| October 10 |  |
Editor says, what if the US Congress rejected the Iraqi War Resolution muses Eric Lipps? Please note that the opinions expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect the views of the author(s).
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In 2002, the U.S. Congress narrowly rejected a resolution which would have empowered President George W. Bush to use military force against the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq if "all other options failed" to get the Iraqi dictator to surrender what the President insisted were his "vast" stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and allow the dismantling of his "aggressive" effort to build nuclear weapons. Among the reasons for the rejection was the argument, made forcefully by Sen. Howard Dean (D-VT), that its language left the decision as to when force would be necessary up to Mr. Bush. "Which means," Dean predicted, "as soon as the ink is dry".
Congress rejects Iraqi War Resolution by Eric LippsPolitical conservatives were furious at what they called a "surrender to a genocidal dictator" any of them--notably syndicated columnist William Safire--accused of direct complicity in the Sept. 11, 2001 terror bombings which had destroyed the World Trade Center and left 2,925 Americans dead. They predicted that economic sanctions, even if tightened, would fail to prevent Saddam from acquiring nuclear bombs, which, they speculated, he would then use against Israel or hand to Al Qaeda for a "nuclear 9-11".
In the 2004 presidential election, Republicans attempted to use Democratic nominee John Kerry's vote against the resolution as a weapon against him, accusing him of being "soft on terrorists" and hostile to Israel. The charge proved insufficient to prevent him from eking out one of the narrowest victories in U.S. presidential history.
In 2007, Saddam Hussein was assassinated. The successor Iraqi government, hoping to bring about a relaxation of the sanctions regime, allowed international inspectors to canvass the country in search of the WMDs and WMD-development facilities Bush had charged were there. Only a handful of relics from Saddam Hussein's earlier efforts, dating back to before the post-1991 imposition of international sanctions, were found despite an exhaustive search. Conservatives, however, continued to claim that the weapons had existed, and said they had simply been successfully hidden, perhaps by being smuggled into such other countries as Syria. No evidence was found to support the earlier claim that Saddam Hussein had been involved in Sept. 11.
Entry posted by Todayinah Editor
© Eric Lipps,2007-.Story Tags
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~ Bush wouldn't have had near the venom thrown at him that he did in OTL if this had happened...even I knew that Saddam almost certainly had nothing to do with al-Qaeda.
~ This one very nearly happened. The senate Democrats made a tactical decision to give W his war so they could fight the 2002 elections on domestic issues [which they then blew for other reasons]. You essentially need a Democratic party line vote ,
~ Interesting,on many levels.
~ The Democrats' "tactical decision" was to give Bush the option to use force, not a specific authorization to do so at once if all remaining nonmilitary options failed--but as I expected at the time, he immediately declared the necessity of doing so.
Regarding Kerry, Bush's victory in 2004 was the narrowest for any wartime president since Woodrow Wilson in 1916. I don't really think that suggests that the country as a whole thought of Kerry as "too Harvard," let alone "too Euro" (despite the Bush team's vulgar attempt to play off Kerry's alleged Jewish ancestry to win the anti-Semitic vote). As for his being "too much of a weasel," I'm not even sure what that means, but concerns aboout Nixon's character didn't defeat him in the (also very close) 1968 election.
~ The chances of the resolution being voted down were slim, IIRC...Saddam had been jerking the UN and the White House around since the end of Desert Storm and nobody was in the mood to give him any more second chances.
~ The big point here is the U.S. failing to take this brinkmenship seriously, and the question of if it would be taken as Bush being cowed or Bush seeing through the bluster.
~ Definitely a change for the Middle Eastern political environment, perhaps taking this as a display of cowardice of the West, so a victory to extremists.
© Today in Alternate History, 2013-. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
