One-and-a-half cheers for the latest Gore

One-and-a-half cheers for the Gorebot. Al Gore, who's been lost these past two years within the tangled mazes of academia and facial-hair experimentation, returned to the public stage last week with a scathing attack on George W. Bush. In front of an audience in San Francisco, Gore argued that Bush's plans to attack Iraq had nothing to do with the 'war on terror,' and would most likely diminish the standing of the US in the world and set back the effort to look for the assailants of Sept. 11. In Gore's telling, Bush was a man determined to find someone to blame for the attacks on America, even if this meant venting the nation's rage on a country which had nothing to do with what had happened.

The significant thing about Gore's speech is not so much what he said, but what other Democrats have failed to say. Gore, like almost every politician outside the US, can easily see that the proposed war in Iraq is a bad idea. His fellow Democrats, however, have been largely running scared from the issue or trying to divert the news agenda elsewhere. Before the Gorebot's unexpected pronouncements in San Francisco, it seemed that Democrats might persist in this strategy: cut their losses on Iraq, and hope that a position of national unity on smashing Saddam would allow us to return to the usual train of Republican corruption, plunging market indices, and assertions of Bush's lassitude given his improbably long Texas vacations.

So why only one-and-a-half cheers for Gore, particularly since his staking out this territory represents a major political gamble? One reason is that I'm not sure he's sincere. Gore, as one wag remarked after hearing the speech, is going to undo ten years of hard work building up his image as a Democratic hawk. You might remember that Gore folded his strong support for the original Gulf War in 1991 into his political biography in subsequent elections: look at brave Al, went this story, standing up in the Senate and voting against his Democratic colleagues in order to stop Saddam! While it's true that Al may have had a Damascene moment in these past two years, skepticism is in order until we see more evidence of his consistency.

Another explanation for why the Gore-cheers are dying in my throat is that, behind the talk of multilateralism and engaging the international community, there's a more sinister argument that makes Bush seem refreshingly honest. This is how it goes: "Democrats are fine with attacking Iraq, or doing anything else that's of questionable legality or benefit, but let's use the UN. Why bother alienating other countries with our unilateralism, when we can force resolutions through the UN which do the same job but which make us seem multilateral?" This implication was certainly in Gore's speech; you could also hear it in Bill Clinton's appearance on morning TV a few days later, the former president soothing the anxieties of both the undecided folks and the hawks by promising a war in Iraq and a friendly hearing for America at the U.N.

We've seen this before: Clinton and Gore, when in office, invented something called "assertive multilateralism" that committed the US to act multilaterally when it could win the support of others, but then to act unilaterally if no-one else was keen on offering their support. This is a bit like offering to obey the laws that suit you, then to disregard the ones you don't like. It's certainly "assertive," but it's hardly "multilateral." (Funnily enough, the press in the mid-1990s always got confused and called the new policy position "aggressive multilateralism," which perhaps better captures its essence.) There are several examples of this policy and its folly from the tenure of Clinton-Gore: Clinton's refusal to participate in a peacekeeping mission in Rwanda in 1994, the administration's rejection of the International Criminal Court in 1998 and Clinton-Gore's dismissal of the Kyoto protocols on global warming in 1999-2000. Suffice to say, other nations got very impatient with this, but Clinton and Gore persisted in the policy and eventually bequeathed it to their successors.

So perhaps Gore has changed, and the Democrats as a party will now think about the international community and multilateral action not simply as a political opportunity, but a two-way commitment that's binding on the United States. They could start by pledging to sign up to both Kyoto and the International Criminal Court; they could also tone down the war rhetoric and see the referral of Iraq to the UN as a chance to consult with other nations, rather than to get the rest of the world to rubber-stamp an invasion plan drafted in the Pentagon. If the Gorebot and the rest can follow through on this, they'll truly be worth cheering for. Nicholas Guyatt, a graduate student in the history department, is from Bristol, England. He can be reached at nsguyatt@princeton.edu.