Bush vs. The Axis of Evil - TL
Every Middle Eastern will be liberated and salute one flag- the flag that waves through the air and paints the sky a beautiful assortment of red, white, and blue, the flag whose stars are scattered across that blue field, the flag of a nation that truly knows freedom, a nation born out of the insatiable lust for freedom, that nation will be the one that they live under, that they will thrive under, that they will feel free under.
And that's on period.
Speaking of which, how likely do you see the draft being instituted with the three quagmires going on ITTL, especially the mess which putting down Iran and Best Korea woud be here?
Tbf, i have a real interest on this TL because i kinda expecting that the Neocons's plans would went horribly right.
Speaking of an Iran War, there's one by @wolverinethad
When I read this TL about the Bush administration launch a war on the Axis of Evil, I got reminded of this old alternate 9/11 timeline with an earlier War on Terror that occurs in 1993.
Rejection and Revenge: An alternate 9/11 timeline
I. The United States Director of Central Intelligence, William Webster, revealed in an interview before he resigned earlier this year that the United States has learned that the Soviet central government had begun “looking at what they need to do to be sure that the missiles do not fall into...
www.alternatehistory.com
When I read this TL about the Bush administration launch a war on the Axis of Evil, I got reminded of this old alternate 9/11 timeline with an earlier War on Terror that occurs in 1993.
The U.S. nukes Iranian military bases after one of the captured Al-Qaeda terrorist lies to the Mossad that Hezbollah was responsible for the 02/11/1993 small nuclear attacks, even though it was Osama bin-Laden.
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I remembered when pre-2016 dystopia 21st century TLs were considered unrealistic. Nowadays, they feel a whole lot more realistic now.
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To be fair, if that part of OTL were an alternate history, it would have ended in the thread immediately kicked from Post 1900 to ASB, and possibly the author's banning (and the kicking of at least twenty members due to how bitter the discussion about the TL would be, at the level of a normal day in the GOT threads).
Rethinking this, some would argue it's implausible simply because it's not dystopian enough; which is understandable considering how bad the OTL impact of the War on Terror was.
Indeed... That bloody stuff almost qualified as "Memetic Hazard"....
Oh... Considering OIF I'm not surprised but still. Cuz, as a Russian, I've read quite a few alarmist fiction about Ru-NATO War from late 00s and very early 10s.
IIRC, one of the main narratives were that Russia was going to be next after Yugoslavia and Iraq. ITTL those alarmists will have a field day, IMHO.
'Khomenei is the Leader'
'Khomeini is the Leader'
Excerpt from ‘The Family: How the Assads Plundered Syria’ by Abdul Malik
Excerpt from ‘The Family: How the Assads Plundered Syria’ by Abdul Malik
Bashar’s turn to the West had stimulated long-delayed negotiations with Israel. In 2000, his father Hafez would turn down a deal to get back 99% of the Golan Heights practically with his dying breath. For Bashar, having already soured his relationship with the Anti-Israel bloc in the Middle East, he felt that he needed something positive for Syria as well apart from the relief that he wasn’t dragging Syria to war. He would be reluctant to meet Sharon given his reputation among the Arab world, and was worried the man who came to power after his brutal crackdowns in Gaza and who came to power to represent the Settler movement would be averse to deals at all. Instead, to his surprise, Sharon was quite open to a deal over the Golan Heights, a region that did not interest him. At the same time, relations with the Palestinians had already rapidly deteriorated. A frightful war of words between Arafat and Syrian leaders, who had significant bad blood since the Lebanese Civil War and the PLO’s endorsement of Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, publicly escalated, especially since the talks came in the middle of the Second Intifada. Sharon had abandoned the idea of talks with Arafat but wanted to look reasonable to international observers so talks with Assad seemed like the best way to support his credibility. In the meantime, Syrian state television hit Arafat for being too soft on Israel and demanded to know why Syria was not allowed to recognize Israel when the PLO had agreed to do so as part of the Oslo Accords. If Palestine could recognize Israel, why was Syria not allowed to?
