Challenge: Baathism as major terrorist ideology

[Strategos' Risk]

People always make a big deal about the silliness of Modern Warfare 2 (Russia invading U.S. whoooooo), but one of the minor amusing things to me about its predecessor, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare 1 is that the main enemy you fight is basically Saddam Hussein if he really was a supervillain. OpFor, the curiously not-Wahhabi-or-Iranian-revolutionary villains, seem to be perhaps secularist. They return in the second game, now having infested Afghanistan. Go figure.

So here's the idea: what if militant secular Arab Socialism became the equivalent of modern-day Muslim extremism, instead? And somehow was exportable to non-Arab states? Imagine Baathists from Saudi Arabia becoming Afghan Arabs.

All of this, of course, will be a big shift since Baathism unlike jihadist ideologies will be constrained by political ideologies, rather than a universal religion. So I'm not sure how it could mutate into something that non-Arab Muslims could adopt. And there are Baathist/Arab socialist states that would be a big target should the international Baathist terrorists attack the U.S. on 9/11- Iraq, Syria, maybe Libya. So this could still be quite different.

[Goldstein]

A good start would be the UAR or a similar state to be more successful, but not enough to fulfill its expectations

Maybe a good POD would be that Israel comes closer to the USSR, and the *6 days war goes better for Egypt. The perspective of a UAR becoming an important regional power makes the US more prone to back islamist insurgencies, and to put more efforts in keeping Persia as a valuable ally, maybe avoiding the most stupid decisions of OTL... even we can find a Lebanon under a long-lasting, US-backed Bashir Gemayel regime. So we come to a situation in which the Cold War comes to an end (not saying it was unavoidable, just for the sake of the challenge), and in which the UAR (Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and a rump-but-not-as-rump-as-OTL Palestine) faces Persia as a natual, US backed enemy, and their expansion is made impossible by the US backing of several Islamist groups, and by the special relationships with Saudi Arabia. The Baathists logically see the US as their main obstacle towards an unified pan-Arab state, start to fully apply terrorist tactics, and Baathism is seen in the West as the new Big Bad Wolf.

While TTL's Baathism has no love for the Kurds, nor for the Phoenicist positions in Lebanon, it has grown to be something very similar to what Hugo Chavez intends ITTL, and backs and exports similar secular nationalist movements, mainly regarding the Iranian and Pashtun peoples, but also backs a neo-Bolivarian Latin American movement, and Egypt is a traning playground for far left separatist groups like ETA. There's even a Fifth International going on on these lines.

[Strategos' Risk]

Ah, but the question is, could this ideology work outside of the Arab world?

[Goldstein]

Originally Posted by Strategos' Risk

Ah, but the question is, could this ideology work outside of the Arab world?

Updated for that matter. Now you have a much more Modern Warfare-ish scenario