That's a great point. There may well have been something else that would have been used to similar effect.

I don't think we should take for granted that this would have happened, though -- that skirts dangerously close to "whatever we do won't have any effect, anyways" territory. Maybe the replacement for the War on Drugs would have been substantially less harmful, or substantially easier to counter. Maybe it would have been more limited to the U.S. instead of becoming an imperialist project like the War on Drugs has become.