The notion that we didn't have a public debate in the months leading up to the war certainly seems like revisionist history to me. My impression was that we debated ourselves til our faces were blue.

Our representatives debated it in the House and Senate, for quite a long time, and ended up giving Bush Congressional approval.

Seems like it was being hashed out in nearly every media outlet for the six months leading up to the war.

And as far as I could tell, on-line and in the real world, people were talking about it, hashing it out as well.

There was a public debate. A pretty fierce one. What Gore and company don't like is the fact that the majority of Americans came out on Bush's side. Instead, they'd like to portray it as a mass brainwashing, based on a web of nasty lies. But Saddam's brutality and non-compliance was plain for everyone to see, and Iraq either had weapons or refused to completely account for their disposal.

I had a feeling you’d say something like that. If you read carefully you’ll note that Gore doesn’t say we had no debate, he says the debate we did have was made not on a basis of facts but on a basis of unsupported assertions, erroneous assumptions, and outright fabrications, which he lists in some detail.

If you don’t think that’s an issue, then I suspect we’re not going to find a lot of common ground here.

Something is wrong with the image for this category, as it isn't displaying for me.

Oops — forgot to categorize it. Sorry! Fixed.

I see your point, and Gore's, though suprisingly I still disagree.

Of his list of 6 false assumptions, the first 4 were all about Saddam being in cahoots with Al Qaeda. Are you insisting that this connection was never challenged publicly?

As for (5) Our GI's would be welcomed with open arms by cheering Iraqis who would help them quickly establish public safety, free markets and Representative Democracy, so there wouldn't be that much risk that US soldiers would get bogged down in a guerrilla war.

Who was guaranteeing this? And who was honestly proclaiming that it would be a walk in the park?

And (6), the assumption that the rest of the world would "fall in line", well, I don't think there were many Americans that would have expected that either, not with the worldwide protests leading up to the war and the open dissent of many European countries. I think most Americans understood that besides the Brits, we mostly likely would have to go it alone.

So while I'd agree with Gore that the assumptions he made were flimsy, I'd also point out that all of them were either vigorously challenged in public or never held at all.

The following assumptions were more likely justification for the war:

1) Iraq had never lived up to its obligations to disarm, dismantle, and disclose its WMD programs stemming from agreements at the end of the Gulf War, spanning 12 years.
2) Saddam Hussein was a ruthless despot who invaded two neighboring countries, brutalized his own citizens, and defied virtually every standard of international human rights.
3) While Iraq's ties to Al Qaeda were tenuous at best, Hussein openly supported Palestinian suicide bombers, including financial incentives.

Only the first two points are about the Iraq / al-Qaeda connection. There’s never been a shred of real evidence of that, and it goes against everything our experts know about Iraq and about al-Qaeda. No one should ever have had to debate that, because the Administration should have known better than to bring it up.

The third and fourth points are about weapons of mass destruction. I think we all know how far short of the original predictions that one has turned out. I don’t blame the Administration for thinking Iraq might have still had some kind of chemical or biological weapons program, but I do blame them for all that nonsense about aluminum tubes and Nigerian yellowcake, and for that scare talk about mushroom clouds.

As for points five and six, about what a pushover Iraq was going to be and how we could push the burden of reconstruction off onto the world community, they — like the rest of it — could come straight out of the rhetoric of folks like Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Cheney. Sure, they never “guaranteed” anything, but they sure didn’t hedge against it very strongly, did they?

Anyway, you’re mixing the grounds for the debate up with the subject of the debate. The debate wasn’t, or shouldn’t have been, over the six points that Gore listed; the debate was supposed to be over whether to invade Iraq.

There are reasonable arguments for the war, and you’ve articulated some of them. But even if those arguments were taken into consideration it was as part of a cost/benefit calculation based on costs — points 5 and 6 — that were at best extremely optimistic, and benefits — points 1 through 4 — that were largely imaginary, if not downright fraudulent.

I’d feel a lot more comfortable, at least about the decision-making process that led to this war, if I thought it had been a fair discussion of your points balanced against an indefinite occupation by 140,000 US troops.

Anyway, you’re mixing the grounds for the debate up with the subject of the debate. The debate wasn’t, or shouldn’t have been, over the six points that Gore listed; the debate was supposed to be over whether to invade Iraq.

I still tend to think there was plenty of on-topic debate leading up to the war. You seem to be saying, if I'm understanding you correctly, that Bush and company got us arguing and talking about things that weren't really germaine to the central issues...is that right?

Again, it seems to me that there was plenty of healthy debate on the right grounds, and on the right subject.