US never invades Iraq

Another crazy dictator annoying the hell out of the President threatening Nuclear Weapons and gassing etc. etc.
 
Only two ways this could happen
1. No 9/11 (which changes a lot)

2. Al Gore gets elected (or more to the point, the Supreme Court is friendlier to him)

As for what effects us not invading Iraq would have had, I think it would have led to a lot less anti-Americanism, particularly in the mideast. Radical Islamism would be much less popular, and al-Qaida would have fewer donors.

Of course, I happen to be a Liberal, so a Conservative's answer is probably going to be different (heck, this is more a political discussion than an AH discussion...probably belongs in the chat forum)
 
As for what effects us not invading Iraq would have had, I think it would have led to a lot less anti-Americanism, particularly in the mideast. Radical Islamism would be much less popular, and al-Qaida would have fewer donors.

-Iraq would certainly still be ruled by SH, internationally contained and isolated, every now and then bombarded by British/US forces.

-More emphasis (money/manpower/political initivative) on Afghanistan. I assume, that this theatre would be in a much better shape by now.

-The United States would be a further away from bankruptcy.

-Better international standing of the Bush administration, thus better relations of the USA with most of the world. The 9/11 bonus would have lasted a lot longer.

-Totally different campaigning before the '04 elections?

-Edmund Stoiber becomes German Bundeskanzler in 2002. Schröder's SPD/Green-coalition only won with the narrowest of margins. His comeback in the polls in the weeks prior to the election has to be attributed to a large degree on his popular stance against the war against Iraq.
 
Sooner or later, Bush will have to make a decision on the No Fly zones. The Iraqis were becoming bolder about shooting at our planes there, and the chances are all too high of them getting lucky sometime and taking one down. So, we can either stay there and keep fighting a semi-war with Iraq or pull out of them...
 
The main change to the timeline would be how events in Iran unfold. It's pretty much accepted as fact that the 2003 Iraq war was a spectacular success for Iranian Intelligence & their disinformation campaign and an utter humiliation for the CIA & MI6.

Iraq would continue to be something of a basket case with continued sanctions in place with an occasional attempt at restarting the Food-For-Oil programme. I find it unlikely that Ahmadinejad would have come to power in 2005 without the Americans sitting next door proclaiming the "Axis of Evil" policy. I think the reformists would have been able to maintain control of the country.

There wouldn't have been widespread protests against the Iraq war and Bush's popularity wouldn't have collapsed quite so quickly but Kerry would have defeated him in 2004. Blair would also have fared much better - I think the Tories might have gone into the 2005 election with Iain Duncan-Smith still in charge as his leadership of the party suffered from some spectacularly bad timing in politics.
 

Keenir

Banned
in OTL, we were on the verge of knocking the Taliban out of the game, if not out of existance...when we turned around and went after Iraq.

in this new timeline, expect Afghanistan to be on its way to being brought up to speed in the post-Taliban era.
 
Clearly Iraq would have gotten nukes by June, shipped them to its vast network of agents operating throughout the USA and Europe, and glassed the entire West by July.
 
This seems more of a Political discussion, since the war hasn't ended.

[proposes new rule: counts as AH only when POD is at least 15 years back]

Anyway, we'd have not one, but two pyschotic dictators running around in the Mid East. The USA would probably try to play Iran and Iraq off against each other, hoping that if they are too busy with their own shared border they will not be a problem for the rest of the world.

Maybe there is more focus on the War in Afghanistan.
 

yourworstnightmare

Banned
Donor
No Iraq;
Iraq ruled by Saddam Crazy Hussein, or some of his dumb cronies (if he had died for natural reasons in between). Tyrancy, Secular Sunni Dictatorship, but a stronger Iraq that can diminish Iranian influence (the shias of Iraq still oppressed). Might very well butterfly away Armored Dinner Jacket's rise to power. (Of cours ADJ benefited from the corruption of his opponents, but I would dare to say the US presence in Iraq played a huge role). Without the Iraq invasion Al Qaida would ironically be weaker.
 
It's pretty much accepted as fact that the 2003 Iraq war was a spectacular success for Iranian Intelligence & their disinformation campaign and an utter humiliation for the CIA & MI6.

I would like to hear more about this, but I rather attribute the decision to go after Iraw to pre-set ideas in the Bush/Cheney-administration plus an infection with the "groupthink"-syndrome.
 