As such, on March 29th 2002, Bashar al-Assad and Ariel Sharon would meet in Sharm al-Sheikh. The deal that was discussed would result in 99% of the Golan Heights being returned to Israel minus the shore area east of the Sea of Galilee. Israeli settlements in the area would be dismantled and compensated by the Israeli state with American help. The local Druze would be given full citizenship and immunities in the new Syrian state, though they had the option to apply for Israeli citizenship and come to Israel like anyone else. The Golan Heights would be demilitarized with UN oversight while Israel would agree to reduce troops in the area as well. Syria had firmly planted itself in the American camp in an astonishing about-face, just as Nasser’s successor in Sadat had done. Despite all the anger on state television against the Palestinian Authority, Bashar still needed a selling point to bring home to his citizens who had been raised to see the Israel-Palestine conflict as the ultimate expression of good (the Palestinians) against evil (Israel). While he personally cared nothing for the Palestinians, his sudden turn on Hezbollah had turned heads – he didn’t want to shake the boat even harder and wanted to push back against allegations that he was a Zionist stooge especially given the deal came during the Intifada. Sadat got Palestinian autonomy, Arafat got PLO recognition, and so Assad wanted something to brag about at home.
The Syrian delegation, themselves keen followers of demographic trends in their own country and playing on the Israeli fear in their own, suggested a form of disengagement from Gaza. To their surprise, Sharon was more than ready to listen. Sharon suggested the complete disengagement from the Gaza Strip, which made up nearly half of the Palestinian population, with Jewish settlers to be dragged out. A border fence would be erected around the region and Gaza would effectively be separated from Israel. Sharon liked the idea because he was worried a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza would make it look like a surrender to terrorism. To make it part of a peace deal would make it look like negotiations with Israel worked out. It also massively helped Israel’s demographic concerns in remaining both a Jewish and democratic state by removing 2 million Palestinians from the equation. At the time of the deal, unfortunately, the Palestinian Authority and Israel were in conflict, so Arafat would not be setting up shop in Gaza anytime soon. At the same time, Israel built serious political capital with the Americans for showing their ‘determination in the search for peace’. And Bashar? He could brag he liberated more of Palestine than Yasser Arafat ever had. [1]
On April 4th, after much back and forth, the two finally shook hands and secured Israel’s third recognition from an Arab state. Sharon’s decision to sign the deal was supported by the Israeli public but not by all that much, with Sharon majorly angering his settler voting base in the process. It would result in the formation of the Kadima Party in 2003 where moderate Likudniks like him and more conservative members of the Labour Party joined to form a centrist alliance, whereas Benjamin Netanyahu took over a now more rightist Likud. Sharon continued his agenda with little care. Despite anger and outrage among the Right, Jewish settlers were dragged from Gaza and driven out. While few Israelis were happy about the move, most understood it.
However, Sharon’s aims were a lot more razor-sharp than was let on in both his own and his enemy’s propaganda. His withdrawal from the Golan Heights compensated the settlers there with territory in the West Bank, or as he and the Israeli Right called it ‘Judea and Samaria.’ This was the land of the Old Testament, not the Golan Heights. The formation in the coming years of a security wall around Gaza now made the Likud One State solution all the more achievable. Sharon had earned himself a hefty measure of goodwill from the Western press, one he used to rapidly expand the settlements inside the West Bank to fulfil Likud’s foundational dream of ‘Judea and Samaria’ as part of Israel.
In the immediate aftermath of the agreement, Bashar’s popularity increased with his own support base of a middle class who wanted out of any Middle Eastern conflict and religious minorities, but a large contingent of Sunni Arabs in the east (and Palestinian refugees in Yarmouk) felt that Arafat spoke the truth when he claimed that Assad had made this deal to undermine rather than help Palestine. Bashar became a villain almost as great in Palestinian circles as Sharon despite gaining Gaza, with Arafat calling him ‘A sad irony. An eye doctor who cannot see.’ Arafat was consequently singled out for vicious criticism in Syrian media, with one Baathist in the Syrian Parliament declaring, ‘This is the saddest of jealousies. Jealous because it was not Yasser Arafat that gave Gaza to the Palestinian people, but Bashar al-Assad! The traitor of Gaza speaks lies of the liberator of Gaza! He deserves to be beaten with a shoe, but if I did that, even my shoes would cry, ‘Master, I beg of you, what crime have I done that I deserve be used on Yasser Arafat?!’’ [2] Syrian media would further belittle and degrade Palestinians for not being grateful for what Bashar had ‘given them’.
