Post by eurofed on Jan 15, 2020 9:02:58 GMT
ITTL the British protectorate on Kuwait that ultimately led to its consolidation as an independent state never happened. The dynastic and diplomatic intrigue that IOTL led to the Anglo-Kuwaiti Agreement of 1899 instead caused the Ottoman annexation of Kuwait. As a result, Kuwait became an integral part of Iraq when the Ottoman Empire collapsed after WWI. This caused a significant alt-historical divergence to happen in the Middle East and East Asia since the 1980s.
In the early 1980s, Iraq's leader Saddam Hussein decided to exploit the post-revolutionary weakness of Islamist Iran, which was busy tearing itself apart with a violent power struggle between the dominant Islamists and their Communist, social-democratic, and Islamic socialist opponents, as well as a purge of the old monarchist elites that wrecked the Iranian army. Iraq invaded Iran with the aim of seizing ethnically-Arab and oil-rich Khuzestan. The initial Iraqi offensive was a decisive success that overrun Khuzestan thanks to the additional oil revenues of the Kuwait province allowing a greater military build-up and a sensible strategy that concentrated Iraqi mechanized land forces and air power. Iran's troubles were magnified by the poor strategic choices of Iran's supreme guide Khomeini. He distrusted, neglected, and purged the conventional army, which had been built up to a considerable degree under the Shah's regime, and instead relied on poorly armed and trained if full of zeal Islamist militias for a counterattack that failed disastrously.
The Iranian forces exhausted and bled themselves white with a series of human-wave offensives that accomplished very few gains for a considerable blood price, despite the regime's determination to win a decisive victory against Iraq and export its revolution at all costs. Out of growing frustration and desperation, the Iranians tried to spread instability across the Middle East to their advantage and open a second front by sponsoring pro-Iranian Islamist, Shiite, and Palestinian militias and terrorist groups to wage a series of attacks against Iraq, Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. They also encouraged their Arab allies, Syria and Libya, to support the same groups and apply military pressure on those states by border clashes. This significantly worsened the chaotic situation of the Lebanese Civil War and increased tensions and instability across the Middle East. However, it eventually backfired badly for the pro-Iranian front. The enraged Egyptians, noticing Libya ignored the previous lesson it had got during the 1977 Libyan-Egyptian border war and relapsed into provocations, reacted by staging an all-out counteroffensive that crushed the Libyan army, overrun Libya, and ousted Qaddafi's regime. Egypt annexed Libya.
Much the same way, the situation led to an unspoken alliance of convenience between Iraq and Israel with the support of Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The two states unleashed a joint attack against Syria that expanded into a combined intervention in Lebanon against the PLO, which took Syria's side, and pro-Syria/Iran militias. Christian and Druze militias switched to support Israel and Iraq. Israel's military superiority allowed the Israeli-Iraqi coalition to win a decisive success despite Iraq being involved in a two-front war. They crushed the Syrian army and its allies, overrunning Syria and Lebanon. This led to the ultimate collapse, disintegration, and partition of the Syrian and Lebanese states alongside sectarian lines.
Iraq annexed most of Syria, including the Sunni and Kurd northern and eastern areas, as well as the Aleppo and Damascus regions. The Alawite community on the Syrian coast established its independence with Soviet support, and became a haven for the remnants of Assad's regime. The Druze areas in southeastern Syria joined and established a land connection with the Druze community in southeastern Lebanon to form an independent state. It got Israel's support since it mostly worked as a buffer state for its annexation of the Golan Heights. Iraq also annexed the Shiite and Sunni areas in northern and eastern Lebanon. The Christians in western-central Lebanon established their own state with the support of Israel that used it as another buffer entity. The Israeli gave it control of the Shiite areas in southern Lebanon they had occupied. The PLO forces and the pro-Syria/Iran militias in Lebanon were crushed. The Palestinians got split between a pro-Iraqi faction that was kept on a tight leash by Saddam, and an anti-Iraqi faction that was expelled from Lebanon and fled to Algeria.
