No Iraq War does the Arab Spring Come to Iraq

If UNSCOM is permitted to finish the job, if someone whose name isn't Bush (and maybe McCain) is elected- or if Kamil's defection interview is spread around, there could be no Iraq war- and the world would know Saddam's WMD were toast. Of course, that might embolden the Kurds and Shi'a in Iraq to revolt. It would take time for the sanction effects to be undone- and I can see the rebels trying to buy arms.
I can guarantee that Iraq would be majorly changed...
 
Do we even know if Saddam would survive until 2012? He was old and fat, and although dictators with state-of-the-art medical care can often hang on at death's door for years (see Franco) there's an outside chance he wouldn't make it to see the Arab Spring.

I'd imagine if he died before 2012, the military and party elite would very rapidly eliminate the psychopathic Uday and install Qusay as a more palatable dictator. Maybe he'd take the Saif al-Islam Gaddafi or Bashar Assad route of smarming up to the West and pretending to be a bright young liberal in order to get the sanctions lifted.

In which case you'd get OTL's Syria - not quite genocidal Saddam-style repression, but pretty brutal, while the West does nothing at first because a stable Baathist regime is useful in preventing sectarian warfare.
 
Is that an actual figure or a hyperbole? I know Saddam bloodily put down revolts but killing HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS after 1991? Do you have any citation for that?

I have seen low end numbers for the 1991 uprising deaths at a hundred thousand and high end numbers at four hundred thousand. Wiki currently puts the number at 180,000, but its kind of hard to get an accurate number as they are still finding mass graves sometimes with several thousand people in a single grave them from the uprising.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_uprisings_in_Iraq

massgraveIraq.png


Saddam practiced collective guilt and punishment in putting down potental threaths so if say some people from a village revolted he would very often have everyone from the village killed. Baby Assad so far in Syria has used gradually increasing levels of violence whereas Saddam believed in going all out from day one as he showed during both the 1991 uprisings and the Anfal campaign against the Kurds in 1988.
 
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RousseauX

Donor
I think there would still be uprisings as populations in the Islamic world were unhappy with the current set of aging dictatorships, but watching democracy in action in Iraq gave the Arab Spring a direction that they otherwise I suspect wouldn't have had. It would be more about changing one dictator for another instead of the idea of replacing the dictator with a democratic process which they got to watch in action in Iraq. Sure, Arabs saw the flaws in a democratic process, but they also saw the positives.
No it didn't, this is evidenced by the fact that Iraqi democracy did not appear as a central theme at any point during the Arab Spring.
 

whitecrow

Banned
I have seen low end numbers for the 1991 uprising deaths at a hundred thousand and high end numbers at four hundred thousand. Wiki currently puts the number at 180,000, but its kind of hard to get an accurate number as they are still finding mass graves sometimes with several thousand people in a single grave them from the uprising.

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_uprisings_in_Iraq" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_uprisings_in_Iraq
I... I don't even know what to say. I never looked into the casualties of the uprisings and thought they were in tens of thousands max :eek:.
 
Baby Assad is not as ruthless as his dad was: the Elder Assad would've gone all-out from the beginning. Dad was very harsh when the Muslim Brotherhood rose up in Hama back in '82: body count estimates vary: some go as high as 30,000.

Any kind of Arab Spring protests in a TL where there was no Iraq War would be suppressed with harshness, ruthlessness, and brutality. Saddam, as noted practiced and preached collective punishment: the crime for which he was hanged wasn't for suppressing the Shia revolt in '91, it was for the Dujail massacre in 1982. 148 Shia men and boys executed, and a villiage razed to the ground in reprisal for a failed assassination attempt on the President-for-life.
 
Nope, Saddam was very very good at putting down revolts.

That's putting it mildly. I don't even think the Iraqis would dare try an uprising if Saddam still looks strong. Now if he showed any weakness, then perhaps. After all, he was feared more than respected. It is better to be respected, since if you are, your underlings won't turn on you the moment you lose power.
 
No it didn't, this is evidenced by the fact that Iraqi democracy did not appear as a central theme at any point during the Arab Spring.

I think you are making a bit more of a one to one relationship then I am talking about.

Arabs watched the democratic process in all its glory take place in Iraq along with several relatively modern campaigns, the drafting and voting on a Constitution, and the rest of the trappings of how to put together a democratic system.

Once the match of revolution was struck it guided what a large portation of the revolutionaries have been pushing for. Not a new dictator or Theocracy, but a democracy and they have an idea about how to build such a system from watching the Iraqis successes and failures.

