If Bush hadn't pushed US soldiers into Iraq in 2003 it makes you wonder what the middle east picture would look like in 2019?

sandy, rocky, killy

Would ISIS have existed?

Honestly bout the only thing IRAQ was good for was keeping IRAN in check.

The most influential terror orgs would have different names

Think that about sums it up

Had we left Saddam in power, and IF he made peace with the Iranians.... there would be big problems.

pretty much all I got.

The Iranians would have never trusted Saddam. 10 years of war will do that.

Fewer dead and injured servicemen. Less debt. Would still be a &$@% hole country.  Would still be a $&@% hole region.

We might still be running about with M16A2s.

Iraq was a dumb war for fake reasons.

His dad, also president, was director of the CIA. One would think he could get good Intel or advice.

Yellow cake, lol.

Iran would be held in check by their biblical arch enemy Iraq.

The knock-on deaths from US infrastructure damage outpaced Saddam's kills on his own population, so barring a new war, a few hundred thousand Iraqi civilians would still be piloting ships or slaughtering goats. Plus another 1-2 hundred thousand alive that died from direct collateral damage.

Er, isn't Iraq an Iranian sock puppet now, instead of a deadly threat tying down their military and gobbling up their budget for a decade?  Didn't Obama, who made the worst possible nuclear development deal with Iran, get elected largely because of dissatisfaction with the Iraq war?

The US invasion of Iraq seems to have worked out pretty well for them.

Hitler and Bigfoot would be in control

You would have a regional power actively supporting any operations it could to disrupt US interests, while having continued its weapons development programs.

This regime would be led by Saddam or one of his sons, after a power play by Uday vs Qusay, who were brutal murderers even compared to Saddam.

There would be an emboldened extermination campaign against the Kurds in the North, with unlivable conditions for march Arabs in the South.

Russia and other former Soviet bloc nations would be looking to capitalize off of the embargoes on Iraq by selling them more advanced weapons systems, to include Theater Ballistic Missile components or systems.

Obama and Hillary would have used the Clinton Global Initiative as a bribe money-laundering operation to allow back-door US defense industry technology to be sold to Saddam as well, just as Clinton did with Loral Space Systems ballistic missile components in the 1990s.

Israel, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkey, UAE, Iran, and Quatar would all be on-edge, and we would continue Southern Watch/No-Fly Zones out of SA.

This would involve increased oil prices based on instability in the region, which would enable Russia to sustain itself better with $80/barrel or higher trend lines.

Saddam would continue to back his oil trades in Euros, propping up the Eurozone with continued growth a little longer before the recession, exposing the Eurozone to an even larger collapse once the shockwaves of bundled junk bond investments and Greece's manipulation of their finances to the ECB took their course.

The 2007-2008 recession might then have been postponed until an elasticity of 2-5 years, at which point the collapse could have fallen into depression levels for more nations than just Spain, while wiping out a larger swath of the US housing market for upside-down mortgages.

Terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Abu Sayaf, Al Qaeda in Iraq, and cells in the US and Europe would receive more direct support from Saddam to launch continued attacks against mass casualty soft targets.

Now imagine the Arab Spring under Obama's instigation with Saddam still in power, launching SCUDs at Israel and SA with Obama talking about how we need to negotiate, or warning Saddam to stop crossing his "red line".

The world would have probably been a better place.

Maybe even no refugee crisis flooding Europe.

I still can't believe we were suckered into using bad Israeli intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq.  Thanks Mossad...

The escalation of de-stability in the region would result in eventual US intervention, with far more loss of life not only for US military personnel, but civilians in the region in other nations.

Look at my scenario above.

Saddam Hussein would have gotten his own Reality TV show.  He would have been involved in all kinds of hillarious hijinks .  Afterward in which he would call out his catch phrase, "You've been Saddamized".

This.  Iraq and Iran were good counterbalances to one another.  Now, iran is focused on Israel.

If we had stomped that shit in 1979 and made it clear that radical Islam was not to be tolerated we probably could have prevented everything including the first Gulf War. The Soviets were going to lose in AFG anyway without our help.

The players might have had different names, but I figure the end result would be about the same.

There would still be massive amounts of refugges going to Europe. Germany already had millions of turks flooding their country for decades. Many of the refugees are also coming from Africa

Let $&@% holes be $&@% holes, and we will continue to be the envy of the world.

According to the Paulbots:

Europe would have much smaller demographics of  Islamic immigrants in it.

And they'd still be busy killing each other instead of jihading as "New Europeans" and as naturalized Americans.

Fuck Arab Spring and everything it has brought with it.

Saudi Arabia would have nuked a US City and then we would have glassed Iraq and Iran. Of course they didn't have to do that because the Bush family are their puppets and had no problem invading Iraq.

