No, we have no assurance in our speculations that he wouldn't.Enki wrote:He wouldn't have gone to war in Iraq.Mr. Perfect wrote:If there had been no EC Bush would have won anyway by pursuing a different electoral strategy. Al Gore would have been worse than Bush.
Start by considering that the Clinton Administration signed the Iraq Liberation Act (in an attempt to placate a public which was polling around 70% in favor of the removal of Saddam,) which declared that "it should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime" and Vice President Gore is on record as being assured as late as 2002, that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction which couldn't be regulated by international sanctions.
Furthermore, Gore, working with the same intelligence would be surrounded by a most hawkish Democrat Joe Lieberman as Vice President; by his old friend and confidante Marty Peretz; the general Washington bureaucracy which wouldn't have been too dissimilar regardless of who is President; would have been pressured by outside voices like Tom Friedman and would have had to deal with Republicans screaming for Saddam's head. Which gets into his volition: Gore made a name for himself as being a hawkish Senator in the 80s. Clinton chose him because he was one of the few Democrats that voted for the first Gulf War. And when in 2002, he spoke in opposition to the Bush administration, he never was opposed to the goal of removing Saddam and the weapons stockpile but the fact that Bush didn't have enough international support.
All this is speculation in the end but it is ludicrous to clearly assert that Gore "wouldn't have gone to war in Iraq." Even if he were a changed man from his public history in 2001-2002, he may not have had much of a choice. Clinton, like Bush 41, barely held back the call for regime change and Gore is no Clinton- he would not have stood a chance at opposing what was popular sentiment through the 90s, especially after the attacks, even if he wanted to...he would have dealt with the same conditions presented.