I don't know if flippant way to say it, but at least you're making an effort to keep this event in the forefront.  I had to admit that it has in many ways faded, a skirmish that had minimal consequences for the US and its allies during the actual fighting.  Just thinking back to what memory comes forth strongest, it would be scenes of the Kurds we left behind to fend for themselves in the aftermath.  While it definitely was not a primary drive in the lead up to invasion the second time around, I think there was a thread of guilt in the US consciousness about that, and the invasion led by W. was an opportunity to right that particular wrong.

I do remember in the lead up to the H.W.'s war, there was a general sense that Saddam was out to control as much of the oil in the region that he could.  So there was an economic panic if nothing else.  And then there was the feeling that Israel was going to act if noone else did, sparking a total meltdown in the Middle East.  Again, another economic panic if nothing else.  Some in the US may have given Saddam the green light, but once one oil country invading another oil country in the ME became a reality, the fear of chaos in the region took over.  Which is why the invansion by W. seemed so out of whack, because it seemed that the top priority for the US (and some of its allies) has been to maintain stability at all costs.  Even if it means supporting dictators who torture and brutalize their people.   

One of the challenges we all face is trying to understand how things really were when we were living through them after we know how it all turned out, from the ease by which the Iraq Army was demolished to Osama's campaign based on the US military coming into Saudi Arabia.  But one thing I think one can say that up til the first Gulf War, the ME had been for most Americans simply Israel vs. the Arab states, the Iranian Hostage Crisis, and oil.  The Gulf War, and the events that led up to it and followed it, changed the ME in American consciousness much as the Vietnam War changed how Americans saw Asia.

He then unleashed the U.S. military on Iraq and proved quite quickly and decisively that the gulf of strength between the premier and the fourth largest military in the world was astonishingly wide.  Then Bush called a stop to it all.  There would be no mission creep.  He would not risk losing global or domestic support by engaging in a long, costly and risky occupation.

That, to me, was Bush41's really big mistake.  Maybe not that he stopped but that he never explained why satisfactorily.   He went to great pains to sell the public on the need to go to war then just stopped and left Saddam in power.  There were and still are a lot people wondering,  'WTF was he thinking?!?'  Apparently, even Bush43.  If he had taken as much pain selling the withdrawal as he did the invasion, maybe we would not be there now.  Just saying.

What I remember is going to choir practice and finding out there was a war on when the director started talking about us fighting, "So Damn Insane." Afterwards we all went to someone's house, one of the altos, and watched the precision bombing on TV.

At work, one of my cycling buddies, an Iraqi whose father lived in Kuwait, told us that Kuwait had provoked attack trying to destabilize Iraqi currency. He even went on local TV to debate the issue. It was a bad night because a Scud had just hit Israel. People started calling our office with death threats, so we started locking the doors during the day. Later I read that Iraq had also accused the Kuwaitis with drilling for oil under and across their borders.

At the time we were told, and believed, that Patriots were actually intercepting most of the Scuds. That seems to have been greatly overstated.

The war seemed like a mismatch from the get-go, and then Hussein had to go and spill all that oil into the Persian Gulf.

I'm adding this comment with some trepidation--a) it's long, but anybody who remembers me from TPM knows how I am, and b) Dan K is probably going to knock the pins right out from under my opinion that GW1 had a lot to do with wilful diplomatic ignorance on the part of GB1. (Whenever I find myself not in agreement with Dan Kervik, it usually turns out I'm wrong.) But hey, I've already written the thing, and the overall point isn't how it got started but what I and my fellow globalistas failed to take into account, so here goes.

Remember that book, A Wrinkle in Time, how the bad planet existed behind a shadow? In retrospect, to me the beginning of the Gulf war was sort of the moment when the shadow that had hovered over the Soviet Union for so many years started to gather around the USA instead.

 It looked great for all of us for awhile there, as the old Soviet Union  walked out into the sunlight. We had Gorbachev and Perestroika,  the “victory of Capitalism,” or at least the collapse of the Soviet experiment with Communism. We experienced the really, really remarkable fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. We had clear skies and decent international long-distance calling—we hadU2, Springsteen AND  Sting: the Russians loved their Children too, for God’s sake. Now that we were the world's sole remaining superpower, honestly, what was stopping us from making the world a better place? 

Among other things, the tendency of American Presidents named Bush to ignore golden opportunities in favor of dark advice and diplomatic choices at once bumbling and destructive.

Remember Bush 41’s awkward effort to honor the service of the little people with his “Thousand Points of Light” initiative? You couldn’t help but feel that it was a cute idea but not very deeply-held, coming as it did from a guy who clearly spent so much more time on the golf course than at the grocery store. And sure enough, I remember sobbing through the first night of creepy low-light satellite footage shot from above Baghdad as bombs traced the green sky, thinking “Another thousand points of light…just exploded.” 

Maybe it was only me, but the contrast between military potency  and moral ineptitude seemed more obvious each day, topped off by the torching of the road back from Kuwait and the failure to even attempt to justify the effort by removing Saddam Hussein. The strangest aspect of the whole experience was how many Americans seemed surprised, bemused and accepting of the whole thing. “Well, he’s the President; if he says we have to go to war who are we to argue?” 

Nobody did want to argue, I guess, least of all me, and I don’t think we learned much. It seems like we all shook off that war, elected Bill Clinton president, got re-focused on the Victory of Capitalism, and figured we were in the clear. I for one believed that international travel and global trade could succeed where “old school” government had failed, and I backed up that belief by spending the next ten years mostly shopping for shoes. (I wasn’t alone in those stores, believe me.) But now I wish we had paid more attention to the neocons circling in the weird shadowy place where it’s hard to tell the difference between ideology, incompetence and evil, supporting their little fleet of carefully-balanced agendas and waiting for a moment of confusion to arise.

Why didn’t we pay more attention? That shadow is always tucked in somebody’s cloak, and a moment of confusion is always going to arise. If we had been ready, maybe the days after 911 could have gone differently—we might have told the “with us or against us” crowd to go to hell and taken our place in an ever more interdependent world, shaken but more compassionate in our experience. 

Instead, here we are--thousands of lives and trillions of dollars later, the bad planet in the shadow, our decline seemingly outpaced only by our irrelevance. A Wrinkle in Time.