The Iranians also attempted to stir up Kurd and Shiite opposition to the Baathist regime within Iraq, but with limited results due to the strength of the Iraqi security apparatus and their deteriorating military situation and loss of prestige. By the mid-late 1980s, Iran came to face revolutionary collapse because of its disastrous military and economic situation. The land war was locked in an unfavourable strategic stalemate that secured control of Khuzestan and defence of its pre-war territory for Iraq, while Iranian human-wave offensives accomplished little but racking a severe blood bill. The economy was collapsing due to the loss of oil revenues. The Iraqi kept air superiority and waged an effective bombing offensive against Iranian cities and economic infrastructure. Iraq was able to keep its war machine well-supplied thanks to its oil revenues, financial backing from the Persian Gulf states, and weapons purchases from the Western countries and the Soviets (although relations with the USSR cooled after the fall of Libya and Syria). The Iranian war effort steadily deteriorated due to Iran's international isolation (worsened after the fall of Syria and Libya) and its economic inability to purchase arms (Iran's lack of money prevented anything like the Iran-Contra affair from happening). Iran's last-ditch gambit of attacking tankers in the Persian Gulf backfired once the Western powers started to escort the tankers and fight off Iranian attacks.
Popular malcontent fuelled resurgent opposition to the Islamist regime. The Second Iranian Revolution overthrew the mullah and killed Khomeini. Iran was forced to sign an armistice that conceded Khuzestan to Iraq. After a power struggle between the various revolutionary factions, a coalition between the social democratics, the Islamic socialists, and the resurgent monarchists defeated and purged the Islamists and the Communists. Iran remained plagued by Islamist terrorism for a few years, but eventually suppressed it. To rebuild its economy after the loss of most of its oil revenues, Iran turned to exploitation of its gas and mineral resources. Because of their hostility to Islamism, when the Taliban threatened to take over Afghanistan, the Iranians intervened to support the Northern Alliance and helped it take over the country.
Saddam spent the next few years after the end of the Iran-Iraq war consolidating his gains and enacting a ruthless purge of various opposers, including Shiite and Kurd militant groups, Syrian nationalists, Alawites, and pro-Iranian Khuzestani separatists. In the early 1990s, a crisis developed in the Far East because of American opposition to the North Korean nuclear program. Jimmy Carter's untimely death in an accident prevented him from acting as a last-moment mediator and defusing the crisis. It escalated to US bombing of the NK nuclear sites, NK all-out attack against South Korea, Japan, and US bases in the region, and the Second Korean War. The American-South Korean-Japanese coalition stopped the NK offensive and rolled it back all the way to the Yalu river, crushing all NK opposition and seizing its surviving leaders for war crimes trials. China was unhappy with the outcome but hesitant to intervene against superior American military power, especially after its recent domestic unrest and with Russia basically unable to provide help. The crisis was eventually settled with a US-Chinese agreement that limited deployment of foreign forces in Korea north of the 40th parallel. Korea was reunified under South Korean leadership and northern Korea gradually rebuilt and integrated into Western standards by a joint effort of America, Japan, and southern Korea.
Iraq got busy for a few years consolidating its gains, then rising tensions with Israel in the early 2000s exploded in an Iraq-Israel war. It played out much like a remake of the Kippur War w/o any Egyptian involvement. There was an initially successful Iraqi offensive that overrun most of the Druze and Christian areas, then a victorious Israeli counteroffensive that stopped the enemy and pushed it back, threatening Damascus. An armistice mediated by the USA, Europe, and Russia occurred and effectively restored the status quo ante. Both sides claimed victory. The Palestinians staged an uprising and a wave of terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians to support the Iraqi. After the Israeli crushed the unrest, they took it as a justification to annex the Jordan Valley, East Jerusalem, and the areas of the West Bank close to the 1949 border or Jerusalem where Jewish settlements clustered. Israel built a barrier to defend its new border and make it impassable to terrorist infiltration. It withdrew its forces behind the barrier and relinquished control of the rest of the West Bank to the Palestinians. It applied the same strategy to the Gaza Strip, withdrawing its forces from the area and building a barrier on its border.
Because the Gulf War and US military deployment in Saudi Arabia did not occur, Osama Bin Laden and several of his associates went to Afghanistn to support the Taliban. They got killed during the Iranian-Taliban conflict, and their efforts mostly sunk into obscurity. Because of their disappearance, the success of Baathist Iraq, the failure of Islamist Iran, and the Iraqi-Syrian and Egyptian-Libyan unions, secular Pan-Arabism continued to look like a more successful model than Islamism to many Muslims thanks despite its flaws, the dictatorial character of the regimes it sponsored, and its failure to challenge Israel. Consequently, Islamist terrorism became a rather less serious problem for the world than it might have been in different circumstances. International stability also increased due to the downfall of several regimes with an habit of sponsoring terrorism and indulging in rogue state behavior, including North Korea, Islamist Iran, Taliban Afghanistan, Assad's Syria, and Qaddafi's Libya. For the same reason, overall global human rights record significantly improved despite the brutality of Saddam's regime. Terrorism still occasionally flared up across the Muslim world, due to instability in various areas and Saudi Arabia's support of Sunni Islamist groups, and more rarely spilled over in the Western countries, but much less so than OTL.
