What if the US was OK with Iraq taking over Kuwait in 1991?
An alternative version of this would be just brokering a solution to the dispute over the oil fields straddling the border that was the proximate cause for the invasion.
The reason for doing either would be a realpolitik policy of bolstering Saddam Hussein as the strongman able to take on Iran and the Sunni fundamentalists. I realize that this wasn't US policy, though it briefly looked like it would be US policy in the 1980s, but it could have been.