The Ghosts of 1991

"In 1991, after the US and its allies bombed Iraq for 41 days and nights with a total of 88,000 tons of bombs, equivalent to seven Hiroshima-size atomic bombs, after the Iraqi Republican Guard was defeated and expelled from Kuwait, Bush urged Iraqis to rise up and overthrow Saddam's regime. The Shia of Iraq responded with an intifadha, and within days Saddam's regime lost control of the Shia areas of Iraq. Until the Shia uprising, Saddam's helicopters were easily shot down by allied forces, if Iraqi pilots dared fly them at all, but for some reason during the Shia uprising, General Norman Schwarzkopf allowed Saddam's generals to fly their helicopters, which they used to strafe Shia rebels on the ground and crush the uprising. Bush Senior ordered US troops not to intervene. Had US troops intervened, had Schwarzkopf not allowed Saddam's generals to fly their helicopters, Saddam's regime would have been overthrown in 1991, and sanctions would have ended immediately, and Usama bin Laden would have one less reason to hate the US."
Iraqi Mojo

It's true, the fear of "big Shi'a" has haunted us for a long time. All our Arab allies are part of "Big Sunni" and I think that we got bad advise from them. I don't know if Iraq would have turned out much different had we not allowed saddam to put down the uprising or not. I guess there is an argument to be made. I think the one big difference would be that today we would have had a lot longer to form a relationship and might trust each other more. But I doubt it would have led to any kind of move towards democracy. More likely it would have progressed more along our long standing policy of stability at all cost. Meaning that if we would have found a reasonable strongman in the Shi'a power structure that was willing to work with us to safeguard out interest, like in SA Egypt, Jordan, we would have worked with them with no mention of democracy at all. We would have been more than happy to support them no mater how they arrived at the all important stability.

Believe it or not that might have made things worst today not better.