{"id":1036,"date":"2006-03-16T22:47:51","date_gmt":"2006-03-16T22:47:51","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:09:39","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:09:39","slug":"alternate_histo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=1036","title":{"rendered":"Alternate Histories"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s a genre of fiction<\/a> 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).<\/p>\n

It\u2019s fun for people of all literary abilities.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s interesting to look at the chain of small events – nail:horseshoe:battle:kingdom \u2013 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\u2019s hard, even as a historian, to reach back and pick out the \u2018turning point\u2019 and try and understand what led up to it and then what flowed from it.<\/p>\n

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\u2019ve assembled the links people were kind enough to contribute below the fold.<\/p>\n

So now I\u2019m 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\u2019ll work on a post outlining that as soon as I can.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, feel free to speculate yourselves. (A cheap way we bloggers have of getting their readers to do the work for them)
\n* the Wikipedia article<\/a> on Ahmad Fadeel al-Nazal al-Khalayleh “al-Zarqawi”
\n* the Wikipedia article<\/a> on Ansar al-Islam
\n* the March 2004 MSNBC article<\/a> on the aborted US attacks
\n* Dan Darling\u2019s The Rise of Ansar al-Islam: Inside the birth of the Kurdish terrorist organization<\/a>
\n* the CSM supporting<\/a> Ansar al-Islam as linked to Saddam
\n* the BBC denying<\/a> it was linked to Saddam<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Armed Liberal wonders “what if…”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1036"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1036\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}