Gore slams White House on Iraq, economy

NEW YORK — Former Vice President Al Gore yesterday attacked the Bush administration before a militantly antiwar audience, accusing the president of creating “false impressions” about why U.S. forces are in Iraq, the state of the economy and global warming.

“Reality is turning out to be very different from the impression that was given when the votes — and the die — were cast,” said Mr. Gore, who again said he would not join the nine candidates seeking the Democratic nomination to take on President Bush in 2004.

Nevertheless, Mr. Gore adhered to a hard anti-Bush line that stopped just short of calling the president a liar during his speech at New York University sponsored by MoveOn.org, the liberal advocacy group founded to fight President Clinton’s impeachment.

Mr. Gore said “false impressions” that led to the war in Iraq included assertions that Saddam Hussein was on the verge of making a nuclear bomb, that he had worked closely with Osama bin Laden, that Iraqis would welcome American GIs with open arms and that reluctant allies would fall into line.

None of these expectations turned out to be true, Mr. Gore said.

“Millions of Americans now share a feeling that something pretty basic has gone wrong in our country, and that some important American values are being placed at risk, and they want to set it right,” Mr. Gore said.

The White House dismissed the comments of the former vice president, who won the popular vote but lost the electoral count in the 2000 presidential election.

“I think the American people know that the president’s committed to the security of the United States and to winning the war on terror and to securing our economic security,” Bush spokeswoman Claire Buchan said in Crawford, Texas.

Mr. Gore said the president “intentionally distorted” the threat of global warming and the benefits of his tax policy just as much as he misled the public on the threat posed by Iraq.

“In each case, the president seems to have been pursuing policies chosen in advance of the facts — policies designed to benefit friends and supporters — and has used tactics that deprived the American people of any opportunity to effectively subject his arguments to the kind of informed scrutiny that is essential in our system of checks and balances,” Mr. Gore said.

Mr. Gore did praise Mr. Bush for deposing Afghanistan’s oppressive Taliban rulers and Saddam, but said the administration’s unilateral approach is putting American troops at excessive risk.

“Too many of our soldiers are paying the highest price for the strategic miscalculations, serious misjudgments and historic mistakes that have put them and our nation in harm’s way,” said Mr. Gore, whose critique of the administration resembled that of the Democratic contenders for president.

Christine Iverson, spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, said it was hard to know the purpose for the Gore speech, saying “until now” only Democratic presidential candidates had described attempts “to rid the world of terrorism to be a strategic miscalculation.”

“Listening to him speak, you’d almost think that he wasn’t vice president when terrorists attacked the USS Cole, when they attacked U.S. military barracks overseas, when they attacked the World Trade Center the first time [in 1993]. These were not ‘mistaken impressions,’” Miss Iverson said.

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