Theory: the key litmus test to explaining the various factions on the modern American left is whether or not you think Al Gore would've invaded Iraq after 9/11 if he'd been president.

I don't. Never have. Not because I'm a Gore admirer or think the Democratic Party is anti-imperialist -- it is very much not -- but rather because the impulse for the Iraq War was centered around a whole host of neoconservative ideologues and institutions in Washington DC....

....and was only then picked up and amplified by liberals, partly out of post-9/11 jingoism (including the craven but correct calculation that this shit was politically popular), partly out of genuine conviction, partly b/c some of them were dumb enough to actually believe WMDs.

I generally agree there would have been *some* form of American imperial quagmire in the greater Middle East had Gore been president, but the model would probably have looked more like Obama or Trump-era proxy wars rather than neocon hypermilitarism. https://twitter.com/pareene/status/1349823776083607552?s=20

And this is not a small distinction, because the historical Iraq War specifically was so damaging to Iraq, the U.S., and the world that it's hard to say just how different things would look if it had just been an aerial bombing campaign a la Serbia (or, for that matter, Libya.)

Again, not defending American imperialism, but these often relatively marginal differences in who rules the metropole often actually matters.

Just look at the dissolution of the European colonial empires.