"A Democratic president would have been at most a year behind the Bush Administration’s track in the War on Terror."

So writes Austin Bay. What do you think? If Gore had won in '00, would he not have gone on the offensive the way Bush did? And all you people who despise Bush, what would you be saying now if Gore had been President all these years and had taken the same approach to national security? If you can perform this mental exercise honestly and see that you would approve of the things you now disapprove, you ought to consider yourself too partisan. I'd certainly say you are.

If you think I'm just jerking you around and being a Republican political partisan, remember that I voted for Gore in 2000. I've thought all along that Gore would have done basically the same thing Bush did.

Bay's piece is commenting on this interview with Christopher Hitchens. An excerpt:

Q - Your much-discussed separation from the American left began shortly after the September 11 attacks. What prompted your displeasure with the left?

A - The September 11 attacks were one of those rare historical moments, like 1933 in Germany or 1936 in Spain or 1968, when you are put in a position to take a strong stand for what is right. The left failed this test. Instead of strongly standing against these nihilistic murderers, people on the left, such as Noam Chomsky, began to make excuses for these murderers, openly saying that Bin ladin was, however crude in his methods, in some ways voicing a liberation theology. This is simply a moral and political collapse.

But its not only that. It’s a missed opportunity for the left. Think of it this way: If a group of theocratic nihilists drive planes full of human beings into buildings full of human beings announcing nothing by way of a program except their nihilism and if they turn out to have been sheltered by two regimes favored by the United States and the national security establishment, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to be precise, two of only three countries to recognize the Taliban, and if Republicans were totally taken by surprise by this and if the working class of New York had to step forward and become the shield of society in the person of the fire and police brigades, it seemed to me that this would have been a good opportunity for the left to demand a general revision of all the assumptions we carried about the post cold war world. We were attacked by a religious dictatorship and the working class were pushed into defending elites by the total failure of our leadership and total failure of our intelligence. The attack emanated partly from the failure of regimes supported by that same elite national security establishment– Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. If the left can’t take advantage of a moment like that: whats it for? whats its secularism for? Whats its internationalism, class attitude, democracy for?

That's brilliantly well put. Much more at the link.