Alternative History and Blue Moons

Sipping deeply into a Blue Moon draft with a slice of orange tilted over the lip at lunch today, I found myself wondering over alternative histories. The restaurant overlooks a small harbor and, as we ate, small boats and wet bikes cruised in and out, the crews waving to the shore as a band tested the drums at a yacht club across the inlet, tuning up for a ball tonight under the stars.

What if the Twin Towers had not collapsed from the plane hits of 9/11? What if only a few hundred people had been killed? A hundred per plane and the occupants of a few floors in each building.

The doctrine of proportionate response might have taken precedence over the urge for a massive military response. Moreover, the political momentum established by Afghanistan may not have been enough to sustain the invasion of Iraq. The Clinton administration's use of cruise missiles in Afghanistan and Africa following terrorist attacks under his watch was certainly one model that was available, but was deemed insufficient after 9/11. The use of the Northern Alliance as a proxy force supported by US air power and special forces was the chosen path forward, relieving us from the logistical difficulties of access to the land-locked Afghanistan for a full-scale invasion.

Still, a lighter-yet force presence might have been the primary option given 300 deaths at 9/11, and given continued intransigence by the Taliban leadership, but I think the outcome would still have been about the same. But given a lower international and domestic political will for the Iraq invasion, might UBL have been captured in Afghanistan? Perhaps, but only if he made a mistake of hubris or was betrayed. The option of hiding in Pakistan was too easy given the largely un-patrolable border and supportive political sentiment.

By not invading Iraq, however, we would have maintained the moral sympathy of the European nations, and would have increasingly been well-regarded in the Muslim world if sufficient NATO assets could have stabilized and rebuilt (well, built at any rate, considering the state of Afghanistan's infrastructure and institutions) the country.

Meanwhile, back in Baghdad, Saddam would have kept up his tyrannical but impotent realm. The strongest argument I have heard about the impact of the US invasion of Iraq, however, is that it was the decisive factor in causing Saudi Arabia to begin its own hard fight internally against support for terrorists, perhaps because they realized that failure to do so transformed them into a vulnerable terrorist-supporting regime. The same might be said for Libya, though it is no more plausible to argue that sufficient pressure could not have been applied to them based on the Afghanistan outcome than it is to believe that breaking the back of the Hussein regime in a week was the turning point in their attitude towards terrorist support.

The Blue Moon was light perfection, though, with just that hint of sweet orange to counteract the spices in my chicken salad.