Reminds me of the attack in the Geronimo TL, only a lot larger and a lot crazier. Good work, hate to see large scale terror attacks in real life, love to see them in fiction.
Bicentennial Man: Ford '76 and Beyond
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
Hmm that’s an interesting wrinkle
Presumably, yeah. I don’t know that much about military equipment
thank you! I’ll admit that was a partial inspiration.
With an Irish catholic in the White House I’d imagine that the troubles will have even more coverage, regardless of what Carey says or what his private thoughts actually are people are gonna assume that Carey sides with the Catholics over the ulsters in NI. I could see Carey’s election emboldening Irish catholic resistance in Northern Ireland, and with that Arafat probably leans even more into solidarity with Northern Ireland as a way to gain more sympathy/support from the American public in particular Irish americans
Yeah it definitely complicates matters maybe we’ll see an earlier peace process. I’m interested in how you handle it. I’ll say I love the way you handled the Saudi stuff, I anticipate a great midterm update, especially for Jersey’s Senate seat.
For an earlier Good Friday agreement you need to convince the IRA leadership that there is no military route to victory and I can't see that happening before the late eighties.
Unless you get a British government willing to walk away against the wishes of the majority of the population but that would be a dystopia, either with the Irish Republic confronting a heavily armed UVF insurgency that they have no ability to fight or an independent Ulster, the latter could get really dark.
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The Riyadh Crisis - Part II
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The Riyadh Crisis - Part II
The Day of Widows and subsequent collapse of the Saudi establishment seemingly overnight caught the world entirely by surprise, and on its own did as much as heavy pressure from the United States on Tel-Aviv to end the Fifth Arab-Israeli War. With Syria having been defeated decisively on the Golan but it being clear Israel had neither the international support nor the domestic will to besiege and take Beirut on their own, the conflict in Lebanon began to wind down rapidly over the course of July and August and quickly devolved into a proxy war between Israel's preferred Maronite faction under the Gemayels and their uneasy Shia allies, against the Sunnis and a minority faction of Maronites backed by Damascus. Gemayel would be elected President of Lebanon just months later, and his six years in power would only deepen and exacerbate the country's bloodshed and sectarian hatreds, but gave Israel their "man" in Beirut, or what was left of it, and in many ways this accomplished the Peres Cabinet's strategic goals, at least for the time being.
The Riyadh Crisis presented the Carey administration, NATO, and the Politburo with their second major international crisis of the past eight months. While Saudi Arabia's share of global oil production had more than halved with the exponential growth of North Sea fields and the ability of the United States to transport via Alaska, and Antonov's rationalizations had improved Soviet export facilities and capacity, it was still a hugely important swing producer and was the symbolic leader of OPEC. Combined with a dropoff in Kuwaiti production that was exacerbated by a major stock market crash in that country in May 1982 that helped push much of the region into recession, oil production from OPEC was suddenly not a given, and global prices jumped 15% in the course of a few days and would peak at 26% above crisis prices in late July (and 34% above pre-Osirak prices), before gradually declining back to their previous January low by the end of the year. This was not the oil shock of 1973 or 1979, but it rattled economies around the world, with developing countries slipping into or deeper into recessions and the United States seeing a sharp drop in output for the third quarter of 1982 after two quarters of otherwise strong economic growth unseen for years.
It was not just the heightened price of oil, which improved and diversified production in 1982 was better able to absorb and offset, that made what was going on in Saudi Arabia a potentially devastating crisis, however. Saudi Arabia's legitimacy was founded in its "custodianship" of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina in the Hejaz region, and though the clerics were now turning on the Ikhwan after the Day of Widows, the blow to Saudi "invincibility" could not be undone. As Sabri's Arabian Republic was founded in the East under the air cover of the air force and army, it was an open question what, exactly, would come next, and a massive civil war in the heart of the Arab and Muslim world gave everyone a great deal of fear.
