You go, Gore!

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Martin Kettle: Mentioning the war In a speech this week, a senior western politician controversially compared the effects of George Bush's foreign policy to the conditions which created the rise of Adolf Hitler. But the politician in question was not the unfortunate former German justice minister Herta Däubler-Gmelin, who was sacked by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder on Monday for saying much the same thing at the height of the German election. The man who drew the comparison this time was none other than former US vice-president Al Gore.

In his remarkable speech in San Francisco on Monday night - remarkable not least because Gore spoke there with a freedom and frankness that he disastrously abandoned during his presidential election campaign two years ago - Gore ripped into Bush's ideological opposition to "nation-building" as a catastrophically dangerous policy. "The absence of enlightened nation-building after world war one led directly to the conditions which made Germany vulnerable to fascism and the rise of Adolf Hitler, and made all of Europe vulnerable to his evil designs," Gore argued.