I love how you saved Douglas Adams but then I was disapointed that you never mentioned him again.
"November: Iraq allows weapons inspectors into the country. They are given fairly free access to Iraqi facilities, and find no evidence of WMDs. The US pats itself on the back and gets back to ignoring the rest of the world."
Why on earth would they? Why should President Gore making it explicit that there would be no military response, make Iraq *more* cooperative? Rather than saying, "Yeah? Whatcha gonna do about it? Since you already ruled out invading."
(At least you get that there was enough ambiguous evidence around that President Gore would probably have thought Iraq had restarted their WMD programs too, even if he wouldn't have been as eager to invade.)
The access wasn't all that free. The evidence remained ambiguous. IIRC, the IAEA just couldn't be sure they were being shown everything.
, and suspected they weren't.
Remember, we have hindsight.
Though, OK, I can see Gore being more likely to interpret the ambiguous evidence from the inspections differently. Especially if we assume he would have *wanted* to see no evidence of WMDs, because he would *not* have wanted to go to war with Iraq--the opposite of Bush's biases. (In this case, happening to lead to a correct conclusion.)