I remember watching the news that night with my parents, I was in 10th grade and I remember thinking I had never really seen war before, not live like this. I remember clearly that I believed I was looking at history.
Marshall has similar thoughts as he notes the near complete lack of coverage of this today.
The Gulf War, the subsequent imposition of no-fly-zones over Iraq and the refusal to allow Iraq back into the good graces of the international system did not make the Iraq War inevitable. But it created a strong and ineluctable gravitational force pushing both countries in that direction. It was the stationing of American troops in Saudi Arabia (initially to prevent an Iraqi move into Saudi Arabia) that created the formative offense around which al Qaeda was built.
History has no starting point of course. As Lawrence Wright explains in The Looming Tower, the seeds of al Qaeda reach back into the early 20th century, with key stopovers in Sadat's Egypt and the Afghanistan War. One might similarly say that the key event was the fall of the Shah's regime in Iran, which increased the centrality of the US-Saudi security alliance as the linchpin of US policy in the Persian Gulf. Or for that matter we could go coup against Mosaddegh, which in many ways set the stage for what ended up being the Islamic Revolution.
But the Gulf War still looks like one of those pivotal events, where numerous strands of history meet together in a single knot. Or to pick another metaphor, one detonation point from which numerous shards and projectiles are still ripping forward into history. By that measure, the lack of commemoration seems less odd than telling.
So much of my life, well more than half, has seen US troops stationed in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Afghanistan fighting terrorism. The Gulf War indeed was a pivotal time in US history.
After all, we're still fighting it today.
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