What about Syria?Iraq would likely see an uprising that results in an even messier situation than OTL.
The Kurds would undoubtedly break away in the North. The Sunnis would be divided between supporting Saddam Hussein (or one of his sons if he is dead) and the Sunni jihadists. The Shias would be divided between secularist liberal movements and supporting Iranian backed Shia militia.
In a way, the Iraq War was a benevolent thing, knowing what Iraq would be like after the Arab Spring/Winter.
In regards to the West, President Hilary Clinton would likely have intitiated a air intervention against the Saddam Hussein government a la OTL Libya 2011. Meanwhile the Iranians try to expand their sphere of influence westward and the Turks try to screw over the IRaqi Kurds in some fashion.
Anyway, any thoughts on this?
Iraq would likely see an uprising that results in an even messier situation than OTL.
How would the current situation in Iraq and Syria have looked like without a 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq (either because Bush changes his mind in regards to this or, perhaps more likely, because Gore wins the U.S. Presidency in 2000)?
Anyway, any thoughts on this?
Far-canal - someone's been drinking the Rumsfeld vintage kool-aid ...In a way, the Iraq War was a benevolent thing, knowing what Iraq would be like after the Arab Spring/Winter.
The Shite Iranian administration are less likely to expand their influence westward if the coalition of the willing has not removed the Sunni Iraqi administrationMeanwhile the Iranians try to expand their sphere of influence westward...
Iraq was a radicalizing cauldron of hated, division and religious radicalism that was getting ready to explode like Syria and Saddam was a demented tyrant in less and less control of his state and less and less connected to reality.
You are going to have an uprising and my guess is the House of Saddam gets pushed aside by the religious radicals that they allowed to grow strong. Sunni Iraq might be led by Zarqawi or some Iraqi theocrat, but it won't be by Saddam.
Actually no - the population of Iraq is actually predominantly Shite, not SunniSyria goes up in flames as well and religious radical Sunnis from Iraq take the Sunni sections of Syria that Assad can't hold.
I suspect that without his 'leadership' then the balkanised state of Iraq would have descended into civil war in much the same way as the Yugoslavian states did post the death of Tito and we would still likely see the rise of religious extremism in the region.
Actually no - both Iraq and Syria were largely secular regimes - religious radicals arose from a grossly malfeasant occupation, which created a power vacuum in the Iraqi space. The occupation radicalised elements of the Iraqi military, while drawing in additional militants and extremists to 'liberate' Iraq. It respect of Syria, the religious radicals are the ones currently being sponsored by the West and their client states.
Qur'an etched in Saddam Hussein's blood poses dilemma for Iraq leaders
It was etched in the blood of a dictator in a ghoulish bid for piety. Over the course of two painstaking years in the late 1990s, Saddam Hussein had sat regularly with a nurse and an Islamic calligrapher; the former drawing 27 litres of his blood and the latter using it as a macabre ink to transcribe a Qur'an. But since the fall of Baghdad, almost eight years ago, it has stayed largely out of sight - locked away behind three vaulted doors. It is the one part of the ousted tyrant's legacy that Iraq has simply not known what to do with.
The vault in the vast mosque in Baghdad has remained locked for the past three years, keeping the 114 chapters of the Muslim holy book out of sight - and mind - while those who run Iraq have painstakingly processed the other cultural remnants of 30 years of Saddam and the Ba'ath party.
"What is in here is priceless, worth absolutely millions of dollars," said Sheikh Ahmed al-Samarrai, head of Iraq's Sunni Endowment fund, standing near the towering minarets of the west Baghdad mosque that Saddam named "the Mother of All Battles". Behind him is the infamous Blood Qur'an, written in Saddam's own blood.
Even to get to this point - the last step before entering the forbidden vault - has been a tortuous process.
And then there are the Sunnis themselves, who are fearful of government retribution if they open the doors and of divine disapproval if they treat this particularly gruesome volume of the Qur'an with the reverence of a holy book.
"It was wrong to do what he did, to write it in blood," says Sheikh Samarrai. "It is haraam [forbidden]."
Despite this, Sammarie says he acted as the document's protector during the mayhem that followed the US-led invasion in 2003, hiding pages in his house and moving others among the homes of his relatives.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/19/saddam-legacy-quran-iraqi-government
IS top command dominated by ex-officers in Saddam's army
BAGHDAD (AP) -- While attending the Iraqi army's artillery school nearly 20 years ago, Ali Omran remembers one major well. An Islamic hard-liner, he once chided Omran for wearing an Iraqi flag pin into the bathroom because it included the words "God is great."
"It is forbidden by religion to bring the name of the Almighty into a defiled place like this," Omran recalled being told by Maj. Taha Taher al-Ani.
Omran didn't see al-Ani again until years later, in 2003. The Americans had invaded Iraq and were storming toward Baghdad. Saddam Hussein's fall was imminent. At a sprawling military base north of the capital, al-Ani was directing the loading of weapons, ammunition and ordnance into trucks to spirit away. He took those weapons with him when he joined Tawhid wa'l-Jihad, a forerunner of al-Qaida's branch in Iraq.
Now al-Ani is a commander in the Islamic State group, said Omran, who rose to become a major general in the Iraqi army and now commands its 5th Division fighting IS. He kept track of his former comrade through Iraq's tribal networks and intelligence gathered by the government's main counterterrorism service, of which he is a member. It's a common trajectory.
...
