What if? Iraq, 1990

Ten years ago the Iraq Surge was in full swing and about to win it's final victory. We'll get into that at the end of the month.

People debate whether or not liberating Iraq was worth it. 

That question is almost uninteresting at this point.

When we woke up on the morning of 2 August, 1990 and saw the news, we understood right away that war was inevitable.

Here's a far more interesting what if.

What if The United States simply said to Saddam, 'You know what, keep Kuwait. We don't care.'

The Israelis would have been pissed, the Saudis and Gulf States terrified. But in Saddam's Iraq, complete with Province 19 as he called it, we would have had a semi-friendly regional power acting as a bull-work against Shi radicalism in Iran. In fact there probably would have been a second Iran-Iraq war, this time with a far more decisive outcome. Recall that Saddam had already re-armed after the 1988 ceasefire.

Heh, this is probably how the World War 1990 universe will end up.

Hegemon 1990

(via mirror.co.uk)