Bashar’s signing of the peace treaty and his promise to keep Syria out of all wars made him a staple of the international arena, filmed meeting George Bush, Queen Elizabeth, and Pope John Paul II. Bashar and Sharon would both win the Nobel Peace Prize that year in what is perhaps even today the most discrediting verdict the award ever provided. The award was provided even after a rally by Palestinians on April 29th 2002 inside the Yarmouk refugee camp in Syria was met with Western-built tanks that Assad had purchased earlier that year from France. The death toll was covered up and in the tight information environment at the time, coupled with the ongoing War on Terror, was completely glossed over. It is now estimated that the Yarmouk Massacre claimed at least 500 lives and maybe significantly more, with Bashar’s brother Maher al-Assad personally on the ground overseeing the indiscriminate chaos. In an eerie retelling of the Hama Massacre where Hafez’s younger brother Rifaat oversaw the obliteration of Hama off the face of the Earth, Maher oversaw the massacre of Palestinian refugees. [3] That the slaughter eerily mimicked the Sabra and Shatila Massacre further underscored the parallels between Bashar and Sharon. As a final middle finger before a disinterested world, a statue of Bashar was placed at the entrance and center of the camp as contrition. However, in the scary world of 2002/2003, the Americans were simply desperate for anything to be going right. Bashar’s international stock rose farther than any Assad had ever gone, sinking all the rest of humanity with it.
Extract from ‘The Rise, Fall, and Rise of Iran’ by Zoreh Rahimi
[4]
Turning the Strait of Hormuz into a warzone was a hard blow for the world economy, as Western and Eastern economies mutually suffered while oil producers like Putin’s Russia and Chavez’s Venezuela were making money hand over fist. Therefore, the priority for the American and British fleets were to make the Persian Gulf open for shipping as soon as possible. The initial stages of the conflict were a pleasant retelling of Operation Praying Mantis, with larger Iranian ships being easily picked off and the American and British navies attempting to guarantee the movement of tankers through the strait. After the first Coalition bombs started falling, Iran had begun targeting every tanker they could. Every tanker they removed from the world market was another less boatload of fuel – if they sank enough, the calculation was that the world would call quits. The sheer sight of foreign tankers in flames in the crystal blue waters of the Persian Gulf, fire riding above the waves, was enough to raise oil prices to suffocating levels. The main Iranian ships were destroyed while the coastal launching positions of rockets from Iranian forces were bombed from air and sea. But it was here that the first signs that this invasion would not be the romp of Lebanon, but a different beast entirely.
The first signs were the arrival of the Iranian Air Force, many of which had been hidden in the mountains. These included F-14 fighter jets from the 1970s that the US had given the Shah. Now in a sad twist, they were being turned on the nation that gave them. They would launch quick hit and run attacks on naval vessels whenever they could, coming and going too quickly for the US to adequately respond. Dogfights began with US jets over the skies of Tehran that February, and though the US fighters generally came out on top, these were not the turkey shoots they had long gotten used to. Any Americans who bailed out over Iran found themselves held captive by the Revolutionary Guard – few would ultimately survive to tell the tales of torture they endured. But it was the Iranian navy whose innovation would most break the myth that this would be an easy war.
The Iranian navy was not particularly advanced, and after the first weeks of hostilities, was already mostly gone. Naively assuming the Iranian navy had been vanquished, American ships began moving and more daringly into the Persian Gulf. But what the Iranians lacked in technology, they made up with in innovation. Iran changed to a strategy of using smaller ships hiding along their vast shores while communicating with non-electric forms of communication such as pigeons, motorbikes and WW2-style light signals to help coordinate between the navy and air force. When a large flotilla of US ships got in range on February 7th, the Iranians launched their masterstroke. Overwhelming American sensors with a barrage of cruise missiles, the flotilla was decimated, with several ships sunk, most notably the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln [5]. By the time the carnage was counted, the US realised they had lost more men (4,000) in a single day than any other battle in their history, including D-Day.
The loss of an aircraft carrier and the sheer scale of the death toll before the invasion had even begun stunned the United States and global media. The first cracks in the Post 9/11 national consensus began to emerge as to the fitness of the Bush Administration to lead the war effort – no one wanted to rock the boat so early into the war but at the same time, the sheer gut blow was inescapable. It also proved an immense morale boost for the Iranians, who began to believe they could pull it off like the Vietnamese did. Other ships were soon attacked, some overwhelmed by torpedo boats. The Iranians even began employing torpedo boats on suicide-missions to take out tankers and Western warships – the Western press called them ‘Iranikazes’ in reference to the infamous Japanese planes.
In response, the Americans and British adopted a more methodical and conservative strategy in the Gulf at the cost of a further constrained oil market. In terms of defence, America began to implement their own protections against boat attacks They also loosened civilian targeting restrictions, increasing the amount of civilians who were killed in the bombardments to try and ensure a disaster like February 7th could never happen again. Iranian sympathy for the Coalition further eroded. But one part of February 7th that the Iranians hadn’t reckoned with was how it changed calculations inside the Bush Administration. Notably, it made the Administration deathly scared of amphibious landings in Iran at all, which opened the Pandora’s Box for what would come later: the gamble that turned the Iran War into something that almost resembled World War Three.
