When chief 9/11 operative Mohamed Atta arrived in the United States in June 2000, he had good reason to believe not only that Al Gore would be the next president, but that he would also be one tough adversary.

For Atta's benefactor, Osama bin Laden, this was just as well. He was spoiling for a fight, and his beef was with Clinton and Gore, not Texas Gov. George Bush.

Truth be told, the boys of summer had been annoying bin Laden for the last eight years. They had particularly irked him with their treatment of Iraq.

In fact, two of the three specific gripes in bin Laden's 1998 "kill all Americans" fatwa dealt with Iraq and America's "continuing aggression against the Iraqi people."

Just a week before that fatwa, President Clinton had piqued bin Laden by warning of "the very kind of threat Iraq poses now -- a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction, ready to use them or provide them to terrorists."

As to Al Gore, bin Laden knew he would be a tougher customer than his boss. In 1991, while Clinton waffled back in Arkansas, Gore was only one of 10 Democratic senators to take to the Senate floor in support of the Gulf War resolution, which barely passed 52 to 47.

In the 1992 campaign, Democratic ads boasted that Gore "broke with his own party to support the Gulf War." On the stump, he chastised the incumbent President Bush for his "dangerous blindness to the murderous ambitions of a despot."

That despot, of course, was Saddam. Gore cited a RAND corporation study that reported, probably with some accuracy, that an estimated 1,400 terrorists were operating out of Saddam's Iraq even after the Gulf War.

As Vice President, Gore showed a willingness to mix it up with the bad guys that Clinton lacked. In his best-seller, "Against All Enemies," Clinton's counter-terror czar, Richard Clarke, brags about Gore's toughness on the subject of extraordinary renditions.

The first time Clarke proposed an extraordinary rendition in 1993, then White House Counsel Lloyd Cutler demanded a meeting with President Clinton to explain how such renditions violated international law.

According to Clarke, Clinton seemed to be leaning towards Cutler's view until Vice President Al Gore arrived and belatedly entered the debate.

"That's a no-brainer," said Gore of the decision to snatch. "Of course it's a violation of international law, that's why it's a covert action. The guy is a terrorist. Go grab his a--."

In the spring of 1998 the Clinton Justice Department indicted bin Laden. Justice cited an understanding between bin Laden and Saddam "that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al-Qaida would work cooperatively with the government of Iraq."

In August of that year, the Clinton administration ordered the destruction of the al Shifa chemical plant in the Sudan in retaliation for al-Qaida's bombing of two American embassies earlier that month.

Clarke would share with the Washington Post intelligence that linked al-Qaida to the "Iraqi nerve gas experts." He was one of six Clinton officials to insist publicly on an al-Qaida-Iraqi tie to justify the missile strike.

Clinton and Gore played hardball in the Balkans as well. When Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milosevic refused to knuckle under on Kosovo in March 1999, the boys decided to get tough.

Not ones to stand by ceremony, they bypassed Congress and the U.N. and started dropping bombs on Yugoslavia on their own authority. The urgency was understandable.

Although Yugoslavia had no WMD, no terrorist arm, no history of violence against the United States, and had invaded no other country, its forces had reportedly killed 100,000 Kosovars and dumped them into mass graves.

On "CBS Face the Nation" Clinton Secretary of Defense William Cohen repeated the 100,000 figure and claimed that the war was "a fight for justice over genocide."

The president compared the work of the Serbs in Kosovo to the German "genocide" of the Jews during the Holocaust and assured America that "tens of thousands of people" had been murdered.

The New York Times helped Clinton and Gore amplify their message. No fewer than 375 articles would contain the combination "Kosovo" and "genocide," most of those making a direct equation.

Still, Yugoslavian President Milosevic refused to cry "uncle" as expected, and so the boys pounded him and his fellow Serbs with 38,000 combat missions over 79 days until he did.

As late as five weeks after the bombing stopped, the New York Times was reporting that "at least 10,000 people were slaughtered by Serbian forces during their three-month campaign to drive the Albanians from Kosovo."

Indeed, it is likely that the nearly unqualified hostility of the world's media toward their cause compelled the Serbians of Yugoslavia to capitulate.

In the war's wake, however, international teams of investigators and pathologists showed that the Clinton White House and their friends in the media had inflated the number of Kosovar dead just a wee bit.

In fact, there were no mass graves. There was no genocide. The ethnic Albanian dead numbered in the hundreds, not in the hundreds of thousands.

Spanish forensic surgeon Emilio Perez Pujol would tell the British Sunday Times that the talk of genocide was "a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines, because we did not find one -- not one -- mass grave."

The International Criminal Tribunal ended up charging Milosevic in the death of only 600 identifiable ethnic Albanians killed in the savage in-fighting, a comparable body count to a year's worth of L.A. gang wars.

No one apologized, not the White House, not the New York Times. Why should they have? War is always hellish and shrouded in fog. The experience toughened Al Gore and proved his readiness to take over as commander in chief.

Alas, one military action too many cost him his main chance. On Easter Saturday morning in the year 2000, the White House dispatched its armed commandos to seize at gunpoint the one illegal immigrant it did not cotton to, young Elian Gonzalez.

Unlike the bombing of Yugoslavia, this action was caught on film. The unnecessary roughness cost Al Gore an estimated 70,000 Cuban-American votes in Florida, about 600 more than he could afford to lose.