The weapons inspectors would have been able to complete their mission and having ultimately given Iraq a clean bill of health this would pave the way for Iraq's rehabilitation into the international community.

This rehabilitation would have likely come at the price of the privatisation (maybe partial) of Iraq's Oil industry which would likely have caused a drop in the Iraqi quality of life and an increase in it's national debt. At least for the short to mid term.

The Kurds would have continued to have existed in limbo for many years to come.

You can expect the next ten to twenty years depending on when Saddam dies to see a budding pro-democracy movement.
 
Are we talking about Desert Storm or Bush II's 2003 assault? If the former, expect the Middle East to be even more dangerous with Saddam holding Kuwait's oil. If you are referring to 2003, then I could see the US being even more aggressive with North Korea over their nukes (Army not tied down by Iraq, proven nukes, etc.). The Taliban are not going to be destroyed regardless of what choice was made. With Pakistan's tribal region granting them safe haven there was no way the US could reach them.
 
The main change to the timeline would be how events in Iran unfold. It's pretty much accepted as fact that the 2003 Iraq war was a spectacular success for Iranian Intelligence & their disinformation campaign and an utter humiliation for the CIA & MI6.


Whether or not Iranian Intelligence was feeding the US misinformation through Ahmed Chalabi (who was generally considered a CIA creature before the war)and his Iraqi National Congress, the US and allies were at that time very much willing to be duped. This from SourceWatch on Ahmed Chalabi:


SourceWatch said:
In December 2002, Robert Dreyfuss reported that the administration of George W. Bush actually preferred INC-supplied analyses of Iraq over analyses provided by long-standing analysts within the CIA. "Even as it prepares for war against Iraq, the Pentagon is already engaged on a second front: its war against the Central Intelligence Agency.," he wrote. "The Pentagon is bringing relentless pressure to bear on the agency to produce intelligence reports more supportive of war with Iraq. ... Morale inside the U.S. national-security apparatus is said to be low, with career staffers feeling intimidated and pressured to justify the push for war." Much of the pro-war faction's information came from the INC, even though "most Iraq hands with long experience in dealing with that country's tumultuous politics consider the INC's intelligence-gathering abilities to be nearly nil. ... The Pentagon's critics are appalled that intelligence provided by the INC might shape U.S. decisions about going to war against Baghdad. At the CIA and at the State Department, Ahmed Chalabi, the INC's leader, is viewed as the ineffectual head of a self-inflated and corrupt organization skilled at lobbying and public relations, but not much else."[5]


"The [INC's] intelligence isn't reliable at all," said Vincent Cannistraro a former senior CIA official and counterterrorism expert. "Much of it is propaganda. Much of it is telling the Defense Department what they want to hear. And much of it is used to support Chalabi's own presidential ambitions. They make no distinction between intelligence and propaganda, using alleged informants and defectors who say what Chalabi wants them to say, [creating] cooked informationthat goes right into presidential and vice-presidential speeches."[6]"


"What he did was pander to the dreams of a group of powerful men, centered in the Pentagon, the Defence Policy Board the vice president's office, and various think tanks scattered around Washington,² according to Thomas Engelhardt, a New York writer who produces a daily web log on the war. The thing that needs to be grasped here is that since 1991 these men have been dreaming up a storm about reconfiguring the Middle East, while scaling the heavens (via various Star Wars programs for the militarization of space), and so nailing down an American earth for eternity. Their dreams were utopian and so, by definition, unrealizable. Theirs were lava dreams, and they were dreamt, like all such burning dreams, without much reference to the world out there. They were perfect pickings for a Chalabi. Of course, the fact that Chalabi is now scarcely mentioned as a possible political force in Iraq is barely acknowledged by the hawks who still insist, albeit with less conviction, that things are going their way and that there is no reason to panic. --Jim Lobe, 11 July 2003 [8]


I agree with Hörnla in #13. Bush, Cheney, et al. were going after Iraq with any excuse: all of their WMD claims were flimsy at best.

There was no "CIA intelligence failure", because the Central Intelligence Agency was deliberately cut from the loop and its warnings on dubious "intelligence" were disregarded. Some pieces of the WMD "evidence", like the bogus yellowcake documents, were so patently false I think even the Iranian Intelligence would not be caught dead trying to pass them on.
 
Top