Okay, you twisted my arm. As if I ever need any encouragement to spout off any of my opinions :) I'll try to be more brief this time.

The "What would Nader do" question is a red herring. Nader never intended to get elected; he wanted to bring issues to the table that the Dems and 'pubs never talk about. Having said that, though, if Nader did get elected by some fluke, I think he's smart enough to have assembled an experienced, bi-partisan cabinet. Since Nader knows as little about foreign policy as Bush does, the real question is more likely, "What would Nader's Secretary of State do?" (It wouldn't be Albright... I wonder if it would have been Powell? Even liberals like Powell -- you may disagree with his politics but at least he's open-minded.)

As for Gore, it's probably a mistake to completely discount his actions. Gore's specialty was always foreign policy, and he's far more cognizant of the way an action can have many unequal reactions when you are dealing with foreign politics.

In the wake of 9/11 I was particularly appalled by the way that diplomacy was not only ignored, but completely rejected. However repulsive I may have found the Taliban, they a) were our allies, b) we knew that Osama was an honored guest in their country because of his actions during their war with the USSR, c) as a guest, they were honor-bound by their culture to protect him unless he broke their rules, and not engaging in acts of terrorism was one of them, and d) we still haven't seen any evidence that the Taliban was involved. So when the Taliban offered to turn Osama over to an Islamic country for trial, it was a very serious action for them. They COULDN'T turn over a guest unless they had proof that he had violated their laws. As opening bids for negotiation go, it wasn't a bad one. The Bush administration completely spurned them. We wouldn't release an American citizen for trial in a foreign country without some evidence -- it looks particularly bad when we demand that another coutry do so.

It's impossible to say at this point how serious the Taliban was -- it *could* have been a delaying tactic. Personally, I'm inclined to think that the Taliban wasn't involved, simply because they already had one war on their hands and didn't have the resources to invest in another. Whether the Taliban approved of Osama's actions or not, Osama had become a deadly liability and I think they were genuinely trying to find a way out of their cultural conundrum.

The upshot of all this hypothesizing is that I think Gore would have at least tried to use the Taliban to extradite Osama. If we could have succeeded in extraditing Osama, we could have saved the lives of both American soldiers and thousands of Afghan civilians who had nothing to do with the incident, brought his to public trial, and not only got the bad guy but maintained some credibility in the middle east. I don't think the anti-American sentiment in the region would be running as high as it is now if we'd been able to achieve a peaceful resolution. (I do think that Gore would have indulged in a little military grandstanding and killed a few hundred Arabs or Afghans just to make the more bloodthirstly elements of the voting public happy.)

On the other hand, if diplomacy didn't work, we would still have military options open. What's to lose?

The other alternative would have been a military police action -- drop in, find the bad guys and bring them home for trial. I think the Taliban would have been very careful to be conveniently out of our way while publically protesting the "persecution" of their guest. We needed the Northern Alliance to displace the Taliban, not to find Osama; an international task force could have handled that well -- we avoid the unilateral action accusation while earning brownie points for justice. Many of the military leaders were unhappy about us deliberately causing the civil war to flare up, because it made the job of finding Osama more difficult.

We have achieved NONE of the (publically) stated objectives in Afghanistan, except for the overthrow of our former ally, the Taliban, who probably weren't involved but were really pesky about not letting up build that gas pipeline. With Taliban gone the pipeline is one schedule, and the Northern Alliance is just as nasty as the Taliban was. It should be obvious by now to anyone with half a brain that Bush's so-called "cowboy diplomacy" doesn't work with fundamentalists. They just get the dander up and get more stubborn than ever. Meanwhile, Osama is relaxing somewhere out of the line of fire. (I think he's alive, the bit about how he died sounds like propaganda to both save face and try to undermine his movement... alternately we may have found him and executed him, but hushed it up to prevent creating a martyr.)

In summary: I don't think that Gore would be worried any more than Bush about the lives and deaths of the Afghan civilians or the American soldiers that died, but I do think he would have exhausted the diplomacy angle first, and probably focused on more of a police action than a whole bombing of the country.