One initiative that eventually fed Saddam veterans into IS came in the mid-1990s when Saddam departed from the stringent secular principles of his ruling Baath party and launched the "Faith Campaign," a state-sponsored drive to Islamize Iraqi society. Saddam's feared security agencies began to tolerate religious piety or even radical views among military personnel, although they kept a close watch on them and saw to it they did not assume command positions.
At the time, the move was seen as a cynical bid to shore up political support among the religious establishment after Iraq's humiliating rout from Kuwait in the 1991 Gulf War and the Kurdish and Shiite uprisings that followed.
"Most of the army and intelligence officers serving with IS are those who showed clear signs of religious militancy during Saddam days," the intelligence chief said. "The Faith Campaign ... encouraged them."
In the run-up to the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, Saddam publicly invited foreign mujahedeen to come to Iraq to resist the invaders. Thousands came and Iraqi officials showed them off to the media as they were trained by Iraqi instructors. Many stayed, eventually joining the insurgency against American troops and their Iraqi allies.
http://www.militarytimes.com/story/...-dominated-ex-officers-saddams-army/31332975/
So secular dictators have what they decide is 'the most holy of all Qur'ans' written in their own blood?
ISIS?
No Saddam's paramilitaries. They went around in the 90s and enforced Islamic law as well chopping off hands and heads and had their own religiously radicalized youth and yes I have seen the pictures.
Secular tyranny became religious tyranny under the Back to Faith movement in Iraq and it even infected the Republican Guard and Iraqi Army.
The jihadists allowed in by Saddam and had trained by his armed forces merged. Men like al-Baghdadi came of age and studied theology and got his PhD in it during the Back to Faith movement.
Peculiar public displays of piety by oppressive dictators are ordinarily for consumption by the masses - have another helping
Clearly no other paramilitary organisation could come up with a black garb and ski masks combo.
The cynical use of extremist nut jobs would be a standard tool in an oppressive dictators toolbox. Not pleasant, but not at all comparable to the hell unleased by the occupation following the 2003 invasion.
The study of theology (Christion or Islam) is not in itself a crime. The vast majority of the jihadists entered Iraq after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, due to the conditions established by the Coalition of the willing. The coalition of the willing disbanded the Iraqi administration and armed forces, creating a power vacuum and thousands of ready recruits for a subsequent insurgency. There is no evidence al-Baghdadi was remotely radical prior to the 2003 invasion and/or his time in US detention centres.
Peculiar public displays of piety by oppressive dictators are ordinarily for consumption by the masses - have another helping
Clearly no other paramilitary organisation could come up with a black garb and ski masks combo.
The cynical use of extremist nut jobs would be a standard tool in an oppressive dictators toolbox. Not pleasant, but not at all comparable to the hell unleased by the occupation following the 2003 invasion.
The study of theology (Christion or Islam) is not in itself a crime. The vast majority of the jihadists entered Iraq after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, due to the conditions established by the Coalition of the willing. The coalition of the willing disbanded the Iraqi administration and armed forces, creating a power vacuum and thousands of ready recruits for a subsequent insurgency. There is no evidence al-Baghdadi was remotely radical prior to the 2003 invasion and/or his time in US detention centres.
Perhaps a newly aggressive Iranian government would attack an Iraq weakened by sanctions and internal revolt.
Ding ding ding I think we have a winner. The only thing I see as really holding them back was the possibility that Saddam might have chemical weapons. His explicit reason for wanting to create doubt was to keep Iran off balance. Eventually though he would have had to open up to the inspectors (even if the U.S. hadn't invaded like under Bush they would still would have bombed him to get him to comply) and he would have had to show the world that he didn't have any WMD's. After that there's no reason for Iran not to invade; they have nothing to lose (they were easily capable of conquering Iraq by the early 2000s) and everything to gain.
Holding Iraq under a pliant puppet regime would have priceless strategic value for Iran because it would be last link in a saddle stretching from Iran to Syria that would provide a direct line to the Mediterranean and Israel's doorstep. They could station troops on the Golan Heights if they wanted (which would maybe have some interesting implications for the 2006 Lebanon War if this all happens in time).
No matter the rest of the conversation he and you are having, it is a well known fact that beginning in the 1990s, Saddam Hussein began the country down a path of Islamification. He abandoned common Ba'athist tenets in favor of a far more religious form of governance.
He had nothing to do with Al Qaeda or anything like that, but he was certainly no longer a follower of the Ba'athist ideology. It seems to me that he began down this path to more easily hold power after the embarrassing display during the Gulf War, as this started soon after his defeat there and then.
"1986 Politburo" - you are confusing Iraq with RussiaYes.
It actually got its start as a gambit in the 1986 politburo meeting during the Iran/Iraq War fearing that Iraqi Shia and Sunnis could make common cause against him to start the process of religiously radicalizing Iraqi Sunnis so that they saw their loyalty to the Sunni Islam above that of the Iraqi state to revolution proof the country.
1986 Politburo" - you are confusing Iraq with Russia
Probably not
Unlike others, Iran does not have a track record of initiating conventional wars of choice.
It is no secret the neocons in the Bush administration were opening looking for an excuse to also invade Iran. You are suggesting the Iranians would repeat Sadam's earlier miscalculation in relation Kuwait (i.e. the acquisition of strategic oil resources).
Probably not
The Golan Heights has been occupied and administered by Israel since 1967
You mean just like the ex-Communist and especially ex-Soviet economies underwent a significant shock in the 1990s?Bremer after America came in decided on moving the government from a Socialist State to a Capitalist one overnight and it collapsed the state run industries and factories.