Of everyone in Carey's orbit, Askew surprised him by giving the most hawkish advice. He proposed immediately recognizing the Sabri government, parking an aircraft carrier or two in the Persian Gulf, and in tandem with the substantive Iranian Air Force essentially declaring to the world that the Hormuz would stay open and the Saudi oil continuing to flow. Jackson was open to the idea but cautioned against doing so unilaterally, instead proposing that the United States assemble a coalition "aimed at the securing of peace in Arabia" and which would have at the tip of its spear actual Arab powers. Katzenbach, on the other hand, leaned the other way - the further the United States could be from such a coalition the better, what with its support of Israel already alienating many Arab powers (Saddam in particular, to say nothing of the erratic Gaddafi) and that a US-led intervention in "the holy lands of Islam" would be perceived enormously poorly. Carey's concerns were more general than that, though he would admit later he saw what the generally pro-Israeli Katzenbach was getting at. He was skeptical that the American public was open to an open-ended intervention far away in the aftermath of Vietnam and Panama, and more broadly, he did not want to make it a core American policy that they would unilaterally intervene in oil producing states to "support the flow." The United States Navy did, indeed, serve an important purpose in keeping global trade lanes open, but that did not mean that its purpose was to support a particular oil price and volume, and the potential after-effects of this becoming a "Carey Doctrine" was enough to dissuade Carey from the action of passing through the Hormuz. Nonetheless, the USS Nimitz was moved off the coast of Oman, and the Eisenhower into the Red Sea, ostensibly to help evacuate American Aramco workers if need be.
Carey's hesitation to jump in with an all-out intervention was not shared across the board; European leaders, in particular Denis Healey, had their own ideas. Lacking the United States' ample natural resources - Texas' oilfields, for instance - the idea of Saudi oilfields getting seized by a radical Ikhwani regime or heavily damaged in a long-lasting civil war terrified European capitals. Healey was a fairly interventionist, old-fashioned Cold War social democrat in his approach and during the spring and summer of 1982 had become convinced that one could draw a direct line between the collapse of British influence in the Persian Gulf in 1971 and the chaos that had unfolded across the Arab World since then, starting with the Yom Kippur War and continuing on with the oil embargo. While British defense spending in the early 1980s was low and there were concerns about the ability of the Royal Navy to project power overseas [1], he was nonetheless determined to see Britain retake part of her mantle of European leadership - and global relevance alongside the United States within the Western powers - and in the Arabian Revolution saw the perfect opportunity. Unlike the United States, the British would head for the Hormuz, and he quickly persuaded France's Giscard and Italy's Spadolini to follow close behind as part of a task force to "preserve the stability of the Arabian Peninsula and prevent a terrible war."
Of course, all of these moves were dependent on one factor above all, and that was Iranian cooperation, which came handily and was coordinated largely through London's relationship with Nader Jahanbani, the close advisor to the young Shah Reza and a British-trained fighter pilot now head of the Iranian Air Force. Jahanbani, a political moderate who had neither interfered in the SAVAK's crackdown of 1979-80 nor the liberalizing hour of 1981, was mostly responsible for making the Iranian Air Force among the best in the world, both in terms of equipment and of the skill of her pilots, and Tehran quickly announced an operation that would be nicknamed "Sky Shield" - that Iran would support Sabri and his Arabian Republic from the air, creating a "shield" of planes when combined with the HMS Ark Royal and her Anglo-Franco-Italian task force off the east coast of Qatar as well as Sabri's majority of the small Saudi Air Force.
As July advanced, then, it was clear that the West had totally and utterly abandoned the House of Saud, either explicitly (in the case of Europe and their Iranian allies) or implicitly through their silence (the United States). This left a gaping power vacuum in the center of the country, as the Saudi Arabian National Guard and King Ahmed Rahman angrily started looking for allies to retake their oil-rich east that now, out of nowhere, enjoyed Western protection as a dissident republic provided the oil kept flowing. There were pragmatic reasons for Riyadh, still suffering street battles and bombings almost daily, to want to take out Sabri quickly even with the "Sky Shield" in place - if the Arabian Republic could survive, then the whole territorial integrity of the Saudi state was in question, and there were more than a few parties on her perimeter who might have ideas about what could come next if the whole thing collapsed.
On July 27, Abdul Rahman elected to roll the dice, just as Western diplomats were ironing out the details in Arab capitals over what was to come next to "stabilize" the situation. The SANG and units of the Royal Saudi Army still loyal to him set out from Riyadh eastwards to capture or sabotage the oilfields, and show the West the price of betrayal...
[1] This being the Falklands-era RN, after all
Are the Saudi's going to declare some sort of Jihad against the West and it's 'puppets'? Will the Developed World push for more fuel economy standards, alternative fuel developments and diversification? How is Japan and the Asian Tigers dealing with the Fuel Crisis?
Oh there’ll be some fatwas flying around, that’s for sure. One reason why Carey keeping American powder dry upfront was smart.
Oh, definitely. This was already a big plank of Ford’s Energy Policy Act and then Carey’s Economic Stabilization Act. It helps of course that 1982 doesn’t see rationing or fuel lines, but it’s still a third oil shock, albeit a small one, in the course of nine years.
