So, Iraq invades Kuwait and we did nothing

[chelsea0011]

Would we just be buying oil from Iraq?

With Bush I President, one couldn't be expected to let all his oil friends be faced with uncertainty, but another decade, another President and maybe no invasion to fight back Iraq out of Kuwait. What then? How is the world different? Would Iraq have moved on Saudi Arabia?

[autorank]

1. Iraq and Iran become regional powers and we triangulate and get

great prices on oil. Or maybe we topple Saddam internally and get even better prices on oil.

[punpirate]

2. As for your latter question...

... it's doubtful that would have happened. The roots of Iraq's disagreements with Kuwait were quite longstanding and go back to Kuwait's independence in 1961. At that time (well before the ascension of Hussein to power in Iraq), Iraq maintained that Great Britain's partitioning of Kuwait decades before had stripped Iraq of one of its natural provinces.

Add into that Iraq's disagreements about Kuwait's interference with Iraqi access to the Shatt al-Arab waterway, and Kuwait's refusal to forgive Iraq's Iran-Iraq war debts and you have the essence of Hussein's complaints with Kuwait. No similar complaints existed toward Saudi Arabia, and because of defense agreements going back to the `30s, when Aramco was created, any attempt by Iraq to invade Saudi Arabia would have triggered a response from the US, even if it had done nothing about the invasion of Kuwait.

[Terran1212]

3. Hussein was very close to being toppled even before the war

The war and sanctions destroyed any resistance that existed. Saddam hussein probably would've been toppled or kuwait would simply have been reabsorbed to its proper owner.