Obviously, there will be mass panics, wonderment at a supernatural, inexplicable event, especially in a region with religious significance to all Abrahamic faiths, and impact on international economic and cultural and defense relations, pilgrimage and tourism .....immediately.
Yet at the same time, without a cascade of *continuing* supernatural events and no reversal of situation, and no credible explanations forthcoming, only the palpable, archaeologically and historically accurate looking Holy Land of 1090 AD, 900 years back, occupying the space where Israel and the occupied territories used to be, daily life, trade, politics, regular worship services, education, will be going on for most people most of the time, even as thousands or tens of thousands of employees of various governments and private volunteer theorists continue to attempt to investigate or speculate upon the inexplicable.
On August 1st, 1990, based on historical ambition, desire for oil wealth to help rebuild his country and defray costs incurred from the lengthy and expensive 8 years' war with Iran, and provoked by Kuwaiti slant-drilling, or at least angered by Kuwaiti and Gulf States' strictness on debt repayment terms, Saddam Hussein has the Iraqi Army invade and occupy Kuwait.
After a brief 24- or 48-hour period in which there is some discussion, through Iraqi-controlled channels, of a new Kuwaiti government, while escaped members of the Kuwaiti royal family vigorously protest the invasion and occupation of their country from abroad, Baghdad ceases with any political fronts and half-measures and declares Kuwait to "Iraq's 19th province."
Saudi Arabia, caught completely off-guard that Saddam's voiced dissatisfaction with the Kuwaitis over debt repayment, drilling, and border disputes over the previous weeks actually escalated into an Iraqi invasion, occupation, and annexation of Kuwait, with Iraqi armor forces now placed in quantity along the Kuwaiti-Saudi border is in a state of panic and holds emergency meetings with American and British officials, , including Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, who are flummoxed as they are.
As a result, President George H.W. Bush orders rapid deployment of American aircraft and elements of the 82nd Airborne to deploy to eastern Saudi Arabia, between the Kuwaiti-Saudi Arabian border and the complex of oilfields concentrated in that province in an Operation soon named Desert Shield, while warning the Iraqis sternly to stay out of Saudi Arabia and that their aggression in Kuwait "will not stand".
The Bush Administration reinforces the initial deployment while sending James Baker and Brent Scowcroft around the globe to build a diplomatic Coalition for the protection of Saudi Arabia and its neighbors, to sanction Iraq, condemn and seek the reversal of the occupation of Kuwait, inclusive of many Arab League members, both sides of the former Iron Curtain and the Cold War alliances, NATO and the Warsaw Pact (including both the Soviet Union under Gorbachev, and several of its recently ex-Communist members, and unifying Germany), and gather public and Congressional support for these goals.
The occupation of Kuwait, creating the prospect of war in the Persian Gulf and damage to oil production facilities, and sanctions on Iraq, taking both Iraqi and Kuwaiti oil off the global market cause a global spike in fuel prices, even as the Saudis and UAE and other GCC members of OPEC work to increase production to partially make up for what sanctions removes from the market. The fuel price spike interacts with soft business cycle conditions and secular trends in American and western corporate restructuring to bring about an American and global recession.
In the five to six months after the early August invasion of Kuwait, there is a fairly broad consensus, nearly universal, that Saddam's Iraq is a bad actor, committing wrong by invading Kuwait. He has little sympathy except in some random countries like Yemen, already ill-disposed to Saudi Arabia, or among some Lebanese factional leaders opposed to Syrian dictator Hafez Asad, who see Saddam as a champion based on the "enemy of my enemy is my friend" principle. There is drama for a period of time as Saddam Hussein detains westerners who were in Iraq as de facto hostages to use as leverage to restrain western powers from launching a military attack, but Hussein will eventually unilaterally release the western civilians.
In the fall of 1990 and as it approaches winter however, the Bush Administration begins openly advocating for putting a time-constrained ultimatum on Saddam Hussein to evacuate Kuwait, and submit to international inspection of potential WMD programs, with subsequent offensive military operations, UN approved, from the air and probably the ground, if he refuses to comply. The prospective operation is called Desert Storm.
This is much more controversial politically in the US, west, and globally than the defensive deployment in Saudi Arabia and the paper and verbal objection to the Kuwait occupation.
In a more frank moment, President Bush admits the American and western economic stake in Gulf oil, and not having vital fuel for the global economy under control of a hostile regime. The anti-war movement in the USA and the west takes the admission as a validation of what it already suspected, that the US government and Allied governments, are trying to lead the US into a war for oil, lending strength to their "no blood for oil" slogan, and leading to multiple proposals from the center-left to left side of the political spectrum in democracies and among third nations to get a relaxation or rollback or partial rollback of the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait without use of force.
The absence of Israel and its occupied territories, and the substitution of medieval Seljuk Palestine, in the midst of this 1990 situation, introduces one of the wildest possible wild cards to international, and domestic politics of the use of force decision.
