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Least favorite alt-history story?

Is it particularly bad? It just looks like a simultaneously dense yet facile infodump timeline to me.

To be honest, even from my slanted views, it's not that bad. Given the subject of its fantasies is just video games and entertainment in general, it's certainly less objectionable than a political fantasy TL, at least.
 
I'd like to see that, actually. It's pretty obvious that doing something instead of nothing at all for all of 2003 would have made the later situation massively better, but exactly what "something" would entail or how the Bush administration could be persuaded to do anything but flail around are interesting questions.

Listening France and Germany instead of insulting them (la vieille Europe, elle t'emmerdes, Donald Tr... pardon, Donald Rumsfeld) and NOT invading Iraq would have greatly helped the entire world, really - non-existence of ISIS included ten years down the road. Saddam was a massive SOB, but he was a threat to nobody bar his own people... and the WMD were never found.
Lesson number 1: never, ever add more chaos to the usual chaos of the Middle-East, Earth most insane place.
 
and the WMD were never found.
Not true actually, what wasn't around anymore were the facilities to make more but there's been a horrifying number if Gas inclusive IEDs in the Iraq Insurgency and the ISIS war as a result of the fact that a lot of shit just got burried out in the desert.
 
Ok. In this case, throwing Paul Bremer under a tank, a bus or a flock of camels would greatly help. Really. What a disaster he was as an "administrator".
Also purging the Iraqi army but not disbanding it - give it barely enough weapons not to be a tthreat but enough to keep law and order across the land. That was a giant mistake made for political reasons - understandable considering the army was loyal to Saddam, but this created a huge vacuum and chaos followed, Al Quaeda thrieved on it.
 
Listening France and Germany instead of insulting them (la vieille Europe, elle t'emmerdes, Donald Tr... pardon, Donald Rumsfeld) and NOT invading Iraq would have greatly helped the entire world, really - non-existence of ISIS included ten years down the road. Saddam was a massive SOB, but he was a threat to nobody bar his own people... and the WMD were never found.
Lesson number 1: never, ever add more chaos to the usual chaos of the Middle-East, Earth most insane place.

Eh, he'd gotten to the 'writing Korans in his own blood while only being restrained from bombing the Kurds to death by the constant UK+US overflights that basically meant the north was only somewhat under his control' stage.

Most likely outcome without the invasion is, in essence, 'OTL Syria but earlier.' murderous death cult and all considering the sort of people Saddam was sheltering in a 'yah booh you suck America' way.
 
Don't think predictions have proven to be a going concern over the last few years but given we had Iraq under essentially a permanent state of siege and was bombing it for relatively minor infractions of the sanctions regime, Saddam's days of being a regional threat or a would-be genocide were over.

In retrospect, the first Bush administration's decision not to support the rebels in 1991 when Iraq rose was pretty spectacularly terrible. Saddam could have been removed with a minimal amount of outside interference, the Iraqi middle-class wouldn't have died under sanctions, and Iraq wouldn't have been treated to the Faith campaign. And Bush's son wouldn't have ended up blundering around and destroying his presidency trying to finish the job ten years later. But Cold War Realists gonna Cold War Realist and they thought a brutal dictator was preferable to instability or any possibility of Iranian influence.

Well, we ended up with those anyway two decades later.
 
Don't think predictions have proven to be a going concern over the last few years but given we had Iraq under essentially a permanent state of siege and was bombing it for relatively minor infractions of the sanctions regime, Saddam's days of being a regional threat or a would-be genocide were over.

So you're saying it's not OTL Syria but earlier, but just at some point we end up with the perverse situation of having to nominally support Saddam's regime while still attacking him on a regular basis to prevent his troops from committing war crimes because the country is collapsing into Civil War and every opposition factor is anti-American because we've basically been bombing the country for 20 years without actually removing the horrible dictator.

Amazingly, this sounds like the one way things could have gotten worse than OTL- even 'OTL Syria but earlier' would probably work out about the same.
 
In retrospect, the first Bush administration's decision not to support the rebels in 1991 when Iraq rose was pretty spectacularly terrible.

Which is rather grim when "see how the first Bush knew not to invade" was a thing that I kept hearing going around in the 00s as if things were sunshine and roses as a result
 
C. T. Glatte's Strike Force Red is the worst recent alternate history novel I've read. It's not even a second-rate copy of WorldWar despite the similar premise. It's something that seems determined to waste as much of its potential as possible.

  • Take uninteresting supervillain aliens.
  • Take an uninteresting paint-by-numbers war drama.
  • Take uninteresting and often anachronistic military equipment.
 
Which is rather grim when "see how the first Bush knew not to invade" was a thing that I kept hearing going around in the 00s as if things were sunshine and roses as a result
On the other hand, a lot of the people I know who supported war in 2003 had opposed going to war at all in '91.
(which is an attitude that seems to have been growing again on the left with my generation, understandably if annoyingly)
EDIT: The latter, not the whole thing.
 
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On the other hand, a lot of the people I know who supported war in 2003 had opposed going to war at all in '91.
(which is an attitude that seems to have been growing again on the left with my generation, understandably if annoyingly)

How did they explain that one??
 
How did they explain that one??
A mixture of looking back and thinking "why were we calling it warmongering to stop a dictatorship conquering another country when we were students?" and the fact that it coming up in the intervening years was mostly due to Iraqi exiles annoyed that he hadn't been toppled then or other people mentioning the same, I think.
 
A mixture of looking back and thinking "why were we calling it warmongering to stop a dictatorship conquering another country when we were students?"

I have wondered that looking back too. Not like there was mutual aggression over some disputed land or anything, it was "nice stuff, I'll take it"
 
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