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The Iraqi army was not in a position to fight as well as it could have. It was caught off balance and then began to rout. Had they found themselves in a better position, it would have been a much bloodier fight, but the Iraqis would still have been defeated. Would there have been more of a...

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find a way avoid a major war in Europe between June 1914 and August 1945. Small wars are acceptable, even up to the scale of the Balkan wars, but no major conflagrations and no total war. And BTW are there an TL's out there that avoid major...

Well one of these assassination attempts is going to have to succeed sooner or later. It's bad enough that Trotsky was upstaged by a deranged Frenchwoman

If such a settlement were established I think a good argument could be made that it would remain connected to Africa. With an abundant supply of virgin timber the Africans could develop the large ships required for frequent trans-atlantic travel, and they would have the incentive to do so, not...

I doubt Churchill will be able to escape with much of the fleet. I don't think many of the officers, let alone the enlisted men want to go into exile, or are particularly fond of the notion of stealing their nation's fleet just to hand it over to the Americans. Churchill has gone a step too...

If Japan no longer has to worry about protecting China's sealanes from the Ottoman navy, might they go after the US territories in the Pacific? I remember some posts in the past about Japanese intelligence in the Philippines. Perhaps the Philippines could be liberated and the US's Western...

In a war like this, intelligence-gathering is easy. There are bound to be people throughout the Conservative government and military establishment who have their misgivings about the coup, and sources of information wouldn't be hard to come by. With our good friend the Wanderer advising the...

Pick a civilization pre-1500 and give it mass literacy. What would be the effects? Obvioulsy ancient writing was an expensive proposition, but many of those societies were wealthy enough to afford it if they had chosen to pursue it. Would it cause technology to advance faster, religions...

If Churchill sends out the fleet to fight the Germans before the Socialists are thoroughly dealt with he'll lose a lot of public support. Unless of course he arranges some sort of "German" provocation. The call for the general strike will probably be heeded, and Churchill will have to crack...

A German history professor of mine strongly criticized the "spirit of 1914" as a myth. There were people who reacted with euphoria, large crowds, patriotic music, etc., but if you look beyond the newspaper stories and look at what people wrote in their diaries, the reaction tended to be one of...

I remember reading a comment from either a friend of the Bush family or a reporter, maybe Bush Sr.'s biographer, to the efffect that W told him he wanted to be a war president. He may or may not have mentioned Iraq specifically at the time, but it certainly was regarded as a target by the...

I'd buy that painting.

Basically you need the left to be more powerful politically. There are several ways to do this, but the best is probably to avoid the Cold War, or at least a Cold War against a communist state. If there was no external leftist threat to point to, demonizing the left would be much more...

I doubt there would be much progress in peace talks. After "Operation Cast Lead" Israel was put under a great deal of international pressure. Absent that, and with Fatah running both Palestinian territories, I doubt the Israelis would feel the need to make any major concessions, which are...

Was it even finished in its protest form? If the song is released as it is on the Youtube clip I don't think it would go over nearly as well as the original, but if the lyrics are filled in well it might be a hit, though it will turn off many of their xenophobic fans, and some might not get...

They'll leverage their position in the cotton market to make a great deal of money. Some of that can be invested in industrializing the economy. They're not going to have this capability forever, and have to avoid abusing it in order to maintain good relations with European powers and...

The confederate military would be a central institution in the CSA, and military imperatives would force a focus on industrialization, at least to a degree. What the US does today, industrial policy through the military budget, will work in the CSA too. Then there's the obvious opportunity for...

@Monty Burns Stjernkjempe already covered a few points I was going to make, so let me just add a few things. I recently took a class in behavioral economics, which attempts to use actual behavioral science to improve economic models. Part of the class focused on how decisions are made, and...

You can't really compare democratic-socialist Britain ITTL with post-war Stalinist puppet-state East Germany. These specialists are probably doing better off under socialization than they would have had the depression been allowed to take its coures. They still have their jobs and salaries...

Well, the mistakes of 20th century socialism had to be made somewhere. That said, there's no way things are going to be as bad as in the Soviet Union. Britain is far more advanced economically and hasn't had a long war followed by a devastating civil war to rebuild from. It's population is also...