"what if scenario for the middle east" Topic

Here's one for you and it probably would have worked.

Papa Pigmeat Markham and Ho Chi Minh(chugging rice wine and chasing it with gin) broker a tri-nation conference between Russia(choose leader of your choice no later than US Reagan administration), China(Mao still alive and running the country), and the US( choice of commander in chief again no later than "well, here we go again").

Johnson, Nixon, Kissinger, Vo Nuyen Giap and MacNamara alive and advising.
Victor Krulak(Sr.) chairman joint chief of staff, supported by Colin Powell, and "Stormin Norman".

agreement made for joint coalition to quel any and all terrorist activity. Unrestricted airstrikes, ground forces and respective nations claiming any and all territory recovered.

Let the arclights begin!

Leads to either WWIII or the type of dystopian police state 1984 look like paradise. Mass murder is the course of the day and the US Army, a hundred years down the line, is remembered as "fondly" as the SS.

Also, terrorism increase a hundred fold and gets infinitely worse than anything you can imagine.

Terrement, this is horrible! :-) laughing and shaking my head. Richard, you took this jest scenario far too seriously.

my own thoughts for part 2. chairman Mao, tasked with creating an espionage and couterterrorism force selects two French generals, veterans of the battle of Algiers to head it. Gorbachev(sp) invoking the sainted name of Kruschev rants that the force be joined by an upcoming young KGB officer whose name the world will soon recognize.

Flights from former French Indochina become overbooked, expatriates, Viet Minh veterans, and residents with strange Corsican dialect assist one another boarding.

a humble retired col., controversial but well versed in plausible deniable experience and the cultures of the mideast as well as South America departs a briefing unobserved.

leaders of the three nations shake hands, break bread and take a "taste".

Now…a few folks left out, but the politics is over and the fun begins. Whose troops, whose equipment and "wherebouts" they come.

'dem black flag folks is in deep "stuff"

time to "git some"

Jerry Pournelle's Codominion was a US-USSR alignment, which has things end up being basically like what Richard Gaulding states above, though off-world things are better AND worse, depending upon where.

For game purposes, the original proposition would give the equivalent of Western Rome, Eastern Rome, and Persia against the "barbarians." With each giving covert aid to one band or other of barbarians to pester the other(s).

I like Terrement's game idea, though--and am designing something like that for an exercise at work (it's not focused on war, but rather factional politics).

Rob