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Updated Sunday 15 May, 2011 12:18 PM |
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This Day in Alternate History Blog
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Playing
The Back Nine of the Jimmy Carter Desert Classic ©Final
Sword Productions LLC 2004 Few
modern historical events have been subject to more ideologically motivated
revisionism than the US relationship with Sadaam at the onset of his war with
Iran. In fact while the US was not
especially upset at Sadaam attacking our enemies in Tehran the genius in Baghdad
did this one on his own. The Shah
had forced a favorable border treaty in the 70’s as the price for abandoning
his support of a major Iraqi Kurdish insurrection.
Sadaam wanted the border revised. He
also saw Shiia theocracy as a danger to his hold on Iraq, which is the true
Shiia Holy Land and majority Shiia. There
was also the oil fields in the Iranian southwest that while Shiia were Arab and
so in theory annexable by Iraq. All
the borders of the modern Middle East are essentially arbitrary and make little
historic or ethnographic sense. So
Sadaam’s adventurism led him to roll the bones, disastrously so as it happens.
Sadaam’s
real backers were the Saudis with the rest of the Gulf Arab monarchs, the
Soviets and the French following behind in roughly that order.
However Iran and Iraq had been sparring almost from the fall of the Shah.
Khomeni attempted to subvert Iraq. Both
sides ran black ops and fought border battles.
Sadaam backed the Iranian Marxist forces [Moscow’s fair haired boys so
Moscow picked up much of the cost]. The
occupation of the US embassy in Tehran was a parallel situation.
It made the improbability of Iran and the US making up into an
impossibility but beyond that it ran on its own track.
However Carter’s inept and disastrous rescue attempt [the sarcastically
named Jimmy Carter Desert Classic] gave the window for a truly bizarre turn of
events. In actuality Carter went
with an over controlled and poorly thought out plan that failed at the first
refueling point. The US special
operations force was extracted on 4/28/80 with embarrassing losses amid general
national humiliation. Iraq had
nothing to do with the operation although other Arab nations did provide basing
or overflight rights. Now
presume the US force gets stuck in Iran instead. You can use any of the obvious excuses – a few more of the
overworked and undermaintained copters malfunction so the troops are more
scattered. Or have the accident
with the copter and the refueling C-130 take out more of the air lift.
Whatever. You have major US
casualties and a US force trapped in central Iran with the only carrier still in
the Arabian Sea at extreme range. Now
this would not have produced an immediate disaster. The locals Iranian forces were neither particularly numerous
or particularly good. Even the
limited US air support from the carrier could have kept them alive and supplied,
but incapable of doing much more. Enter
Sadaam. His intelligence in Iran
was pretty good. His own services
were active there plus he was providing refuge to both royalist and Marxist
opponents of the theocrats. Have
him do a snap decision to start the party on his own.
Iraq could probably have dropped a weak battalion to support our
surrounded troops while starting a series of border battles. The
obvious response on the Iranian side would have been to start executing hostages
and threatening to attack shipping in the Gulf.
So we have US hostages with hoods over their heads being beheaded and
hung on live TV feeds and small boat attacks on random Gulf tanker traffic.
Let us have a few tankers go boom and a few more forced into Iranian
ports. Have the Iranians militias
grab a few oil platforms and random islands.
Jimmy [the champion of human rights] Carter would have found himself
actually at war with Iran and allied with Iraq.
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