On the one hand, Saddam Hussein is unable to use the anti-Israel "whataboutist" card to deflect pressure upon himself to evacuate Kuwait, like he did in OTL, or to rally crowds of exiled Palestinians and the PLO in exile in his favor. In OTL, Saddam used whataboutism in a couple ways, by saying as a rhetorical question, "why the world, the west and the US in particular so suddenly and urgently concerned about making Kuwait "free" when they've lived with occupied West Bank and Gaza for 23 years?" At times, since Syria sided with the US-led coalition and Kuwaitis and Saudis, he also said, "Why is making "Kuwait" free of Iraq's occupation so urgent when right now Syria completing its occupation of Lebanon and crushing the last resistance to it. Of course he can still say that, because Lebanon is around, but that line packed much less "punch" in the Arab world and Third World than the lines on Israel-Palestine. He also hinted to Arab audiences that somehow his internecine conflict with Kuwaiti Arabs over their oil, was a move on behalf of the Arab collective, *for* the Palestinian cause they all supported/claimed to support, by creating a "double hostage exchange" situation here. He pretty much in OTL started saying things like, "I will withdraw from Kuwait, or let the Emir back in (or think about it), like the west wants, when the USA/west *makes* the Israelis get out of occupied West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem". The Palestinian diaspora's representatives and public in Jordan and the occupied territories rallied to him because of this rhetoric and the "enemy of my enemy" principle. And of course it did not apply to all individuals, but the correlation was visible enough to anger GCC member countries, leading them to collectively punish their Palestinian diaspora communities by expelling them for pro-Saddam communal speech, sentiment, actions they saw as ungrateful.
In this ATL, that stuff is mostly not happening. Many Palestinians, and other types of Arabs may be getting a thrill at Saddam Hussein thumbing his nose at and defying the long-resented United States. But since March, Palestinian diaspora communities, in Lebanon refugee camps above all, and Syrian ones, and other locations throughout the Middle East like Tunis and PLO headquarters, have been fixated on what is to them, the "miracle" of Israeli disappearance, and their own personal infiltration and migration efforts into medieval Palestine [whatever obstacles and rivals they have to deal with, some of them will be succeeding by fall summer 1990 in establishing some sustained communities over swathes of land] and their diplomats and internationally engaged spokespeople preoccupied with getting resources and recognition to survive in and upgrade the territory they've acquired control of.
The international Palestinian diaspora and PLO will not, like OTL, be in a position of succumbing to membership pressure to voice pro-Iraqi chants to "stick it to Uncle Sam", unless the USA has started doing something very strange between March and August 1990, that I do not expect President George H.W. Bush to have allowed himself to do, or get involved with.
{Spoiler - a dumb unrealistic move. Open only if you dare..}That wildcard move would be if he, out of domestic political calculation, chose to deploy the US military to medieval Palestine in mass numbers, to function as not only local police and peacekeepers, but park rangers and game wardens, strictly enforcing against non-US authorized immigration [so Palestinian] at a time when US inability to control illegal immigration and drug traffic through its southern borders was a highly salient and bipartisan cause of complaint, heavily featured in the news media. If the USA *did* indeed set itself up in spring 1990 as a park ranger/game warden of the Holy Land, to keep uptime Palestinians and Arab Muslims out, and the Holy Land a reservation for Jews [from where? Mainly the declining Soviet Union, possibly Romania and Bulgaria, There is also the west, but those Jews would mostly want to be tourists, not settlers. But there would always be a few.], then of course US-Palestinian, and US-Arab, relations would already be at a fever-pitch of hostility. I just think that the George H. W. Bush Administration and the people in it, in 1990, were far too realistic and realpolitik, to commit to such a silly religio-ideological Israel reclamation project, even if some fringe Congress people started drafting up some bills and some pundits voiced the idea.
So much for the Middle East side of things. However, the absence of Israel in the Middle East may remove some fuel, or elements of support from the pro-Desert Storm political coalition in the United States, especially among members of the opposition Democratic Party. It might remove enough fuel or elements of support from the Coalition that President Bush cannot get a Congressional majority endorsement of support for offensive military action to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, or disarm him.
Seriously.
Why not?
Because, although it was only one of multiple, overlapping factors, the idea that Saddam Hussein increasing his regional power, wealth, armament, cofnidence in using his armament, and types of armament would be dangerous for Israel and "bad for the Jews" was *a* motive for many American politicians and voting and letter-writing constituents of politicians in supporting the rollback of Saddam Hussein. Was it enough to be decisive? We cannot say with certainty, but it is not an unreasonable argument.
On the one hand President Bush could be reasonably confident in having pretty unified support of the Republican minority in Congress. Peacenik arguments like "no blood for oil" would have minimal persuasive value for most Republican politicians and constituents. On the other hand, some Republicans can revert to isolationism, because although Saddam Hussein was a dictator, he was not a *Communist* dictator. On the other hand, he was a Third World, "not-quite-white" dictator who said anti-American things at times, so the conservative bias may be to be punitive towards him or take up his challenge to American honor. At the same time, oil state Senators and Congresspeople would say, "hey, if it's about oil, we gotcha covered, and we could do it even better if we made sure to ignore anything environmentalists said". I doubt it would emerge to true political saliency, because American conservative evangelicalism is associated with the southern Bible Belt which emphasizes national loyalty and pro-military attitudes and deference to conservative authority figures, but......if people like Pat Robertson *wanted* to make a stink about it, they *could* have made an argument that Saudi Arabia was unworthy ally to support from a Christian Evangelical point of view because of its internal crackdowns on Christian religious practice, and banning of crosses and non-Muslim worship services for foreign guest workers, including even US service people. Again, they wouldn't do it though because there's hardly a fight they don't want to back the military and commander-in-chief in.
