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I just finished reading the transcript of Al Gore’s speech (via Atrios) to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. Earlier this evening I also watched a recording of MSNBC’s coverage of the speech.

On paper, this speech provides some of the most thoughtful commentary I have read regarding the Iraq question. In my opinion, Gore was sending a memo to other Democrats running for office this year. His underlying message was, “If the president wants to make this war a campaign issue, let’s make it a campaign issue. Let me tell you how”. To that end, Gore did a nice job of laying out the differences between this impending conflict and the 1991 conflict, describing the possible international implications surrounding a unilateral attack on Iraq, and asking what do we do after we have won?

In my opinion, the most powerful part of the speech were Gore’s comments regarding the new pre-emptive Bush doctrine:

Last week President Bush added a troubling new element to this debate by proposing a broad new strategic doctrine that goes far beyond issues related to Iraq and would effect the basic relationship between the United States and the rest of the world community. Article 51 of the United Nations charter recognizes the right of any nation to defend itself, including the right in some circumstances to take pre-emptive actions in order to deal with imminent threats. President Bush now asserts that we will take pre-emptive action even if we take the threat we perceive is not imminent. If other nations assert the same right then the rule of law will quickly be replaced by the reign of fear – any nation that perceives circumstances that could eventually lead to an imminent threat would be justified under this approach in taking military action against another nation. An unspoken part of this new doctrine appears to be that we claim this right for ourselves – and only for ourselves. It is, in that sense, part of a broader strategy to replace ideas like deterrence and containment with what some in the administration “dominance.”

This is because President Bush is presenting us with a proposition that contains within itself one of the most fateful decisions in our history: a decision to abandon what we have thought was America’s mission in the world – a world in which nations are guided by a common ethic codified in the form of international law — if we want to survive.

We have faced such a choice once before, at the end of the second World War. At that moment, America’s power in comparison to the rest of the world was if anything greater than it is now, and the temptation was clearly to use that power to assure ourselves that there would be no competitor and no threat to our security for the foreseeable future. The choice we made, however, was to become a co-founder of what we now think of as the post-war era, based on the concepts of collective security and defense, manifested first of all in the United Nations. Through all the dangerous years that followed, when we understood that the defense of freedom required the readiness to put the existence of the nation itself into the balance, we never abandoned our belief that what we were struggling to achieve was not bounded by our own physical security, but extended to the unmet hopes of humankind. The issue before us is whether we now face circumstances so dire and so novel that we must choose one objective over the other.

…

Does Saddam Hussein present an imminent threat, and if he did would the United States be free to act without international permission? If he presents an imminent threat we would be free to act under generally accepted understandings of article 51 of the UN Charter which reserves for member states the right to act in self-defense.

If Saddam Hussein does not present an imminent threat, then is it justifiable for the Administration to be seeking by every means to precipitate a confrontation, to find a cause for war, and to attack? There is a case to be made that further delay only works to Saddam Hussein’s advantage, and that the clock should be seen to have been running on the issue of compliance for a decade: therefore not needing to be reset again to the starting point. But to the extent that we have any concern for international support, whether for its political or material value, hurrying the process will be costly. Even those who now agree that Saddam Hussein must go, may divide deeply over the wisdom of presenting the United States as impatient for war.

At the same time, the concept of pre-emption is accessible to other countries. There are plenty of potential imitators: India/Pakistan; China/Taiwan; not to forget Israel/Iraq or Israel/Iran. Russia has already cited it in anticipation of a possible military push into Georgia, on grounds that this state has not done enough to block the operations of Chechen rebels. What this doctrine does is to destroy the goal of a world in which states consider themselves subject to law, particularly in the matter of standards for the use of violence against each other. That concept would be displaced by the notion that there is no law but the discretion of the President of the United States.

In effect, Gore provided the blueprint for the Democrats to take a stand on the issue of Iraq and pre-emption (though he received scant coverage from major media outlets). I wonder if it will be enough to motivate the Democrats to begin questioning the administration more frequently and forcefully. This is not to say that a war with Iraq should be out of the question, rather that Congress should not rubber-stamp the President’s Iraq resolution or accept Bush’s new pre-emptive doctrine without question.

On a more political note, there was a lot of talk on MSNBC as to whether this speech means that Gore is officially in the ring for 2004. I am not convinced that his purpose was to deliver this speech as candidate Gore. As I mentioned before, this speech is a good read, but Gore’s delivery of the speech did not seem to be an attempt to drum up campaign support. In fact, the actual delivery of the speech was not impressive. I think Gore, who is essentially the leader of the Democratic Party, was trying to get his fellow Democrats to wake up and start asking questions. If the purpose of Bush’s speech to the UN was to make a case for going to war, Gore’s purpose was to provide a rebuttal.

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