What if there had been no Gulf War?

What if no US troops had entered the Arab territories?

Would there have been any terror against the West? When Kuwait was overrun and occupied by Iraq, there was an extended pause when nobody did nothing. It was a secondary news item. Most people could not have pointed to Kuwait on a map nor did they even know it was a country. WTF? Saddam said the Kuwaitis were syphoning off oil in his southernmost oil fields and he invaded them.

Would we have ever heard Osama's name if there had been no intervention in Kuwait and forces assembled in Saudi territory prior to the commencement of Desert Storm and the subsequent stationing of US troops in the region? Would we have even had the first Trade Center attack? Would Al-qaida be a household name? Would there have been any loss of life among our own troops, our allies, and more than a million Arabs?

j/k

Remember that "Al Qaeda" was created by the Bush Crime Family CIA to fight the Commies in Afghanistan. If Osama actually DID turn against his friends, the Bush Crime Family, it wasn't because of what Poppy did in Iraq, but more likely because they killed his big brother Salem Bin Laden in Texas.

Even if Osama sensed that it was no accident, I think he would have blamed his brother for falling under western influence. He had already distanced himself from the rest of his family.

which was 10 years after Salem's "mysterious" plane crash. Osama wasn't officially "cut off" from the family until 1994. And even that could well be a cover story, since the Bush Crime Family were still doing business with the "other" Bin Ladens, and indeed continued to do so even after Idiot Son was pResident and Osama allegedly attacked the US.

Saddam might have invaded Saudi Arabia next. The war was about oil, and Saddam controlled both Iraqi and Kuwaiti oil after the invasion. Had he invaded Saudi Arabia, then a third world dictator would've been able to use global energy market as blackmail. Ironically the war in Iraq in 1990 was one of the few wars the entire world got behind.

That is probably what would've happened, Saddam would've used the energy supplies as leverage to toy with the global economy the same way North Korea threatens missile attacks on Japan and South Korea. Dictators love leverage. Does it justify the half a million people who died from UN sanctions against Iraq? No.

All in all, maybe (emphasis on maybe) it would've led to a renewable energy surge since nobody wanted to be dependent on Saddam Hussein's political agenda to obtain energy supplies. The same thing kindof happened in the 1970s with OPEC. But once prices went down everyone forgot again.

Would 9/11 have happened? I don't know for sure. The US would still support Israel, still have ties to dictators in the region and still export western culture to the middle east. So terrorists in the area would still hate us.

We could've stopped 9/11 had we actually listened to the intelligence we were getting.

We had been allied with Saddam in the Iran/Iraq war. All the mideast wars were largely tribal conflicts, weren't they? At the end of the day, the winner still needs to sell the oil. The only strategic problem was that Saddam Hussein wouldn't have allowed any foreign revenue sharing with his oil. No foreign ownership. Can't blame him for that.

what if Israel hadn't kept the Palestinian territories after conquering them?

what if Bush v. Gore hadn't validated the coup of 2001?

hell, what if the Crusades hadn't happened?

speculation goes on and on.

and saudi arabia was right there, with weak defenses (assuming we weren't involved) and lots of oil.

Pretty tempting target for a power mad despot. I wouldn't mind owning saudi arabias oil fields.

Let's say Saddam Hussein waited a couple of years and then commenced to wearing that Saudi ass out. Let's say he took them by storm and blew their doors off. Then, let's say Saddam got liquored up one night and decided to choke off the world's oil supply, just for the heck of it. Or let's say Saddam had a stroke and Uday took power temporarily while Saddam was laid up. Then let's imagine Uday got bored dipping the Iraqi football team in swimming pools of shit and HE decided to choke off the world's oil supply and not sell a drop to the West.

Can you then easily conclude that all Western nations and the world-at-large would have been coming down on Iraq in one concerted mass assault and putting an end to the entire Iraqi escapade in short order?

No to mention that Saddam's neighbors were not going to sit idle themselves watching Iraq's Saddam take over the entire region. I imagine that Syria, Saudi, and other neighboring states would have made some mutual self defense treaty after Saddam took Kuwait. It's not like they were cheering Saddam on.

And they may have not liked it, but they didn't really have the military to stop him.

Iraq and Iran had the toughest militaries in the region (exluding Israel who would have been prevented for political reasons from getting involved).

I'm not sure there is much saudi arabia could have done without our help.

And the world/middle east sat idly by while he took over kuwait.

mideast domination and became anti-West, then it obviously would have dictated a need for the western world and the neighboring states to come down together on his armies. But, remember that Saddam was our ally. Even after the defeat of his much of his army in Desert Storm, Bush the Elder knew better than to take Saddam down. He was a buffer, a very strong buffer against terrorists and would-be terrorists in the region. Saddam didn't tolerate disorder within his borders.

But, as long as he was still selling crude to the West............Hey, Saddam was a strict disciplinarian as a dictator. He kept a tidy house.

I have grown weary of this constant warfare in the mideast. This is headed nowhere. It hasn't led to anything but death. It's time for some solution. Somebody needs to call a truce. There's no end to this epic for our generation or another and another to come. The verdict is in. You cannot control people even after you have whipped their armies. War is nothing but destructive.

Saddam was actually correct when he said Kuwait was once a province of Iraq. And also when he said the Kuwaitis (Bush puppets) were slant-drilling into his oil wells. Not that Saddam was a nice guy, but the Kuwaitis were hardly boy scouts either.

there has been something for Arabs to be pissed off about.

in fighting the Soviets when they occupied Afghanistan. Osama gets his hair up whenever western boots are on the ground in his holy lands. We were Israel's ally when we were arming and advising Osama in Afghanistan. The western boots on holy Islamic turf set off the terrorism.

So why did the Soviets go into Afghanistan? I've never figured that one out completely.

but it's way too simple of an explanation.

Doesn't require much speculation as to why they'd want influence there.

And the Soviet Union already had plenty of oil. They were scheduling an Olympics that would already extol the virtues of Soviet Communism, they surely knew they were putting worldwide participation in that on the line when they went into Afghanistan.

For me, it's never added up. Then again, the war that we started in Iraq is the same thing. I guess that when world powers get completely full of themselves, they overestimate their strengths, and underestimate their weaknesses.

the USSR cared far less about their troop losses than we do about ours and they were free to use far more severe tactics, ala saddam, to keep the people in line.

Our atrocities pale in comparison to what the USSR did on a routine basis.

Also, they didn't need the oil for themselves, but imagine the power that would give them over the rest of the world if they controlled the bulk of the worlds oil supply. They have too much influence over europe now with their current oil fields (give them too much lip and they just shut down the pipelines, imagine that on a much grander scale).

Saddam would have likely invaded Saudi Arabia, which was completely incapable of repelling such an invasion on its own. If that had happened, the West would have had no choice but to respond. It may have been a "war for oil," but Western economies were and still are way too dependent on oil to allow Saddam to control that much of it (approximately 1/3 of the world's resources). We might have been forced to cut a deal with him, but there is no way we wouldn't have gotten involved.

As for terrorism, who knows. Personally, I think terrorism is much more rooted in a desire of far-right Islamic fundamentalists to restore the caliphate. Israel may be an excuse, foreign troops on Islamic soil may be an excuse, but just solving those issues won't solve terrorism. In the Madrid bombings, much of the fundamentalist literature hailed the attacks as a strike against the medieval expulsion of the Moors. Much of bin Laden's writings involve restoring the bloodline of the Islamic caliphs. So, regardless of whether we withdraw from the Middle East (which, by and large, I think we should), terrorism will still be a reality.