In the early 1980s, Iraq's leader Saddam Hussein decided to exploit the post-revolutionary weakness of Islamist Iran, which was busy tearing itself apart with a violent power struggle between the dominant Islamists and their Communist, social-democratic, and Islamic socialist opponents, as well as a purge of the old monarchist elites that wrecked the Iranian army. Iraq invaded Iran with the aim of seizing ethnically-Arab and oil-rich Khuzestan. The initial Iraqi offensive was a decisive success that overrun Khuzestan thanks to the additional oil revenues of the Kuwait province allowing a greater military build-up and a sensible strategy that concentrated Iraqi mechanized land forces and air power. Iran's troubles were magnified by the poor strategic choices of Iran's supreme guide Khomeini. He distrusted, neglected, and purged the conventional army, which had been built up to a considerable degree under the Shah's regime, and instead relied on poorly armed and trained if full of zeal Islamist militias for a counterattack that failed disastrously.
The Iranian forces exhausted and bled themselves white with a series of human-wave offensives that accomplished very few gains for a considerable blood price, despite the regime's determination to win a decisive victory against Iraq and export its revolution at all costs. Out of growing frustration and desperation, the Iranians tried to spread instability across the Middle East to their advantage and open a second front by sponsoring pro-Iranian Islamist, Shiite, and Palestinian militias and terrorist groups to wage a series of attacks against Iraq, Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. They also encouraged their Arab allies, Syria and Libya, to support the same groups and apply military pressure on those states by border clashes. This significantly worsened the chaotic situation of the Lebanese Civil War and increased tensions and instability across the Middle East. However, it eventually backfired badly for the pro-Iranian front. The enraged Egyptians, noticing Libya ignored the previous lesson it had got during the 1977 Libyan-Egyptian border war and relapsed into provocations, reacted by staging an all-out counteroffensive that crushed the Libyan army, overrun Libya, and ousted Qaddafi's regime. Egypt annexed Libya.
Much the same way, the situation led to an unspoken alliance of convenience between Iraq and Israel with the support of Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The two states unleashed a joint attack against Syria that expanded into a combined intervention in Lebanon against the PLO, which took Syria's side, and pro-Syria/Iran militias. Christian and Druze militias switched to support Israel and Iraq. Israel's military superiority allowed the Israeli-Iraqi coalition to win a decisive success despite Iraq being involved in a two-front war. They crushed the Syrian army and its allies, overrunning Syria and Lebanon. This led to the ultimate collapse, disintegration, and partition of the Syrian and Lebanese states alongside sectarian lines.
Iraq annexed most of Syria, including the Sunni and Kurd northern and eastern areas, as well as the Aleppo and Damascus regions. The Alawite community on the Syrian coast established its independence with Soviet support, and became a haven for the remnants of Assad's regime. The Druze areas in southeastern Syria joined and established a land connection with the Druze community in southeastern Lebanon to form an independent state. It got Israel's support since it mostly worked as a buffer state for its annexation of the Golan Heights. Iraq also annexed the Shiite and Sunni areas in northern and eastern Lebanon. The Christians in western-central Lebanon established their own state with the support of Israel that used it as another buffer entity. The Israeli gave it control of the Shiite areas in southern Lebanon they had occupied. The PLO forces and the pro-Syria/Iran militias in Lebanon were crushed. The Palestinians got split between a pro-Iraqi faction that was kept on a tight leash by Saddam, and an anti-Iraqi faction that was expelled from Lebanon and fled to Algeria.
The Iranians also attempted to stir up Kurd and Shiite opposition to the Baathist regime within Iraq, but with limited results due to the strength of the Iraqi security apparatus and their deteriorating military situation and loss of prestige. By the mid-late 1980s, Iran came to face revolutionary collapse because of its disastrous military and economic situation. The land war was locked in an unfavourable strategic stalemate that secured control of Khuzestan and defence of its pre-war territory for Iraq, while Iranian human-wave offensives accomplished little but racking a severe blood bill. The economy was collapsing due to the loss of oil revenues. The Iraqi kept air superiority and waged an effective bombing offensive against Iranian cities and economic infrastructure. Iraq was able to keep its war machine well-supplied thanks to its oil revenues, financial backing from the Persian Gulf states, and weapons purchases from the Western countries and the Soviets (although relations with the USSR cooled after the fall of Libya and Syria). The Iranian war effort steadily deteriorated due to Iran's international isolation (worsened after the fall of Syria and Libya) and its economic inability to purchase arms (Iran's lack of money prevented anything like the Iran-Contra affair from happening). Iran's last-ditch gambit of attacking tankers in the Persian Gulf backfired once the Western powers started to escort the tankers and fight off Iranian attacks.
