Post by eurofed on Dec 20, 2016 17:36:22 GMT
This scenario combines two basic ideas: the Curse of Tippecanoe (the regular death in office of Presidents of the United States elected or re-elected in years evenly divisible by twenty) continues up to and including the 21st century, and 9/11 occurs in a worse and more global way, causing greater distruction and loss of lives in North America and Europe. ITTL John Hinckley Jr. assassinates Ronald Reagan on March 30, 1981. Moreover, to account for the 'curse' seemingly getting worse by the turn of the millennium, Mehmet Ali Agca assassinates Pope John Paul II on May 13, 1981.
By the same pattern, in the early 2000s (not necessarily on 9/11/2001, to account for butterflies arising from previous events), Islamist terrorism is able to organize a major attack wave on the Western world that is substantially worse than OTL, effectively combining the equivalent of the OTL 9/11 attack (but more successful) and the sum of the attacks on European and American cities of the last decade. In America, hijacked airplanes destroy the Twin Towers (causing the usual loss of life) and deal major damage to the White House and the Capitol, killing the President (not necessarily GWB, to account for butterflies in the sequence of US Presidents caused by Reagan's assassination) and many members of the Congress. Other terrorist attacks by "lone wolves" or small groups occur in a few other North American cities. In Europe, a sequence of major terrorist attacks in several European cities (surely involving Britain, France, Belgium, Spain, Germany, and Italy, but quite possibly other nations as well) occurs in the same period and claims the lives of an equivalent number of European citizens as the attacks in North America. Broadly speaking, ITTL Islamist terrorists combine the methods and playbook of Al-Quaeda and ISIS from the onset, and their first major attack wave hits the Western world at large, causing a total loss of life that ranks in the high thousands in North America and Europe.
As it concerns how and why 2000s Islamic terrorism gets stronger ITTL, I suggest an event sequence in the 1980s-1990s that includes an early occurrence of the Arab Spring with a version of the Iran-Iraq War, Gulf War, and Operation El Dorado Canyon and/or Western military interventions in the resulting civil wars that leads to the collapse of the Assad, Saddam, and Qaddafi regimes. By the early 2000s, the crisis eventually leads to the Islamists taking over large swaths of the Middle East, especially in Syria, Iraq, and Libya (possibly Lebanon, Algeria, and Yemen as well). This occurs in addition to the Taliban seizing control of Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion. The terrorists exploit their expanded power base and multiple havens in Central Asia, the Mashriq, and North Africa to organize and wage a massive, simultaneous attack against North America and Europe.
The Vice President survives and becomes President. Enough members of the Congress survive to allow forming a quorum. The ranks of the Congress get replenished by emergency nominations of Senators by state governments and special elections. In the aftermath of the attacks, a constitutional amendment is ratified to provide for continuity of government measures, including a procedure for emergency replacement of the House of Representatives. The Presidential Succession Act is amended to place the members of the Cabinet below the VP in the presidential line of succession (giving priority to the most important Departments, such as State, Treasury, Defense, Justice, and newly-created Homeland Security) and extend it to state governors (giving priority to the most popolous states). The terrorism crisis acts as a major boost for European supranational cooperation and integration in the military, intelligence, police, and judicial fields. NATO activates Article 5 by the unanimous bidding of the US, Canadian, and European governments. The West plans and enacts a large-scale NATO armed intervention in the Middle East to destroy all known terrorist havens and occupy their territory, at the very least including Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Libya, and all other areas under the control of Islamist forces. Due to the scale and extension of the terrorist attacks, there is massive, widespread public opinion support in the West for military retaliation and police repression against the terrorists and their sympathizers, w/o noticeable differences between America and Europe. The Western countries enact a massive intelligence, police, and judicial crackdown of Islamist sympathizers in their territory and a vast campaign of extrajudicial targeted killings in the Muslim world. Islamist propaganda and apology of terrorism in public or on the Net get criminalized and persecuted, with a vast effort to suppress their diffusion similar to the one against child pornography.
The situation makes Iran powerless to intervene and exploit or play a meaningful role in the crisis, perhaps because the war with Iraq and/or a military confrontation with the West causes a collapse of the Khomeinist regime or at least seriously destabilizes it and cripples its economic and military resources. Alternatively (and possibly more likely) the situation makes the Western governments so suspicious of Islamic fundamentalism in any form to assume Iran as well is involved in support to the terrorists and any kind of Islamist regime is too dangerous to be allowed to exist, so they expand NATO military intervention to Iran as well. Quite possibly, enough ties between the Saudi regime and the Islamists come to the attention of Western intelligence to make the US and the EU decide a regime change in Saudi Arabia is necessary as well.
