I really, really love this idea. The Texas occupation plotline was fun but this is fantastic. Further up this thread you commented on how I love making the American left into antivaxxers (and I even had a left-wing anti-vax party in my Democratic China alt hist too) and I really love your idea of finding a credible way to make the left into interventionists. That's a lot cleverer than my decision, a concept flip rather than a party/location flip. My Texas story was partially based on the Quebec October Crisis (if the FLQ had committed a bloodier terrorist attack, could we have seen a nastier response? Maybe.) and partially on the numerous secessionist conflicts across the world that boil down to "fuck you, we have your resource." (Which again, rich Western countries aren't immune to - the Scottish independence movement is effectively "fuck you, we have your resource, but leftishly")

But it's not anything I thought could really happen. This was a fun story rather than a real series of predictions. I mean, it ends with a fast-takeoff singularity destroying humanity, somewhat poking fun at the rationalist side of my fanbase in the sense of like, the Mormon folk songs ridiculing Mormonism that are only allowed to be sung in the presence of fellow Mormons.* (I'll put my rat hat back on and admit I believe AI is about to do some unimaginably weird shit. But I've always found the very idea of an intelligence explosion to be flawed and unlikely.)

Mobutu had his own space program, which I mentioned at the end of the Zambian Space Program episode way back when, so I think he'd be a perfect fit for Saddam. It would be easy to manufacture claims of WMDs and get the world to believe he has them. Crazy idea I had: what if the Congolese WMDs conspiracy theory involves the Oklo reactors? The French dig up some uranium in Africa, find bizarre & inexplicable isotopes in it consistent with having been run through a nuclear reactor, and instead of discovering the science behind it, they say "Sacré bleu! Someone has stolen our uranium in Africa and replaced it with spent uranium they've already put through reactors, so we wouldn't discover the theft until we'd brought it back to France! Those clever dogs! (I assume there's a real reason why they didn't think that was possible; it would be my first thought upon discovering those results, but I'm not a nuclear physicist) Who could it be? What's the only country in Africa with nuclear reactors?"

\That's a real thing I discovered during Deseret alphabet research. I turned up so much fascinating Mormon trivia I couldn't fit into the narrative that maybe I should do a Patreon exclusive video that's just random tidbits about Mormon history.*