One of the hardest things to is to realise that your fantasies are just that — fantasies. And before we all get too excited let me clarify that I’m not talking here about imagining Hillary Clinton dressed in Highway Patrol leathers and swinging a night-stick, or any such run-of-the-mill sexual reverie. I’m talking about what we imagine without clear evidence to be true, such as the causes of our illnesses or what might have happened if it hadn’t been for X or Y.

Over in America there’s one of those silly, confected media rows going on at the moment, concerning the HBO chat-show host Bill Maher. Maher was having what passes on these programmes for a conversation after last week’s bomb at Bagram air base in Afghanistan. Said Maher: “I have zero doubt that if Dick Cheney was not in power, people wouldn’t be dying needlessly tomorrow.” The transcript then reads “(applause)”. And later on: “I’m just saying if he did die . . . more people would live. That’s a fact.” This packs so many imponderables into one statement that, whatever else it is, it’s not a fact. And whatever else it is not, it is a fantasy.

But far more indicative than Maher’s brutal counter-factual was the semi-editorial written in last week’s New Yorker magazine by its influential editor, David Remnick. The New Yorker is, of course, predisposed towards liberalism and the Democrats, but it is usually intelligently predisposed and people take notice of it.

Remnick was asking himself the “worse than painful” question of just how different things might have been had Al Gore been declared the winner. The question is painful because the answer, according to Remnick, is that things would have been infinitely better. This is partially because Gore was a paragon, being variously — in Remnick’s eyes — humorous, intelligent, honest, principled, patient and possessed of good judgment.

Expert View

The idea behind Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader? is to prove to the world that the average American grown-up has less intelligence than a child

Chris Ayres

• More

• Post a comment

BACKGROUND

• John Humphrys: The real battle is for the heart of an Arab child

• The enemy within

• Comment: Rod Liddle: Too much tolerance can hurt a country

• Kelly launches fund to fight Islamic extremism

• Minette Marrin: Oppose America and you are at war with yourself

Related Internet Links

• A world without America is unimaginable

• As with Iraq so with Iran - living through the same mistakes

But the difference is mostly down to the perception that Gore’s decisions would have been a complete contrast to Bush’s. The strongest argument here concerns how climate change might have been handled, but it is in the area of foreign policy that fantasy really asserts itself.

It is grudgingly conceded that though Gore and Clinton were supposedly “far more alert to the threat of Islamist terrorism” than was Bush, even so 9/11 would have been “likely not avoided”. One ought to recall here that the long-planned attack came only eight months after the change of Administration, so Remnick’s concession is otiose. But then he asks: “Can anyone seriously doubt” that a Gore Administration would have successfully and necessarily invaded Afghanistan, but avoided a “mistaken and misbegotten” invasion of Iraq?

Well, yes, of course anyone seriously could. The contention is that, in the conditions of 2001-02, Gore would never have opted to invade Iraq, choosing to handle things in some unspecified alternative fashion. This may be true. He might have said — as Barack Obama did — that Saddam was no imminent threat, or that he disagreed with the Director of the CIA’s “slam-dunk case”, and that a continuation or intensification of sanctions — despite their widespread international flouting — was the best way of enforcing UN resolutions. That Cruise missiles would have figured somewhere seems, in light of the history of the Clinton Administration, fairly likely.

The problem is that we can’t know, and I am somewhat jaundiced by the memory of all those predossier British Conservatives in late 2001 and 2002 pressing for action over Iraq, and now saying: “What me, guv? No, I was misled.” As a liberal I can understand how the unpleasant battle against the American Right can colour one’s judgment. The second media outrage of the week was the right-wing pundit Anne Coulter’s quip that the boyish Democratic hopeful John Edwards was a “faggot”. But hurt liberal feelings about such things are beside the point. What’s been happening isn’t about this Right-Left battle of insults. George W. Bush didn’t come into office saying “I must intervene in world affairs more than Bill Clinton”; he was inaugurated promising the polar opposite. Then the twin towers fell, and so did the scales.

The resulting “neocon” analysis went something like this: 9/11 was an emanation of an ideology that had grown in conditions of dictatorship and failure in the Middle East. For any of us anywhere to be safe, the conditions themselves had to be changed. One of the consequences of this was Bush’s abandonment of the Kissingerian idea of promoting friendly dictatorships. In the meantime, what had be prevented at all costs was the coincidence of terrorism and WMD.

Now, you can argue that this analysis can be applied more or less intelligently. But what you can’t find is a leading Democrat who seriously questions it. Let me take you back to Obama, circa autumn 2004 on Iran. “The big question is going to be,” Obama said, “if Iran is resistant to these pressures, including economic sanctions, which I hope will be imposed if they do not cooperate, at what point are we going to take military action? . . . Launching some missile strikes is not the optimal position for us to be in,” he admitted. “On the other hand, having a radical Muslim theocracy in possession of nuclear weapons is worse. So I guess my instinct would be to err on not having those weapons in the possession of the ruling clerics of Iran.” Err, no.

And the next year: “Right now rogue states and despotic regimes are looking to begin or accelerate their own nuclear programmes . . . As we speak, members of al-Qaeda and other terrorist organisations are aggressively pursuing weapons of mass destruction, which I think all of us believe they would use without hesitation.” So, what would President Obama do to counter these threats? He’d like — in principle — to do more diplomacy, of course.

But if that talk doesn’t get anywhere, or if measures such as sanctions are blocked? Abstractions are an assistance to fantasy; reality rains on the gaudiest parade. For a Republican or Democrat they’re the same problems and they didn’t go away because you elected a new president.

A vote for Hillary or Obama, or even Rudy or John, doesn’t change the regime in Pyongyang or Khartoum, or make the next jihadi tooling himself up right now for that magic moment, think to himself: “They voted Gore? Then I guess I won’t bother.”

Times Recommends

• Strip away the figleaf and reveal naysayers
• Dave’n’George: there may be trouble ahead
• I do not accept that £64,000 a year for politicians is peanuts