Sudan hasn't been weakened over a decade of sanctions and a previous war, and there's not many US allies who'd let the army ship in. (It'd really just be Egypt) Bush would also have just spent a year of planning and arguing and pressuring for the invasion of Iraq, which on the one hand I guess he's prepared for a invasion but OTOH this is a different country, with different logistical issues. He'd have to work at getting other countries to be onboard for this, after expending political capital over Iraq.
Some sort of military action, air strikes and the like, maybe, but a full-on invasion seems extremely unlikely even if Bush really wanted to do it.
Regardless, Ethiopia, Chad and Eritrea could also participate in the invasion. All those countries had problems with Sudan.
If Bush could organise a joint campaign between those three countries in 2003 he'd deserve a nobel peace price.
I forgot Uganda. It was in a proxy conflict with Sudan at the time.
Say Bush never even thinks of invading Iraq in this timeline.
That is ASB too. Iraq, with its giant pile of oil, location, past conflict, and army that, even after the clobbering and sanctions, remained one of the strongest in the region, would be a legitimate concern and subject of focus for any administration of the time, whatever their other politics, in a way that much weaker, much poorer, out-of-the-way Sudan simply wouldn't be.
This isn't going to happen under Bush because the Republican foreign policy and national security nexus had spent the nineties obsessing about 'finishing the job' on Iraq, to the point that members of the administration were already talking about invading Iraq only hours after the 9/11 attacks had begun. Iraq wasn't just 'somewhere we can invade for fun' it was somewhere with an enormous beltway and public opinion animus invested in it going back a decade. Sudan is not remotely equivalent to that.
The way to make this happen is to have Sudan harbouring bin-Laden at the time of the attacks, not as a follow-up invasion. You need to go back into the nineties and Sudanese internal issues to make that happen though. I don't know how that would play out but presumably the first rule would be don't get all the fucking neighbours involved and occupying territory they'll have to be paid off for later.
Thing is, as my alternatehistory.com thread showed, Bush did want to invade Sudan.
Thing is, Sudan had hosted al-Qaeda in the 90s.
Thing is, as my alternatehistory.com thread showed, Bush did want to invade Sudan.
Possibly if you remove Blair and/or Cheney you can stop the build up against Iraq long enough for Sudan to become the focus. I think @Ciclavex has said before that we underestimate the role Blair had in that and that without him Bush might not have taken that step.
If Bush could organise a joint campaign between those three countries in 2003 he'd deserve a nobel peace price.
Then write the story where it does happen. Write the story where, due to (even more) understaffing, the Americans try to rely on neighbors/locals for much of the ground forces like you're suggesting, with obviously less than ideal results. Do the nuts and bolts research, and even if you have to embellish/handwave some things (it's okay to do that for the sake of a story as long as the end result is well-written), show the deployments and likely results.
Don't just say "well, make this square peg fit into a round hole", because that's what you're trying to do. You can't just swap countries with very different backgrounds, capabilities, politics, and geography on a whim and expect it to work.
You didn't actually source that, you just stated it.
Not that it matters anyway even if we take Bush's desire to do that as a given, because Bush was a highly advisor-reliant president in foreign affairs, which is precisely what your 'Condi advised him against' it notion shows. They're not going to drop Iraq to do it and fighting three ground occupations in three different countries is too much madness even for that administration.
As I said the most direct way to get America into the Sudan is to have the government there keep hosting bin-Laden.
Thought: if this did happen because something something oranges something, is this an invasion and occupation of the whole of Sudan, or would it have to be an occupation of Darfur and bombarding parts of Sudan to secure it?
Yeah but there’s no scenario where Bush would choose an intervention into Sudan over Iraq.That's why my scenario is "Sudan instead of Iraq". I know that both couldn't be invaded at the same time.
