What If?

When I was a child I used to read Marvel Comics' "What if?" series which always took some dramatic event in a superhero storyline and asked, "What if that had happened differently?"
Then the tale would spin out showing the difference between the alternate storyline and the real one. Questions like, "What if Peter Parker never got bit by that radioactive spider?," would be answered in 20 quick pages of cool artwork and cheesy dialogue.

Very often people especially pundits and politicians like to do this with real events.

I bet in the next few days we will hear such questions posed by both members of the left and the right. Questions like:

"What if one of the London Bombers is a released Guantanamo prisoner?"

"What if England had never joined us in the Iraq War?"

But do these question ever really serve any good except as attempts to sway public opinion or idle mental masturbation for the intelligentsia?

(Of course as a blogger, I'm a pot calling the kettle black, or what if I'm the kettle Hmmm... I bet the Watcher knows...)