[...]
The bombing of Iran lasted roughly a month, with most major installations of Iranian forces reduced to rubble. Their air force and navy was mostly gone, they had no outside help, and most of the country still wouldn’t be caught dead saying a good word about Khamenei (wherever the hell he was now). But as the Coalition, spearheaded in good part by Turkey, began their auspicious march over the Iranian border from Turkey and Azerbaijan. The Iranians had known the battle plan for a long while and had erected a touch series of fortifications down the way. From Turkey, Coalition forces attempted to reach Tabriz while from Azerbaijan they aimed to follow the Caspian to reach Rasht and ultimately Tehran. Troops who had naively imagined Iran as an exclusively secular and Pro-American people were rapidly disabused of the notion, as they ran into the rural Iranian populace who was significantly more religious and nationalistic than the urban Tehran residents. While the religious zeal of the Iranian Revolution had faded, a renewed vigour returned. Suicide bombings The mountainous terrain was the stuff of nightmares for Coalition troops, as they seemed to be attacked from all sides.
This was supposed to be accompanied with a landing by American and British marines on island of Qeshm (a steppingstone to capturing Bandar Abbas) and another landing at the central oil producing city of Abadan, but the shock of February 7th ensured a much more conservative posture. Ultimately, the landings at Qeshm unfold, the most serious amphibious landings since the Big One, and the most vicious fighting seen by either the British or Americans in living memory. Mercifully for the Coalition, it would ultimately be a relatively easy capture on March 3rd, with the Iranians preparing for the far more easily defendable Bandar Abbas conflict. Abadan was likewise intensely fortified around the sea. The Abadan operation was delayed, as air cover was redirected to ensure the safety of the fleet around Bandar Abbas at the mouth of the Hormuz Strait, trying to demine the location as quickly as they could.
This created a problem, as oil was still at nearly $300 a barrel and driving the global economy to a standstill. Bicycles surged in popularity even in America as scenes unprecedented since the oil shortages of the early 1970s reared their head. Serious discussions began inside the White House about the wisdom of fuel rationing. Ultimately, it was agreed to open up the emergency oil reserves to an extent to try and mitigate the pump-pain for now. It was already expected that recession would hit inside the year. Meanwhile, the oil lobby inside the United States (which had been deeply uncomfortable with the war contrary to later populist myths), began pleading with the Administration to try and secure the safe passage of Middle Eastern oil as quickly as time would permit. It was in these stressful conditions, that Bush would make what was likely his most catastrophic error of the war, the one that turned an Iran War into the century-defining conflict that the War on Terror would be known as.
Extract from ‘Saddam’s Shadow: The Legacy of Baathism in Iraq’ by Michel Farooq
Saddam Hussein seemed to have made his mind up on the war by early 2002. To him, Iran’s defeat to the West was inevitable, but he wanted to make sure the Americans (and broader Coalition) suffered with every inch. He reportedly said, in reference to Kissinger’s own quip, ‘It’s a pity they can’t both lose’. Saddam still retained a small number of sleeper agents in Kuwait from the Gulf War who were reporting on US troop presences. These were relayed to the Iranians who used them to send missiles to US bases in Kuwait over the February – an alignment almost as bizarre as Khomeini and Israel teaming up to destroy Saddam’s nuclear reactor back in the 1980s. Saddam stepped up his violations of the No Fly Zone placed over South Iraq and harassed Coalition planes transferring men and supplies to Turkey and the Gulf. Saddam even sent sabotage teams into Turkey and the Gulf states to try and destroy Coalition supplies in the expectation it would be blamed on Iranians, though it is unknown if any of them succeeded. If this sounds like madness for a country that had been shattered by sanctions and was enemy number one of the Western foreign policy elite, it should be remembered that Saddam attempted to have Bush Senior assassinated on a trip to Kuwait in 1993 – Saddam’s sense of self-preservation was undeveloped compared to other dictators.
Saddam had always been enemy number one for the United States. Under the Clinton Administration, Congress passed a law announcing that ‘Regime Change’ was the stated policy for Iraq, and that Saddam Hussein had to go. Bush was often said to have had a particular animus for Hussein, given that many regretted his father not taking him out in 1991. Rumsfeld went as far as to demand his agency to find evidence Saddam was behind 9/11 on the day that it happened. Saddam’s Iraq was by far the weakest of the Axis of Evil nations, broken by decades of sanctions, meaning the Neocons thought Saddam would be what the USSR was to Hitler: The Rotten House that would come down with the first kick. Despite Iran proving that this was not necessarily the case, the thinking in the US remained that Iraq would be comparatively easy.
