There’s a genre of fiction based on the premise that certain events in history happened differently; the Germans won the Second World War (Man In A High Castle), or the South won the Civil War (How Few Remain), or Czarist Russia settles North America (Ada:or Ardor).
It’s fun for people of all literary abilities.
It’s interesting to look at the chain of small events – nail:horseshoe:battle:kingdom – and have some sense that our history is made up of the accretion of countless small events which only assume their real import in hindsight. Usually it’s hard, even as a historian, to reach back and pick out the ‘turning point’ and try and understand what led up to it and then what flowed from it.
Every so often we get one, and it seems to me that the 2002 decision not to invade/bomb the Ansar al-Islam camp in northern Iraq was just such a point. I’ve assembled the links people were kind enough to contribute below the fold.
So now I’m playing with the idea of what the world would have been like if we had invaded/bombed the camp (two separate choices themselves), and I’ll work on a post outlining that as soon as I can.
Meanwhile, feel free to speculate yourselves. (A cheap way we bloggers have of getting their readers to do the work for them)
* the Wikipedia article on Ahmad Fadeel al-Nazal al-Khalayleh “al-Zarqawi”
* the Wikipedia article on Ansar al-Islam
* the March 2004 MSNBC article on the aborted US attacks
* Dan Darling’s The Rise of Ansar al-Islam: Inside the birth of the Kurdish terrorist organization
* the CSM supporting Ansar al-Islam as linked to Saddam
* the BBC denying it was linked to Saddam
Uh, most of your links are broken/formatted wrong.
On the other hand, I had the pleasure of viewing your 404 page, and I LOVE IT! Would you mind horribly if I used it for my own puny little webserver?
The ultimate alternate history has gotta be For Want of a Nail: If Burgoyne Had Won at Saratoga.
Bombing the camp – probably absolutely nothing. We bombed a lot of places in Iraq. Absent real-time ground reconnaissance eyeballing the personnel targeted, and painting them with laser designators, I just don’t see much coming of mere bombing.
As for a raid, I’d say we’d have the same result, absent such real-time reconnaissance, based on what happened at Son Tay – a bunch of enemy fatalities but none the ones we wanted. The only publicity from it would be ours and, if there was any, it would be Desert One all over again.
Ground recon identifying the bad guys we wanted and lighting them up with laser designators for air attack is required for the success of such operations.
These guys just weren’t worth that sort of effort and risk.
As much of a fan of the Great Man theory of history as I am, I gotta go with little to no change in history. Al-Zarqawi is only really important because he is a name and a face. Had he died in the camp, history would have produced a different Zarqawi. Perhaps less bloody, perhaps more. Quite likely less homicidal and hence more effective. Somebody else would have picked up the reigns.
For all the crap Bush takes for not eliminating OBL, Zawahiri, Mullah Omar, and Zarqawi (some of it deserved) I gotta say the administration in general is right not to obsess over individuals. We didnt defeat Japan by killing Yamamoto (as much as it helped).
Mark has a good point. It might be interesting – and I guess that’s what this is all about – if there were less of a personality cult surrounding Zarqawi. AQ in Iraq might not have been so eager to inflict Sharia on Anbar province or kill local tribe leaders, leading to the split that has left the Salafis in Anbar dead or running. They might be less likely to massacre Muslims, leaving A-Q with more popular support. An AQ in Iraq more in tune with Zawahiri’s way of thinking might have worked more closely with Moqtada al-Sadr.
This Ansar camp scenario is just another of the Democrats’ “magic bullet” fantasies – a way of avoiding their fund-raising base’s adversion to the messy reality of war, and to continue their denial that we fight aboard to avoid attack at home.
If you want to play the “great Man” game a far more interesting point to begin would be what would have happened if the US had insisted on finishing the job in Afghanistan, killing Osama, before contemplating an invasion of Iraq.
Regards, Cernig @ Newshog
I’m not so much interested in the impact of getting Zarqawi as I am in playing out the policy results, within the US, within Iraq, and internationally.
A.L.
“If you want to play the “great Man” game a far more interesting point to begin would be what would have happened if the US had insisted on finishing the job in Afghanistan, killing Osama, before contemplating an invasion of Iraq.”
Wandering aimlessly around Afghanistan where OBL _isnt_? Of course we _could_ talk about what the results of hundreds of thousands of US troops on Afghani soil would be- or if you want to be serious about it what an invasion of the Pakistani tribal regime would look like. Is that what you are proposing exactly?
A.L.,
The most likely policy result is nothing because (a) no one of importance would be a casualty and, (b) few outside the camp would know that anything had happened.