A lot better than it does now.

The only thing that keeps Islamic counties under control is a secular dictator. 20 years ago we had them in Libya, Egypt, Syria and Iraq. Now look at them.

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/25546334/ns/world_news-mideast_n_africa/t/secret-us-mission-hauls-uranium-iraq/#.VVLtU-lFAqQ

No Iraq War = no Obama

SAme amount of people would be dead only itd be secretly by Saddams and Assads hands in hidden places.

Make no doubt about it.  We have kicked radical Islam in the nuts after they sucker pounced us. If we hadn’t crushed them it would be much worse today.

Iraq was unstable before the invasion. The Shi'a Arab revolt had never been fully pacified, and the Kurds at that point pretty much had their own autonomous country in the North that the Iraqi military couldn't deal with. Saddam was dealing with constant threat of coup, and that included issues he had with his own sons (he had one of his sons tortured for pissing him off). The last time the fictional idea that Saddam held the country in check with an iron fist ended in 1979, since then its basically been a powder keg waiting to explode. What happened after 2003 invasion was not a fluke, it wasn't prevented by Saddam, it was caused by Saddam.

Besides, there has been a growing Islamic religious revival since the 1970s, as the notion of a secular Pan-Arab governments has died, and many Wahhabi mosques were being built in Iraq to cater to the Sunni population, which though the minority was the sect that Saddam belonged to, his base, who he needed the support of to remain in power. Saddam catered to the growing fundamentalism by playing the guise of the true believer, starting his Faith Campaign in the mid 1990s, where many of the secular laws that made Iraq famous were rescinded, and the Saddam University in Baghdad had a large religious school that promoted Salafi ideology, the graduates of which include the current leader of ISIS.

The information age would still have caused an Arab Spring, and Iraq most surely would have suffered a major rebellion by both Kurds and Shi'a Arabs, probably many Sunni too. So they'd have torn themselves apart as well. Maybe Saddam or his son(s) could have kept in power, maybe not.

Europe was already trending with importation of middle eastern, African, and Asian immigrants well before Iraq 2003 Invasion.

The main causal factor in European immigration policy is infanticide in Europe, not US foreign policy.

They've undercut their future by killing it in the womb, pure and simple.

Because Europe is governed by beta males and females in their parliaments, they rarely make good decisions about anything, immigration policy being one of the biggest self-destructive examples. Defense, social policy, eduction, healthcare, environmental management, energy, transportation, and banking are also major blunders for them anytime European Parliaments convene.

It would have been cheaper just to pay him to be good.

I don't believe that.

Bush 43 wasn't the kind of President that governed or even ran as a populist, therefore there was no way he was going to hand-off a National wave of culture to his VP in 2008, assuming he would have won reelection in 2004.

The media had their sights on him from the get-go over the Al Gore crying and the EC, so they were determined to browbeat Bush throughout his administration regardless.

Obama's grooming was already in the works before the Bush WH, and 2008 was his run, propped up by every establishment power in DC and the presstitutes.

He still would have to face Hillary in 2008.

Without the Iraq War, Hillary may have been the nominee in 2008.

Put that in your pipe and ponder it for a while.

Oil would have been traded in currency other than the US dollar, economies would have collapsed and global upheaval.

Or something like that.

Hussain in charge.
He hates Iran..
No ISIS.

Israel bombs because he pays terrorist to blow themselves up.

We bomb because we can.

No boots on the ground...

The free market works. Oh well.

It would be the center of peace love and happiness.  They would all love the Jews. See how bad Bush s screwed things up.

Probably not much different then it used to be

Less ISIS no doubt

Like the 500T that was shipped to Canada, around 2008?
Regardless of the age of it, they had it

The 500lb gorilla in the room is that the US would have had to intervene sooner or later.

Most of the Iraq War arguments are made under the assumption that Saddam would somehow turn to peace, that Iraq would be stable, and that Iraq's issues were contained to Iraq alone without any spill-over to her neighbors, most of whom are significant oil producers in the region, which the manufacturing and emerging economies rely on heavily for exports.

The world is a small place when it comes to trade, and we are all connected in ways most Americans are clueless about because of geographic isolation by two major oceans-something that is not a reality for the rest of the world.

You still have them in Egypt and Syria. Egypt did take a short break, though.

Some people would be doing some things.

As if.

Sunni Shia sectarian rivalry is always gonna fuck the region up but it would’ve been isolated to small outbreaks....what Arab Spring did is destroy any secular control and unleash Salafi Sunni militantism.

One of Saddam's sadist fuck kids would be in charge of Iraq and we would probably be bombing their shit anyway

Fewer Islamic immigrants In the US, less debt and unfunded liabilities. 4,424 more soldiers who were probably strong conservatives, less messed up children from growing up without their fathers