That January, debate had already been underway at the White House, with Cheney and Rumsfeld insisting that this would be the perfect time to take out Saddam too, using his undercover help for Iran as a pretext. This was fiercely opposed by Colin Powell, who was incensed that the Administration, during the fiercest war America had fought in living memory, wanted to go into Iraq too. Rumsfeld argued that it would kill two birds with one stone: he suggested not a charge on Baghdad, but instead to loop through Basra and the Iraq-Iran border and to take Abadan (with its oil producing capabilities). He argued that the Shia population would rejoice in liberation from Saddam, that this would weaken the Shia religious fanaticism in Iran since they would have secured one of Iran’s supposed policy objectives and win goodwill from the Iranians, and that this would help the world’s oil market since a higher % would be under the control of the US rather than insane dictators. Saddam’s rule itself would ‘probably’ collapse with the loss of his oil revenue and his remaining forces could be mopped up with only a few divisions. Yiddish-speaking Powell called it ‘The Schlieffen Plan for Schmucks’ in reference to World War One Germany’s strategy of invading a neutral neighbour to attack their enemy. He knew this would cause international uproar and wanted no part of this, especially given that both he and Condoleezza Rice (similarly repulsed by the plan) had expended so much time and energy to build the coalition necessary for Iran. Bush initially agreed with Powell, resisting pressure from the Neocon camp to implement their grand plan of a world free of dictatorships by the force of American firepower.
This was changed by February 7th. The shock of losing an aircraft carrier, the extreme loss of life and the acknowledgement of hubris by all rights should have led to the Administration being more cautious. Indeed, they were – of amphibious invasions. Rumsfeld now argued that amphibious invasions were too dangerous to attempt two at time, especially at Abadan. He argued that they could still reach their operational objectives. He also bandied about evidence that Saddam had been instrumental in handing over the targeting information that allowed the aircraft carrier to be sunk – evidence that even then was considered pathetic even in the fog of war, let alone today. The Iraqi Kurds were enthusiastic about the plan, who were mainly deployed as a diversionary force on the Iranian border – they were enthusiastic about any plan to take out the man who genocided them in 1988. Rosy pictures of enthusiastic Iraqi local support filtered through from Iraqi politicians – they insisted that while Iran was a 2500-year-old civilisation, Iraq was a less than a century old patchwork of three peoples who would be relieved to see a figure from a rival sect out of power. The ‘reports’ that Iraq had provided the information that led to the sinking of the USS Abraham Lincoln began to be circulated by the Administration’s partisans on the Fox News Network, whose unapologetic jingoism made them the most popular cable news network during the war. No one wanted to believe that the US military had been incompetent – they wanted to believe in dastardly foreign conspiracies. Other rumours were tossed around on the network, with some anchors suggesting Saddam was handing over chemical weapons to Iran to use on American soldiers. Others suggested that Saddam may have had a role in 9/11 – even most CNN and MSNBC viewers in polls believed that Saddam had a role in 9/11 according to surveys at the time. It was nonsense, including the idea of Saddam militarily supporting Iran in a way that would provide his mortal enemy with any aid – Saddam’s method was to directly take it to the US.
As April began, the Strait of Hormuz was more open than it had been, but hardly as much as it could have been, with any tankers rolling through needing intense Coalition escort. The chance of a random missile, mine or suicide torpedo boat setting the Gulf on fire was a real one. With forces on the northern front finally reaching the outskirts of Tabriz, Coalition forces begin the second and final amphibious assault of the war, landing just outside Bandar Abbas with the intention of annihilating the last remnants of the Iranian navy base. Several amphibious ships were blown up by hidden mines and boats, inflicting brutal casualties on the Coalition. The Iranian Navy had outperformed all expectations, now their last act would be to die with a rifle in their hands on Iranian soil itself, fighting off the marines as they continued to land. Bandar Abbas would be the first true battle of the invasion of Iran and would last a month and would be the beginning of a common story seen in the war: huge Iranian losses and smaller Coalition losses that scared the Coalition significantly more.