I can cover that; i have a big Japan update covering 1982-84 planned
Well Lebanon's in for a bad time, but OTL was pretty bad for Lebanon in the 80's too. Perhaps no Iranian Revolution and no Hezbollah at least makes future efforts at restoring internal stability and building a lasting peace and reconcilliation more possible.
While this is the sort of intervention that can end up biting you in the ass, I think the three of them are probably making the right call. Healy has to worry about the Labor Militants but oil prices skyrocketing would basically be his political deathkneel. Giscard and Spandolini also get another crisis to bring them closer together could prepare them for making their mark on European integration.
Sabri's air power advantage is definately going up, we'll see if its enough.
This is definately a situation where being a vulture seems more profitable than an ally. I don't see many of their neighbors being willing to pick a fight with Iranian and European airpower with out getting a really big payout from the House of Saud and I don't think they can make an offer good enough for the likes of even Sadaam.
Betting it all on one big show of force, that always goes well. They definately aren't leaving Riyadh exposed to any actions by the Ilkwan by sending most of their loyal troops east. If something like that does happen, well bad times for whoever the Ilkwan captures.
I know you have mixed opinions on whether the Jordanians and Egyptians would cooperate on an intervention in the Hedjaz, but I say the benifits of such an arraingement outweigh any negative feelings between the to of them. Jordan, acting alone really does put some serious strain on the resources they have available to them and after getting a lot of pressure from the Baathist bloc, it would do them some good to bring Egypt alongside to balance out that influence. Plus working with Egypt helps reduce any thoughts from Western leaders that Jordan's intervention could hurt them. Egypt gets the benefit of the Hashemites legitimacy to involve themselves in the region, and old claim but still worth something in strange times. Not to mention, after going pretty ham on everyone Muslim Brotherhood adjacent, going into the Hedjaz alone could easily spark fears over what would happen when the Egyptians entered Mecca and Medina. Working together just seems to be solidly in their intersts.
That’s kinda my thinking; the worst of the Genayels surviving is offset by no Hezbollah.
That and Britain’s traditional pre-1970 role in the Gulf makes them a natural intervenor here for stability in the region; and, yes indeed, VGE and Spads are continuing to bond. I’ll have to drill into that more later.
Depends on how valuable you think said AirPower is. History is full, especially recently, of countries trying to “war by airstrike” and it not going well
Saddam is wayyy too much of a vulture. He’d probably rather just take, rather than be given.
Mmmhmmm
These are great points. I think Jordan is attached enough to their history as custodians of the holy cities and their ancestral rivalry with the House of Saud, it’s just been Egypt that’s the wildcard in my planning. So I like how your description of what a team up could look like explains away some of my biggest issues with the idea
Or perhaps some regional variation, say in the case of a quasi-independent Hejaz (say, with one of Hussein of Jordan's kids on the throne and underwritten by an Egyptian-Jordanian agreement) or a rump Saudi-led Nejd in the middle that nobody else wants (Riyadh was their pre-SA power base but also mostly important, much like Ha'il, due to its position as a key oasis town on a major hajj route)
The Saudi offensive will fefinately fail. Maybe the Ikhwahn sieze the opportunity to launch another offensive against the the house of Saud. The Jordan and Ejypt intervene and occupy the Hejaz.
Well actaually maybe not, he was born in 1963.
A better choice would be Hussein's younger brother, Muhammad , that way you also get him and his branch out of the way for Prince Abdullah
Maybe the King will be Faisal, second son of King Hussein of Jordan?
Well actaually maybe not, he was born in 1963.
A better choice would be Hussein's younger brother, Muhammad , that way you also get him and his branch out of the way for Prince Abdullah
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Hard to win any kind of offensive when your whole Air Force is also being spotted by Iran and the UK against you
yeah, Faisal struck me as a bit too young, too.
Yeah, at age 18/19 he's old enough to rule on his own but inexperienced due to age while Muhammad is in his 40s and served for years as his brother's aide, he has enough experience to stand on his own and having a kingdom of his own (especially getting to rule Mecca and Medina, the two most sacred cities in Islam) is enough of a consolation prize for being passed over in the line of succession in Jordan.
Also, he has two teenaged sons so that secures his succession
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Except that from what I understand, the failures regarding war by air strike happened if it is a place the enemies can easily flee to (whether it is heavily urbanised, forested or mountainous), while Saudi Arabia has the best place for air strike, complete flatness.