Still, if only those wily Republicans had not robbed Gore of the remaining 600, if only he had been in place as commander in chief on Sept. 11, the war on terror would have turned out so much differently.

So our progressive friends tell us, and they are probably right, but for reasons they cannot even begin to fathom. More next week.

Sept.11, 2001, found would-be terror fighter Al Gore brooding Achilles-like in his tent. This should have been his hour.

A Vietnam vet, he had broken ranks with his own party to authorize the Gulf War, had chastised the senior Bush for coddling Saddam, had signed off cheerfully on extraordinary renditions and had encouraged Clinton take it to the Serbs without so much as a howdy-do from Congress.

On top of that, Commander Gore had the discipline and the will the notoriously disorganized and dithering Clinton did not.

If only the Republicans had not "stolen" the 2000 election, he would have had the chance to manage the war on terror, and he would assuredly have done a better job.

So the Democrats believe, and for reasons they will never acknowledge, they may actually be right. A close reading of Doug Feith's essential new book, "War and Decision," reveals why.

In the book, the former undersecretary of defense Feith lays out the "parade of horribles" he and his colleagues contemplated on the eve of the Iraq war.

There was little they missed: Iraq could experience ethnic strife; reconstruction could take 10 years, not two; terrorism networks could improve their recruiting; the U.S, would not find WMD.

But there was one "horrible" the Bush White House failed to contemplate. It was the most insidious of them all and the one that Gore, for reasons that will become clear, would have avoided.

Given Gore's warrior spirit, however, he would likely have made many of the same decisions the Bush White House did in regards to both Afghanistan and Iraq.

That much said, Gore could not have done better in Afghanistan. The great majority of military and political decisions the Bush team made proved to be the right ones.

The team's wisdom, however, was not instantly obvious. By Oct. 31, 2001, the New York Times was running front-page stories with headlines like, "A Military Quagmire Remembered: Afghanistan as Vietnam."

The president's critics in the media and in Congress promptly hoisted the "quagmire" flag up its metaphoric flagpole and saluted almost as one. "Are we quagmiring ourselves again," the Times' Maureen Dowd asked cattily.

The terrible truth is this: Dowd and her allies hoped the answer was yes. Just three weeks into the war, they expected -- and wanted -- the Bush administration to fail.

They were soon disappointed. Kabul fell less than two weeks after the Times and literally hundreds of other critics had written off Afghanistan as another Vietnam.

For all the virtues of his book, Feith fails to see how the residual spite from the November 2000 election undermined every action the Bush White House took.

With Afghanistan under control, the White House turned its attention to the other potential theaters of the War on Terror, tangible and virtual. Iraq, make no mistake, was one of them.

Those who persist in believing that Iraq was "invaded" for oil or for Israel or for Haliburton or to impose a wishful neo-con democracy will not want to read Feith's book.

What drove war planning was one overriding concept. Feith calls it "anticipatory self-defense." Sept. 11 had proved that Islamic jihadists were no longer content with terror as theater.

No, they were clearly keen on mass destruction. Were they able to unleash WMD of any sort on American soil, our way of life would have effectively come to an end.

As all parties understood, Saddam was the one person in the world with the means, motive and requisite madness to make this happen.

"Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power," claimed Al Gore himself just six months before the war began.

A month later, rationalizing his upcoming vote to use force against Saddam, Sen. John Kerry chimed in: "I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security."

In its loud talk of war, however, center-left politicians failed to hear the "chickens coming home to roost" drumbeat of surrender from deep within their own ranks.

Howard Dean did. Ignoring the center, he fueled his seemingly successful candidacy on the deep-seated, anti-American animus of the hard left. And for these people, truth was utterly irrelevant.

"What I want to know," Dean asked in the very first sentence of a pre-campaign warm up speech before the war even began, "is what in the world so many Democrats are doing supporting the president's unilateral intervention in Iraq?"

That the U.S. had enlisted 30 allies, three of which had committed combat troops, Britain's in great number, did not deter Dean from openly dissembling.

The media, as Dean's rivals began to see, were eager to abide by almost any lie as long as it sabotaged "Bush's war." How else to explain Dean's success or the celebrity of conspicuous liars like Joseph Wilson and Richard Clarke?

The media also erased a decade's worth of Democratic warnings about Saddam, enabling them to transform non-partisan intelligence shortfalls into "Bush lies."

Worse, as Feith reveals, the media exploited and aggravated the natural divisions within any bureaucracy to undermine the war effort at every step.

International critics took their cue from their American comrades, and terrorists in the field took encouragement from both. All parties shared a self-fulfilling yen for quagmire.

For Gore and the other centrists -- their past bravado consigned to the memory hole -- there was no longer any point or profit in supporting the war.

And for Gore, in particular, it had always been about Al Gore.

Sen. Alan Simpson has related in detail how Gore shopped his vote on the critical 1991 Gulf War resolution for TV time. "I was there," wrote Simpson, "and witnessed Al Gore putting politics over principles."

It seems likely that he was projecting his own inner Judas when in February 2004, Gore publicly said of George Bush, "He betrayed this country!"

No, Al, that honor was yours.

The one "horrible" Gore would not have had to contend with was dealing with treacherous characters like Al Gore, and yes, that would have made a world of difference.

By Jack Cashill
www.worldnetdaily.com