As the chaos was just beginning, on April 18th, a US spy plane was shot down near Abadan. Based on the data recordings, it was shot down from the Iraqi side of the border. This was final straw for Bush, who felt that Abadan was too important for global oil supplies, and that any amphibious invasion would be stopped with Saddam’s help. He decided to go with ‘The Rumsfeld Option’. He had broached the topic to the various other members of the Coalition – the overwhelming majority rejected it, most vehemently. On Bush’s side were the Iraqi Kurds, Britain (who were also worried about the impact of Saddam intervening in support of Tehran) and the Australians along with some Eastern Europeans eager to prove their mettle. By the time the spy plane was shot down, Bush had worn down his partners to the point where they finally gave private approval for a bombing campaign (not invasion) of Iraq and its military installations. This in a way worked out for the Pentagon, since they had taken out most of the visible Iranian targets inside Iran so resetting to start bombing Iraqi targets seemed to give them something to do. On April 20th, from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, American and British planes unleashed a new wave of destruction, this time against Iraq. Though it was calculated to be just short enough to avoid full escalation, it still destroyed most of the Iraqi radar and anti-aircraft defences inside the lower No-Fly-Zone in Iraq. It certainly achieved its goals of helping American spy planes operate in peace in the Gulf. Unfortunately, it gave the Iranians a wicked idea.
On Friday April 26th a Shia procession began to congregate near the Tomb of Ali in Najaf, the third holiest location in Shia Islam behind Mecca and Medina. Some of the Mosques took a sudden, and stridently militaristic tone that morning, saying that the time had come to finally cast out the Saddam regime. Similar scenes played out in Basra, and other parts of southern Iraq. Even Baghdad saw some astonishingly brave sermons. But it was in Najaf that the most strident resistance was found. The Iraqi army stationed there was overwhelmed by the sudden and baffling presence of arms among the protestors, who made mincemeat of the demoralized security service, who feared war with America was imminent. By nightfall, most of Najaf had arisen in rebellion and pitched battles began in Basra between militias and the Iraqi army. Crowds of bearded young men (which should have been a clue to onlookers) waved American flags and said, in English, ‘Save us from Saddam!’
That evening, the Bush Administration debated developments. To Rumsfeld, it was proof that Iraq was a ripe for an uprising against Saddam since clearly a bunch of rabblerousers could just take the third most important city in Shia Islam from under Saddam’s nose. Saddam for his part had announced that his son Uday would be put in charge of ‘Suppressing’ the rebellion, with rumours spreading that Uday would destroy the Tomb of Ali as a punishment for the Shia for their insolence. The footage of Iraqis with American flags begging for help, much like the Kosovans had for Clinton, warmed Bush’s heart to the idea of intervention. He had remembered the shame that fell upon many in the foreign policy world when the Kurdish and Shia rebellions of the 1990s that had been instigated against Saddam had been allowed to be crushed after his own father had encouraged their rebellion, adding a further layer of personal responsibility. Eventually, to the disbelief of Colin Powell, Bush decided to ‘create a second Kurdistan’ i.e. to liberate Southern Iraq and use it as a base to attack Iran. If Bush hadn’t been so blinded by his certainty in the goodness of his country to realise the truth, that these ‘protestors’ were Iranian supporters raising hell specifically to force a US intervention and bog the US down yet further in the Middle East, maybe he would have chosen differently.
On April 27th, Bush made an address from the Oval Office and delivered an ultimatum: “We have seen that the urge for freedom is limited to no race, religion, or creed, but a yearning across all men, imbued by his Creator. The same rights written in our Declaration of Independence. Saddam Hussein must now respect that right. If Saddam Hussein does not respect that right and does not consent to withdrawing his troops above the No-Fly-Zone established by the United Nations in the next forty-eight hours, the United States and its allies will remove them for him.” It was a bold statement, but one completely unsupported by the very Coalition he had invoked. Knee-deep in an unexpectedly difficult war in Iran, no one wanted to back the US’s Iraqi incursion, except three countries: Britain, Poland, and Australia. With this being all the help they could hope for, Bush cast the die that would define the century.
On April 30th, while the Royal and US Marines were fighting door-to-door in Bandar Abbas, American tanks stormed from Kuwait into the deserts of Iraq. The troops, many falsely believing Iraq had helped with the sinking of the USS Abraham Lincoln, were quite eager to whip the Iraqis a new one. They charged down the highways of Iraq in the direction of Basra, utilizing the newly developed tactic of ‘Thunder Runs’. For an Iraqi army that was overwhelmed, demoralized and separated from command, it was a knife through hot butter. The US stepped up their bombing northward as well, taking out a column of tanks headed towards Najaf. They would find out later the next day that one of the casualties in this ‘Second Highway of Death’ was none other than Uday Hussein, his Golden AK-47 having melted on his lap as he burned alive inside one of the tanks. Though Uday had fallen out of favor with his father, his death would light a fire in Saddam that this would be his last and bloodiest war.