Popular malcontent fuelled resurgent opposition to the Islamist regime. The Second Iranian Revolution overthrew the mullah and killed Khomeini. Iran was forced to sign an armistice that conceded Khuzestan to Iraq. After a power struggle between the various revolutionary factions, a coalition between the social democratics, the Islamic socialists, and the resurgent monarchists defeated and purged the Islamists and the Communists. Iran remained plagued by Islamist terrorism for a few years, but eventually suppressed it. To rebuild its economy after the loss of most of its oil revenues, Iran turned to exploitation of its gas and mineral resources. Because of their hostility to Islamism, when the Taliban threatened to take over Afghanistan, the Iranians intervened to support the Northern Alliance and helped it take over the country.
Saddam spent the next few years after the end of the Iran-Iraq war consolidating his gains and enacting a ruthless purge of various opposers, including Shiite and Kurd militant groups, Syrian nationalists, Alawites, and pro-Iranian Khuzestani separatists. In the early 1990s, a crisis developed in the Far East because of American opposition to the North Korean nuclear program. Jimmy Carter's untimely death in an accident prevented him from acting as a last-moment mediator and defusing the crisis. It escalated to US bombing of the NK nuclear sites, NK all-out attack against South Korea, Japan, and US bases in the region, and the Second Korean War. The American-South Korean-Japanese coalition stopped the NK offensive and rolled it back all the way to the Yalu river, crushing all NK opposition and seizing its surviving leaders for war crimes trials. China was unhappy with the outcome but hesitant to intervene against superior American military power, especially after its recent domestic unrest and with Russia basically unable to provide help. The crisis was eventually settled with a US-Chinese agreement that limited deployment of foreign forces in Korea north of the 40th parallel. Korea was reunified under South Korean leadership and northern Korea gradually rebuilt and integrated into Western standards by a joint effort of America, Japan, and southern Korea.
Iraq got busy for a few years consolidating its gains, then rising tensions with Israel in the early 2000s exploded in an Iraq-Israel war. It played out much like a remake of the Kippur War w/o any Egyptian involvement. There was an initially successful Iraqi offensive that overrun most of the Druze and Christian areas, then a victorious Israeli counteroffensive that stopped the enemy and pushed it back, threatening Damascus. An armistice mediated by the USA, Europe, and Russia occurred and effectively restored the status quo ante. Both sides claimed victory. The Palestinians staged an uprising and a wave of terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians to support the Iraqi. After the Israeli crushed the unrest, they took it as a justification to annex the Jordan Valley, East Jerusalem, and the areas of the West Bank close to the 1949 border or Jerusalem where Jewish settlements clustered. Israel built a barrier to defend its new border and make it impassable to terrorist infiltration. It withdrew its forces behind the barrier and relinquished control of the rest of the West Bank to the Palestinians. It applied the same strategy to the Gaza Strip, withdrawing its forces from the area and building a barrier on its border.
Because the Gulf War and US military deployment in Saudi Arabia did not occur, Osama Bin Laden and several of his associates went to Afghanistn to support the Taliban. They got killed during the Iranian-Taliban conflict, and their efforts mostly sunk into obscurity. Because of their disappearance, the success of Baathist Iraq, the failure of Islamist Iran, and the Iraqi-Syrian and Egyptian-Libyan unions, secular Pan-Arabism continued to look like a more successful model than Islamism to many Muslims thanks despite its flaws, the dictatorial character of the regimes it sponsored, and its failure to challenge Israel. Consequently, Islamist terrorism became a rather less serious problem for the world than it might have been in different circumstances. International stability also increased due to the downfall of several regimes with an habit of sponsoring terrorism and indulging in rogue state behavior, including North Korea, Islamist Iran, Taliban Afghanistan, Assad's Syria, and Qaddafi's Libya. For the same reason, overall global human rights record significantly improved despite the brutality of Saddam's regime. Terrorism still occasionally flared up across the Muslim world, due to instability in various areas and Saudi Arabia's support of Sunni Islamist groups, and more rarely spilled over in the Western countries, but much less so than OTL.