The only Middle Eastern uprising I think was directly effected by the bravery of the Iraqi people coming out and voting by the millions I think was the early winter 2005 killing of Lebanon's former PM by Syria which helped them brave their fear as many said and come out and demonstrate in huge numbers against Syria. The other cases of Egypt and the rest were influenced in my view by watching the successes and failures of Iraq's multi year trek towards trying to build a democratic society.
 
I think there would still be uprisings as populations in the Islamic world were unhappy with the current set of aging dictatorships, but watching democracy in action in Iraq gave the Arab Spring a direction that they otherwise I suspect wouldn't have had. It would be more about changing one dictator for another instead of the idea of replacing the dictator with a democratic process which they got to watch in action in Iraq. Sure, Arabs saw the flaws in a democratic process, but they also saw the positives.

That sounds like desperately clutching at straws. Sorry, arguments based on wishful thinking are not persuasive.
 
Arabs watched the democratic process in all its glory take place in Iraq along with several relatively modern campaigns, the drafting and voting on a Constitution, and the rest of the trappings of how to put together a democratic system.

All under an amazingly inept American administration which botched the reconstruction and continually pushed its favourites? You will recall that Bremer fought democracy tooth and nail. That he unilaterally cancelled the results of municipal elections, and that he fought elections tooth and nail until the Ayatollah Sistani gave him no choice.

Unfortunately for your thesis, to the extent that the Arab Spring had any inspiration in Iraq, it was inspired by anti-american movements. Realistically though, its pretty clear that the Arab spring movement was indigenous to the countries that it occurred in.

Your notion that the 'example' of 'functioning' democracy in Iraq had any influence on the evolution of the Arab Spring movements is ignorant and condescending at best.

You do realize that just about all of the Arab states have something of a joint shared history with European democracies. That through cultural exchange, economic ties, and history, the populations of most of these Arab states had an understanding of democracies. You realize that even several of the monarchies had representative houses, that Algeria and Lebanon had had electoral traditions, and that even Egypt despite being a dictatorship/oligarchy still maintained democratic trappings.

For your poetic thesis to have any credibility, the Islamic world would have to have existed in a complete vaccuum, one which precluded any history, and one which carefully ignored or excluded the American occupation from notice.

Sorry, but your argument does not deserve to be taken seriously. It is merely a self-serving effort to rationalize an imaginary positive outcome from the Iraq War and occupation. The fact that you've gone to such desperate and abstract lengths speaks volumes about the war and occupation.
 
That's putting it mildly. I don't even think the Iraqis would dare try an uprising if Saddam still looks strong. Now if he showed any weakness, then perhaps. After all, he was feared more than respected. It is better to be respected, since if you are, your underlings won't turn on you the moment you lose power.

Well.... except that Saddam Hussein was or would have been by the time of the Arab Spring, an old burnt out husk of a man. His regime was hollow and rotten to the core. He'd systematically executed or rooted out any potential rivals or threats to his leadership, which included some of his own family members. There was literally no one competent to replace him. His high command were sycophants and bunglers. Rot pervaded the leadership. The regime was corrupt and incompetent, its functions reduced to a shell. It's only remaining skill maintaining a precarious grip on powre.

The Saddam Hussein of 2003 was not the Saddam Hussein of the Iran Iraq War, certainly he wasn't the Saddam Hussein of the Gulf War and its aftermath. His regime, by 2003, was a mere husk - the economy battered by sanctions, an international pariah, bombed at will, having already lost control over large parts of north and south.

It seems to me that the question of whether the Arab Spring movement could have pushed Saddam Hussein out is a threatening one to Americans. If the answer is yes, then the entire Iraq War becomes a tragic exercise in futility, a waste of trillions of dollars and of American and Iraqi lives. I don't think most Americans really want to contemplate that they spent a decade in war and occupation, lost 5000 lives, killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi's, spent trillions of dollars and inflicted catastrophic damage... when all they might have needed to do was wait. That's just a hard possibility to face up to rationally. The instinct is to say no.
 