Saddam would declare that evening from an undisclosed location that ‘America and Satan are at war, and we will fight the greater evil, no matter how uncomfortable it is to ally with Satan’. Iraq would never publicly consider themselves an ally of Iran in the conflict with this statement by Saddam being the closest acknowledgment. Iran would condemn the ‘Warmongering imperialism of the Great Satan that threatens to suffocate the world in darkness’, though they too refused to call the Iraqis an ally. For the first time in the Western press, the Iran-Iraq ‘duo’ began to be referred to as ‘The Axis of Evil’ in a straightforward context. Across Europe, the first serious anti-war rallies would now begin, as it now appeared that America was using the Iran conflict as an excuse for a broader game of civilizational conquest. Almost all Coalition members would stress their non-committal to helping the US, and that this was entirely the decision of the US, many vocally voicing their displeasure, such as the French. President Chirac would publicly call Bush’s invasion, ‘A dereliction of duty’ and ‘An opening of the gates to hell’. The Pope would even condemn the attack, alongside multiple religious leaders and a still small but still noticeable segment of the Congressional Left in America. Increasing fear was being spread that the draft was now inevitable, but the Administration insisted this wasn’t necessary, even as military planners stretched mathematics to breaking point to try and get numbers that could sustain the war. Bush even appealed to Assad to join the conflict and take out Syria’s old enemy, which earned a particularly unenthusiastic response from Damascus. The only immediate help coming in was from the Kurds, who began marching south towards Mosul with the aim of conquering enough territory to have a strong hand in any negotiation with a future Iraqi government. Russia and China now began a series of much more hostile declarations, with Putin calling the decision to expand the war to Iraq ‘A form of imperialism ill-suited to the new millennium’, with China warning, ‘The United States risks losing all goodwill it has earned since the terrorist attacks of 9/11’. The Mullahs in Iran were pleased – their plan to utilise the arrogance of the neocons and their certainty that the world longed to be American had been expertly played, and now America would find a new distraction that would prolong the war. A prolonged war increased the odds of their eventual victory, and with this victory, who on Earth would dare defy them after defying the United States?
But while the diplomatic implications were disastrous, there was at least one piece of good news for the US military – Thunder Runs worked. The American military was in the outskirts of Basra one day into the invasion, having already seized the Rumaila Oil Field before they could be sabotaged by Saddam. In Basra the plan was that the Shia militias (actually Iranian agents in a Tet Offensive-style uprising) who had risen up against Saddam would now turn their guns on the Americans and shatter American expectations yet again. But the Iranians had made one critical miscalculation; while the Shia were unenthusiastic about America taking out Saddam even a week ago since it was foreign interference in the Arab world, everyone feared Saddam was going to unleash his rage on the Shia if he was allowed to return. The frosty reception that Americans would have received otherwise became on of great relief and rejoicing, with any Iranian-backed units trying to take on the Americans turned on by the population. Saddam’s disintegrating southern flank still in places tried to hold up their resistance, leading to a chaotic three-way struggle in Basra in early May between Saddam-ites, Shia fundamentalists and the US military. Ultimately, there was only going to be one victor. Basra was taken with only twenty Coalition dead and was secure by May 5th. Iraqi port facilities at Umm Qasr had already been seized by British special forces mostly intact. Iraq was now cut off from the Persian Gulf, with its oil facilities moved to rapidly transferring everything it could to help relieve the battered global economy.
It was a great irony that Rumsfeld and Cheney, who had been so enthusiastic about starting the invasion of Iraq, would seem almost completely indifferent thereafter. It seemed the thing that most appealed to them was just starting the war against Hussein and not thinking much beyond that since they could come back to him later. American troops rolled along the Shatt al-Arab river, with hundreds of thousands of men rolling both towards Iran and northwards towards Najaf. As American soldiers peered into the river, they could see rusting away the tanks and destroyed vehicles from the last war that had been fought here between the two nations they were now simultaneously at war with. Many had heard of the unfathomable horrors of that war, and wondered how they can beat two nations that had endured so much for so long. Could they last eight years in a war like that?
