What if the stop the war protesters had got their way?

It’s the 10th anniversary of the Stop the War protest today, which led me to think about a point Christopher Hitchens once made: how the world would look if the ‘stop the war’ protests – in their various forms – had their way?

• Saddam Hussein would be lord and master of the annexed Kuwait, his terrorised citizens living in a country once described as a concentration camp above ground and a mass grave below it. The Kurds may not have held out against him, the Shi’ite south still brutally repressed.

• Slobodan Milosevic would be a European dictator, having made Bosnia part of a Greater Serbia and ethnically cleansed Kosovo.
• Afghanistan still would be run by the Taleban, with al-Qaeda as their guests. It would be the world headquarters of ever-more-ambitious terrorist attacks, far more deadly than the 7/7 hit on London.
• The hand-amputating RUF milita would have overrun Freetown in Sierra Leone, instead of the British army repelling them.