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Alternate History General Discussion

Not exporting a quarter of its rice to England would probably have helped even without the green revolution.

Like the main problem with arguing that the British Empire was a guard against famines is the history of British rule in India was one wherein a policy of discouraging food stores and the encouragement of cash crops led to a decrease in food security.

Just reversing a lot of british policies would have done the job.
I'm not sure if the issue was that Orwell was unaware that the Empire's policies had exacerbated the famines (which seems mad now, but, again, there was sometimes this attitude that Bengal starving every few decades was some unavoidable natural thing like an earthquake*) or just that he felt any change there would be outweighed by what he probably assumed would be an overnight catastrophic loss of central government authority.

* Maybe the attitudes of some people in the US towards mass shootings could be a crude analogy here.
 
Not exporting a quarter of its rice to England would probably have helped even without the green revolution.

Like the main problem with arguing that the British Empire was a guard against famines is the history of British rule in India was one wherein a policy of discouraging food stores and the encouragement of cash crops led to a decrease in food security.

Just reversing a lot of british policies would have done the job.

British policies were fundamentally extractive - and like I explicitly said, I disagree with Orwell - but I do still think it’s useful to keep in mind that predictions being off may have had something to do with India’s wheat production nearly doubling in five years.
 
I'm not sure if the issue was that Orwell was unaware that the Empire's policies had exacerbated the famines (which seems mad now, but, again, there was sometimes this attitude that Bengal starving every few decades was some unavoidable natural thing like an earthquake*) or just that he felt any change there would be outweighed by what he probably assumed would be an overnight catastrophic loss of central government authority.

I suspect the latter.

Given the amount of chat among Indian Nationalists and officials a like about the way the Empire's policies had exacerbated the famines (It's a major part of Naoroji's 'Poverty and Un-British Rule in India') there's no way someone like Orwell wouldn't have heard the charge even if he didn't agree with it.
 
Frank Harvey's Explaining the Iraq War makes a convincing (to me) case that the war was inevitable after 9/11, regardless of who was in office.
I find that argument to be pretty gross. Its been said millions of times in the past 18 years but, end of the day it is a whitewash trying to remove culpability from the Bush Administration.
 
I find that argument to be pretty gross. Its been said millions of times in the past 18 years but, end of the day it is a whitewash trying to remove culpability from the Bush Administration.

Gore was a hawk, though, and his running mate was Lieberman, who strongly supported the war. I am neutral on this topic, though.
 
Gore was a hawk, though, and his running mate was Lieberman, who strongly supported the war. I am neutral on this topic, though.

Also, note the 2000 Democratic platform said "In Iraq, we are committed to working with our international partners to keep Saddam Hussein boxed in, and we will work to see him out of power. Bill Clinton and Al Gore have stood up to Saddam Hussein time and time again. As President, Al Gore will not hesitate to use America's military might against Iraq when and where it is necessary."
 
Also, note the 2000 Democratic platform said "In Iraq, we are committed to working with our international partners to keep Saddam Hussein boxed in, and we will work to see him out of power. Bill Clinton and Al Gore have stood up to Saddam Hussein time and time again. As President, Al Gore will not hesitate to use America's military might against Iraq when and where it is necessary."
Firing Cruise Missiles and launching some F-117 strikes isn't the same thing as invading. Much less invading when we're already involved in another war.
 
View attachment 46353

David Frum did not need two hands to write this.

It's the bit where he sniggers at the idea of "hey, there are wounded and traumatised people, I bet Gore would do government stuff to help them" that gets me. "Ha ha this leader would be a sissy", that I'm used to, and if Gore was showing up at Arlington's memorial in a dufflejacket then this would just be a crasser US version of Sandbrook, but that bit gets me.
 
I don't think Marxist history is apologetica or its whitewashing the crimes of the bush administration to un greatman the discussion. You can argue that war mongering was a bi partizan part of american politics and the system and culture was such that would be pressure for war regardless of administration without excusing a President who was fully on board that agenda.

I think there'd be huge pressure on Gore to attack Hussein, whether or not he actually would. There were voices on all sides in the american corridors of power who really wanted a second gulf war. It wasn't just Bush, though the timing and manner of it was him.

Even in OTL, when Gore had lost the election he felt the need to word his opposition to the invasion in a relatively hawkish manner (iirc arguing about un approval and evidence while also saying saddam was a danger to peace and so an invasion shouldnt be taken off the table entirely).
 
I must say, seeing the other Arab dictators most similar to Saddam also have their countries explode into bloody civil wars without the need for an American invasion has drastically lowered how much impact I think the Iraq War had.

Some argue that the Arab Spring wouldn't have happened without the Iraq War. I disagree with that, though. I think the Arab World was ripe for revolutions. I also think such an argument removes agency from the Arabs.
 
Feel like 'Iraq would have gone exactly the same' will inevitably appeal to people who, Marxist or not, will desire to argue for one reason or another that (bourgeois) politicians are all the same, but it's an extremely tenuous argument.

Don't feel saying a different government would have had different policies is great man of history stuff. Al Gore went on record as opposing Iraq, but so did the guy who would have been his national security advisor, and other people who would have been part of his foreign policy team privately or publicly opposed it.

I don't find the riposte to this of 'Yes, but in government they would have taken the diametric opposite view, because...' at all convincing. These people had been in government until less than two years before, so they knew the intelligence picture as it stood.
 
I buy the idea that the Afghanistan War was almost certain to happen once the planes hit the towers. Set aside whether they were going to happen if Gore was in the Oval Office. The country was reeling, politicians as much as anyone else, and the pressure for dramatic military action beyond a few cruise missile strikes was intense. And, of course, the Taliban refused to hand over Osama and I don't think that would change regardless of who was President.

Iraq? I simply don't believe that without the neoconservative cadre of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz et al that any administration would have as much internal pressure to put troops in Mesopotamia. It was not a war driven from Langley or the Pentagon.
 
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I should note that even though I support the "probably inevitable no matter what" side of the Iraq War debate for actual history, I would, if anything, encourage an AH story where the divergence causes it to be butterflied away. Obviously, if it's something like "And Gore brings about world peace and creates an eco-utopia in less than four years", I'd gladly criticize it for being wish fulfillment. But alternate history should mean changed history.
 
I should note that even though I support the "probably inevitable no matter what" side of the Iraq War debate for actual history, I would, if anything, encourage an AH story where the divergence causes it to be butterflied away. Obviously, if it's something like "And Gore brings about world peace and creates an eco-utopia in less than four years", I'd gladly criticize it for being wish fulfillment. But alternate history should mean changed history.
I mean, there's a substantial difference between the idea that sooner or late the United States was going to go to war with a regime it utterly loathed and knew from experience it could smash into paste and the idea that the 2003 Iraq War was inevitably going to happen.
 
Yes and I've actually read more since. Thanks. It wouldn't be a popular war but neither was Korea.

EDIT: and of course that was an entirely different context.

I do think MacArthur's statement is very telling, though, along with the fact that even the most pro-Chiang Republicans never supported such.
Also, how is the context different?
 
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