It's true that every single president has ended up messing with the Middle East. Only one ever steeped us into two decade long quagmires. H.W. was content to topple Saddam's forces and GTFO. Clinton was happy to bomb this shit out of Iraq when there was no call for it, so people would stop talking about his penis. Obama is happy to drop every bomb we've ever made, and train up a lone Syrian to fight in our stead. Treating W's fuck up as an inevitable war fails to give him credit for all of the extraordinary effort Bush's administration went into to lie to the nation, waste trillions, and kill 10,000 U.S. Soldiers. Just assuming anyone could achieve that kind of thoughtful, planned out, deliberate fuck up is ridiculous.
Have we forgotten the state of the day Union when W had worked his will, or rather ruined everything and melted into a puddle? We were at the heart of the largest economic downturn since the Great Depression. Is your assumption that Gore would manage to top that? That a guy who was the Vice President to the "great compromisor" BJ Clinton would thumb his nose in the face of an all republican house and senate, and hamstring the economy without an ounce of pragmatism? This was before the antipartisan divide. Republicans and Democrats hadn't ruined all bipartisan trust yet by shoving a war and a healthcare plan up each other's asses.
I don't know how bad off we were back then tech wise, we've had windmills in TX for over a decade now. I'm not saying a more ambitious plan wouldn't have caused some problems economically. But you can't compare that to the catastrophe that was the Bush presidency.