Israel and Leba-nin

And if you think about it, had the truck bomber parked his truck bomb in a different place, we're not talking 9/11, we're talking whatever date in 1993 when the original WTC attack took place -- and with a hell of a lot more deaths, since both towers would have collapsed with everyone in them.

 

Good post, Jay.

I've thought a lot about that concerning Bobby Kennedy's death.

He lives, and he's probably the Democratic nominee in '68. Given that Humphrey made it so close (popular vote, anyway) against Nixon, RFK might have won.

No Nixon, no Watergate, no Gerald Ford, probably no Jimmy Carter. How would Vietnam have ended differently?

Reagan could have gotten elected in 1976 instead of '80. (And I'd love to do some reading on the 1976 GOP gathering in Kansas City, the last real national party convention. If anyone has any recommendations, let me know.)

 

If Al Gore -- who went to Vietnam when he didn't have to, so much for the "finding his nuts" school of political analysis -- is president, we do not invade Iraq. Period. Because none of the people who so deeply wanted to, for their own reasons that have nothing to do with our survival, would have been in the government to do it.
9/11? Probably, but some of the hijackers might have been rolled up.
If 9/11, then Afghanistan, for sure.
But Iraq? NFW.

 

But the fallacy of the chain of dominoes is we don't know what other factors would have developed or evolved because someone zigged instead of zagged (think chaos theory). Sure, Al Gore might have stopped 9-11 dead in its tracks. Or al Qadia might have blown up a Super Bowl. So many things would be different based on even a relatively small change to the timeline that trying to track its theoretical impact is pointless.

 

More distance I get, the more I think nobody "stops" 9/11, at least not completely. However since we know now that this administration abandoned the Clinton Adminstration's "obsession" with AQ and Osama almost from day one, largely because they didn;t want any part of any program from the previous administration, I have to think one of the alarm bells would have caught at least a piece of the plot, even if it was a lucku grab like the Millennium Bombing arrest.

 

Maybe, maybe not.
You can look back at several key points and determine if they were truly tipping points or just milestone events.
What we don't know now is the impact of 9/11 and the resulting war on terror. A tipping point or milestone?
At this point, we know of three major planned attacks on American soil between '93 and 2001. WTC 1, OKC in '95 and 9/11. Will history judge this time as a period of anarchy, which leads to something much bigger or as a bump in the road to something else.
Nobody knows, at least not yet.
But this is what we history dorks discuss when no one else is around.
Things like what kind of President Hamilton would have been or how different America would have looked if Franklin had become a state.
The current affairs stuff is trickier, because it is still being played out.
If we didn't didn't know about the daily briefing, I'd probably say things would have stayed the same, but knowing what we know now. I'd have to think that Gore wouldn't have ignored that.
I personally think that much, much more is out there, but it hasn't floated to the surface.
Going back to Germany, so you have someone else. So maybe this time Rommel's in charge, takes over most of central Europe leaving France and England alone. This version of Germany instead allies itself with western Europe/America in a war against a communist Russia.
Would Europe/America have tolerated a Nazi Germany that had been with them, instead of against them?
Would America have gotten involved in Europe if we were already in a war with Japan?

 

Good post, Jay, but you missed the Millenium bombing plot in 2000.
And the OKC one is the really unavoidable one, I think. A one (or two) man band with a homemade bomb.

 

There's actually a very good work of fiction on that. The title evades me at the moment.

EDIT: Just located it. The Whenabouts Of Burr by Michael Kurland. Some unofficial government agents stumble across a network of machines for traveling across timelines (with some linear drift). The first world they come to is one where it's 1897, and Hamilton is the fourth president. They stay in a hotel where a sign boasts, "Ministry of Public Security -- Our Eyes Are Everywhere, Guarding Your Rights."

Sound familiar?

 

This coming from a dipshit who once insisted on this board that no one died at Abu Ghraib.

 

While the fallout from the WTC attacks are still playing out, I'd argue that the OKC thing actually helped head off more trouble in the long run. Before that, there was a growing militia movement of pissed off white guys in this country. The OKC bombing was intended by McVeigh to be the first shot in a revolution. Instead, it really shocked a lot of those militia people. Instead of rallying around it, they were horrified and the movement collapsed. If it happened a year or two later, maybe the militia movement is a little more hardcore and it does start something.

I don't think Germany would have left France alone. Those countries had a lot of bad blood between them, including a lot from the reparations and concessions Germany had to make after World War I. France more or less rubbed Germany's noses in it, thus spawning the nationalist movement that ultimately led to Hitler's rise. With as many people that followed Hitler, I'd reason that one of them would have been capable of capturing that energy and hatred and turn it into what Germany became. And France would have been high on the list of targets when it came time to release that energy. And, of course, once France is attacked England was drawn into the war and away we go.

 

That's just brilliant.

Maybe if your boys wouldn't have sucked in 2000 and 2004 they would have gotten elected, and you wouldn't have to cling to your dumbshit hypotheticals.

You've had years to get over Gore's loss. Time to stop whining and bleeding out your anus and get with the program, Streisand. No one cares about "what if" Gore got elected. Never have; never will.

 

Uh, Gore was elected in 2000, One Trick Pony. You may remember that the former Vice President won the popular vote.