Excerpt from ‘Broken Dreams: How the War on Terror Changed America’ by Linda Reins
On May 6th, Bandar Abbas finally fell to the Coalition, and ‘fell’ was the correct word as no one on scene felt ‘liberated’. When a member of the Iranian forces was captured and found with a Sony Walkman that played American rock music, the American on scene asked him why the soldier was fighting for a government that would arrest him if he was caught with it. ‘If you stood at the border, tossed me a gun and told me to shoot Khamenei, I would have,” he reportedly replied, ‘but if you step one foot onto my country’s soil, I wouldn’t have you here even as a corpse’. The American soldier who heard the conversation would recall, "After I heard that, I realised there was a chance we might not win this thing.'
As if silently accepting the impossibility of the task given to them, the Pentagon encouraged and convinced the Arab nations of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to step up their role as the occupying force behind the lines. No one in the Pentagon trusted the capability of either army on the offense, but the defense was considered safe enough. While no one was thrilled about occupying Persian towns with Arab troops, it had become a necessity after the decision to invade Iraq. With that, 200,000 American troops had been redirected from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to fight a guy who had nothing to do with 9/11, leaving a hole that the Arab allies of America volunteered to fix because Bush saw some protestors with flags, had the troops there at the time and thought 'now or never'. However, to stress their opposition to the invasion of Iraq, they refused to transfer across Iraq and were transported to Bandar Abbas by boat or plane. The Arab troops were viscerally hated by the locals and the Arab troops hardly found the Persians much better. It was considered an inelegant solution, but the Americans needed any solution. While storming into towns was a horrible experience, it wasn’t the same as an occupation of people that hated them – the ghosts of Vietnam were hard to shake.
On May 7th, American troops crossed the Iraq-Iran border in order to seize Khorramshahr and Abadan. The madcap plan to invade Iran through Iraq had certainly spread Iranian forces thinner than they would have liked, all for the very agreeable (to the Iranians) cost of the implosion of America’s diplomatic power and now open criticism from its own allies. Though Bush tried to laugh it off in public, privately he worried that he made the wrong choice and that he had been manipulated into war by Cheney and Rumsfeld. Powell had narrowly avoided resigning in protest of the Iraq invasion, convinced by Bush himself to stay at the last minute. Members of the military were now insisting on a draft, with Cheney and Rumsfeld insisting that it wasn’t needed and that it would adversely hurt the economy and home front.
But as the Poles tried to help drag Bush out of the mess he’d put himself in by marching with the Kurds down to Mosul and the Australians made the awkward charge on the road to Najaf, other players in the world were watching. That player looked at American actions in Iraq with a mix of horror and dread – it was like a prophecy had come true. The Axis of Evil speech was not a cheap stunt, but a masterplan. A masterplan to overthrow all of America’s enemies with the political capital built on 9/11. His nuclear program was still years off – it wouldn’t complete on time, and he certainly wouldn’t be allowed to complete it. If this Texan Cowboy was desperate enough to invade Iraq while still struggling in Iran, it would only be a matter of time before he would test that wrath too. He would never have a better time than now. If he waited any longer, the Iraqis and Iranians would fall and the undiverted attention of the world would land on him and end his dynasty. He would not allow it. If he could seize his southern neighbour, however, then options would open. With the West too distracted in the Middle East and only a skeleton force left on the peninsula, the South would never be so exposed again. The Americans would need to reinstall the draft to fight him, something he knew would be a bombshell that would upturn American society. He might annex the South, maybe not. Maybe he could hand the South back, and in return get a guarantee from China, maybe get nukes. The more he thought about it, the more he talked himself into it. Maybe he could do it, and complete what his father started. As fear entered into him from the madness of Bush’s Iraqi invasion, so did reason leave him. Seeing his future deposed at the end of an American rifle, he tried to avert it like Macbeth did when told of his fate by the witches. Yet it was precisely due to his actions that Macbeth would ultimately meet his downfall. For so long he had played the madman to scare the world, now he started to wonder if he was the sane one in a world of madmen.
So it would be for Kim Jong-Il, as the final episode of the War on Terror was about to unfold: the Second Korean War.
[1] Sharon would eventually pull out of the West Bank so this is basically him having a politically convenient excuse to do what he did OTL.
[2] A real insult in the Syrian Parliament directed at Abdul Khaddam, a reformist member of the government, who fled Syria in 2005 in opposition to Assad.
[3] Yarmouk Camp underwent OTL sufferings during the OTL Civil War, of which the Syrian government was certainly one of the actors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yarmouk_Camp#During_the_Syrian_Civil_War
[4] – The sign off tune to Iranian State News for at the time
[5] Based on a more limited version of a contemporary military exercise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002. The Lincoln was the infamous ‘Mission Accomplished’ carrier Bush made his OTL speech from.
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And this is saying a lot with Henry Kissinger and his reputation IOTL in mind.