The invasion of Iraq by the U.S. and Allies was not to oust a dictator and establish democracy. Its sole aim was to get the control of Iraqi oil. When Saddam was a friend and client of the U.S.A. the U.S. was not bothered about his suppression and cruelties. U.S.A. turned against Saddam only when his moves hurt its own interests. It was U.S.A. and Allies who supported Saddam throughout the Iran-Iraq war.
Not only Saddam. Hosni Mubarak,Zinebdin Ben Ali, Ali Abdullah Saleh and Bashar al Assad were all friends of U.S.A. at one time or other. Mubarak, Saddam, Bashar, Saleh etc, even if not democratic, were at least secular. But the most fundamentalist regime of Saudi Arabia is still bosom friend of U.S.A.
It is not the case of the Middle East alone. It was the U.S. who propped up most of the despots in Latin America, Africa and Asia. Trujillo,Batista,Pinochet, Duvalier,Mobutu, the list is too long to count.
 
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Well.... except that Saddam Hussein was or would have been by the time of the Arab Spring, an old burnt out husk of a man. His regime was hollow and rotten to the core. He'd systematically executed or rooted out any potential rivals or threats to his leadership, which included some of his own family members. There was literally no one competent to replace him. His high command were sycophants and bunglers. Rot pervaded the leadership. The regime was corrupt and incompetent, its functions reduced to a shell. It's only remaining skill maintaining a precarious grip on powre.

The Saddam Hussein of 2003 was not the Saddam Hussein of the Iran Iraq War, certainly he wasn't the Saddam Hussein of the Gulf War and its aftermath. His regime, by 2003, was a mere husk - the economy battered by sanctions, an international pariah, bombed at will, having already lost control over large parts of north and south.
Didn't all that exactly describe Gaddafi? Especially a Gaddafi regime which didn't bother to reform and open up without an Iraq war?

It seems to me that the question of whether the Arab Spring movement could have pushed Saddam Hussein out is a threatening one to Americans. If the answer is yes, then the entire Iraq War becomes a tragic exercise in futility, a waste of trillions of dollars and of American and Iraqi lives. I don't think most Americans really want to contemplate that they spent a decade in war and occupation, lost 5000 lives, killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi's, spent trillions of dollars and inflicted catastrophic damage... when all they might have needed to do was wait. That's just a hard possibility to face up to rationally. The instinct is to say no.
And the icing on the cake? Iraq is now an Iranian province!
 
Do we even know if Saddam would survive until 2012? He was old and fat, and although dictators with state-of-the-art medical care can often hang on at death's door for years (see Franco) there's an outside chance he wouldn't make it to see the Arab Spring.

I'd imagine if he died before 2012, the military and party elite would very rapidly eliminate the psychopathic Uday and install Qusay as a more palatable dictator. Maybe he'd take the Saif al-Islam Gaddafi or Bashar Assad route of smarming up to the West and pretending to be a bright young liberal in order to get the sanctions lifted.

In which case you'd get OTL's Syria - not quite genocidal Saddam-style repression, but pretty brutal, while the West does nothing at first because a stable Baathist regime is useful in preventing sectarian warfare.

Sorry a successful people powered revolution against Saddam is as likely as a successful people powered revolution as Stalin. Saddam knew how to rule through abject terror. It's not something you simply lose with age unless you get demented. Plus the sanctions regime was falling apart and the price of oil was rising because growth in China and India was going gangbusters last decade.

Now a regime led by say Uday if he killed his brother would be unstable and a successful revolution might be possible as the guy was basically an Arab Caligula, but if his smarter brother won after Saddam dies then it's the same situation as Saddam only with less experience.
 
Arab springs

Arab Sprngs are essentially a wide scale attempt to replace governments that are either not Sunni or not Islam based by Sunni inspired government. It's a reaction to what was perceived in the first decade of the XXI century the Shia rise. Endgame is having the Shia "block" (Iran, part of Lebanon and maybe Iraq) surrounded by a brotherhood of like minded Islamic states with Sunni leadership forming a loose block. The countries tha shoud be worried are Iran and Israel. Israel is in a difficult position, because it doesn't know yet wether having a weakned Iran is worth the risk of having to face a large Sunni coalition.
Since Iraq is a mostly Shia country, getting a Sunni Islam based government into power would be hard, with or without Saddam. But once Saddam was the last of the nonreligious leaders standing, he would have to be challenged.
I'm not saying that all the people protesting in the middle east are wiling participates in this plan. Some of them have a progressive agenda. So did most of the demonstrators when Iran kicked out the Sha.
Most of the dictators falling down are despicable people. But among their opponents are some very dangerous people.
On the bright side, the Saudis will soon have the means to take out Iran's nuclear program and Iram will be to isolated to fiht back. On the dark side, Israel is beginning to look more and more isolated...
 
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