balioc:

kontextmaschine:

So if we’re all doing our retrospective takes on the Iraq War, mine was… it wasn’t that big a deal? In scale, direction, and costs borne and imposed it was basically well within norms for what the country might get distracted with over a two-decade period.

Already within my lifetime the specter of the Vietnam War, once much more significant in national affairs, looms not nearly as large as I remember it doing in the ‘80s (indeed, the easy victories of the “Desert Shield/Storm” Iraq excursion of the early '90s were specifically hailed for dispelling this “Vietnam Syndrome”), as colorful but not particularly important chapter of 20th Century American history.

While the action did not serve to renew America’s post-Cold War unipolar “hyperpower” moment, I honestly don’t think it accelerated its end any, which looks to be more a product of the development of China and reassertion of Russia than any “Clash of Civilizations”.

…the Iraq War – the (cultivated) reaction to it, and then the backlash to that reaction, and then the fallout from the actual war being such a huge debacle – ended the decade-and-a-half End of History.

Even if it had no lasting geopolitical impact whatsoever (which seems like a stretch), its impact on the American psyche was quite enough to be a History-Defining Big Deal all by itself.

Which seems like it would be your jam.

I mean that was the way it happened, but if not for that then…?

Like, if it didn’t have military commitments at the time the US might’ve engaged harder in the Crimea crisis, and the Syrian civil war would have been obviated and the big refugee flow to the EU preempted. That’s the two things I can see going differently.

memecucker:

kushblazer666:

theworldofwars:

Propaganda made by the allies of WW1 of what could happen to the United States if the axis won.

turkish florida

New Kobe

skagus:

me: At the same time, it seemed there was enough… slack… in the system that these things didn’t really matter. I mean, since the 1930s, Amelia Earhart, we’ve known women *could* be pilots, but still they *didn’t*, still they *don’t*, she didn’t change anything. Even if she survived her circumnavigation I don’t see how…

also me: She circles the globe, lands, big celebrity. American interventionists looking for “their own” Charles Lindbergh seize on her, she campaigns for military buildup.

also me: When war comes she’s put in charge of WASP. It’s mostly ceremonial but due to her starpower it’s higher profile in this universe, not in a way that makes a war-winning difference but it’s woven closer into the war narrative.

also me: Like, she inspires more women flight instructors, and there’s a famous escort carrier with an all-woman flight crew (that never sees action) and there’s a yay-Soviets movie made about the Night Witches.

also me: Then she’s given an also-ceremonial representative role in the demobilization but she unexpectedly speaks out against the re-marginalization of women in war industries, not enough to stop it but enough that the military-corporate-labor nexus that rules the postwar is more female and feminist than it would be otherwise.

also me: She helps make the Equal Rights Amendment a thing decades earlier (it definitely fails… that time) and endorses Adlai Stevenson

me: …

also me: THAT’S how

also me: most of her allies get purged in the Second Red Scare as comsymps or lesbians, though