Meanwhile, the mission we were sent to launch on January 17, 1991, was to liberate occupied Kuwait, and that is what we did. At the end of February 1991, we had driven the Iraqi Army out of Kuwait City, and shown the vaunted Iraqi Republican Guard to be inept and impotent. Our military had done what was asked of us and had done it in a manner of which we were proud. We had been in the desert for three-quarters of a year—the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines of the Coalition were tired of the killing and were eager to go home. Unfortunately our desires may have caused the next generation of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines to spend a much longer period of time in the vast deserts of the Middle East. But then in 1991, who foresaw September 11, 2001?

THE NEW THREATS

The attacks on New York’s twin towers and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., changed the United States, her people, and their leaders.

Before the events of 2001 we had weathered a host of attacks carried out by Al-Qaeda and the agents of Saddam Hussein. These events involved a number of actors and may or may not have been related, yet all were aimed at the United States. The bombings by Al-Qaeda agents of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania caused large numbers of civilian casualties. An Al-Qaeda attack in Yemen nearly sank a U.S. Navy ship, the Cole, and caused the deaths of several of our service men and women. Earlier, agents of Saddam had attempted to assassinate former President George Bush in Kuwait. Later, Iraq expelled the United Nations Weapons of Mass Destruction inspectors and then was caught building surface-to-surface missiles that failed to comply with the agreements that ended Gulf War I.

While these events drew condemnation from many nations, America was seen as big, strong, and resilient, and so reactions out in the world were less vocal than if a smaller, more helpless country had been exposed to actions and attacks such as these. And even in the United States, though our citizens were seriously concerned about these events, they were not outraged enough to be moved toward significant action.

That does not mean that we did nothing. We did retaliate with cruise missiles fired against Al-Qaeda facilities in Afghanistan. We punished Saddam’s misdeeds with air attacks (which seriously damaged his W.M.D. capabilities). We brought our concerns to the UN and other international forums (though such diplomatic efforts were often stifled by other nations, for reasons of their own). Yet none of those actions could be called significant, much less decisive.