On the Democratic side, however, is where you have a real chance of great shrinkage of support for offensive action against Saddam Hussein, and greater endorsement of restraint or diplomatic alternatives to fighting. Pragmatic Democrats know oil is important to the global economy, but they do not want to openly champion a war to secure global supply and price stability and explain that in townhalls with constituents, staff and supporters who could well be environmentalists hoping for alternative energy solutions or whose formative political experiences were opposing the Vietnam War. This difference may not apply as much to southern Democrats, Blue Dogs/Dixiecrats at the time, who had more white evangelical constiuents then than they do now. However, although Tennessee Senator Al Gore voted to support use of force in the Gulf War in 1990, it was not universal among southern Democrats. Georgia Senator Sam Nunn, Democrat, known as "strong on defense" was not satisfied with Bush Administration arguments and opposed authorizing force for Desert Storm. Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas, moderate-conservative enough to challenge Arkansas teachers unions, voiced opposition to authorizing use of force for Desert storm.
Without a connection to defense of Israel, either as "the only safe place for the Jews" or "the only democracy in the Middle East" the rationale for northeastern, upper midwestern, and west coast Democrats, people like Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, possibly Nevada Senators Harry Reid & Richard Bryan, - maybe, but less likely, Florida Senator Bob Graham [not sure how Israel-hawkish vs. just being southern hawkish he was]. and multiple Representatives like California's Tom Lantos, Mel Levine & Howard Berman; New York's Gary Ackerman & Stephen Solarz,; New Jersey's Bob Torricelli); Maryland's Charles McKillen, Wisconsin's Les Aspin). And there might be a few more defections from northeastern, west coast or upper midwest urban or inner suburban moderate Republicans from the "yes" vote in either House or Senate.
On the one hand, Saddam Hussein was mustached dictator who committed cross-border aggression, who seized hostages [and then conveniently for coalition powers, released them before it was time for a go/no-go order], so he was eminently caricuraturable as a villain. He was a villain, a bad dude, it was not simply a caricature. On the other hand, his victim, Kuwait, was not a democracy, but a not-really constitutional, religiously chauvinistic and sexist monarchy. And the Saudis we were protecting and helping by rolling back the Iraqis were even more absolute monarchist, sexist and misogynist, and religiously bigoted. And they'd deliberately inflicted economic pain on Americans in the not-so-distant living memory of the 1970s. So not such sympathetic allies to fight and die for. The other "Arab Coalition" members were hardly more sympathetic. Morocco, another not really constitutional monarchy, not really endangered, at a great distance. Syria, under its own brutal dictator, Hafiz Asad, who was crushing resistance to his control of Lebanon. Mubarak's Egypt, ruling with a military-backed dictatorship that lived off a huge annual "peace-bribe" from the USA. The US had diplomatic support of other powers, and British and French units really sent into the fight, unable to match our scale, but very substantial for their scale, and contingents from other countries. And then the Germans and Japanese, important beneficiaries of Gulf oil, Germany and Japan, willing to underwrite efforts with big checks, but unwilling and (politically) unable to put their own military of self-defense personnel on the line in the desert.
Beyond the oil concerns, given Iraq's prior use of chemical weapons against the Kurds and in the Iran-Iraq war, and the Israeli bombing of the Osirak nuclear reactor in in 1983, Iraq's attempt to purchase gigantic cannons, Iraq's pursuit of advanced weapons and WMD, chemical and nuclear, were important sources of additional American and international concern.
The Bush Administration did use those to rally support in OTL 1990-91 and would also do so here. But here again, I think the absence of Israel and Israeli civilians, a country and population that millions more Americans felt a visceral concern for the safety and vulnerability of than other people of the region, no matter how unfair it may be, could make this concern a bit less salient to American public and political opinion.
So, what happens in this ATL?
Does George H. W, Bush get to prosecute Desert Storm in 1991, or is he stymied? Does he get to do it, just a little later, or not at all?
How would an alternate containment of Iraq work out over the 1990s?
If there is a Desert Storm, would regime change be pursued against Saddam unlike OTL? If not, how would US Middle East policy, premised on dual containment of Iraq and Iran, the Gulf, differ without all the emphasis on an the peace process between Israel and its neighbors, and the frustrations of that?
Who wins the Presidency in 1992?
Is there any reason related to the PoD we should expect the USSR to disintegrate along with Communist Party power in the August-December 1991 timeframe?
What the heck is the most likely set of events to happen in the 1090/1990 Holy Land, between 1091/1991 and 1100-2000 AD?
