised to be president, but also that she lacks the ability to explain herself and clarify a future, which, because of China, the national debt, oil prices and environmental threats, especially from hurricanes, is bound to be very different for all Americans.—Dawn/The Observer News Service
