It\u2019s 1990. I\u2019m a young captain in the U.S. Air Force. I\u2019ve just witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall, something I never thought I\u2019d see, short of a third world war. Right now I\u2019m witnessing the slow death of the Soviet Union, without the accompanying nuclear Armageddon so many feared.<\/p>\n
Still, I\u2019m slightly nervous as my military gears up for an unexpected new campaign, Operation Desert Shield\/Storm, to expel Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein\u2019s military from Kuwait. It\u2019s a confusing moment. After all, the Soviet Union was forever (until it wasn\u2019t) and Saddam had been a stalwart U.S. friend, his country a bulwark against the Iran of the Ayatollahs. (For anyone who doubts that history, just check out the now-infamous\u00a01983 photo<\/a>\u00a0of Donald Rumsfeld, then special envoy for President Reagan, all smiles and shaking hands with Saddam in Baghdad.) Still, whatever my anxieties, the Soviet Union collapsed without a whimper and the campaign against Saddam\u2019s battle-tested forces proved to be a \u201ccakewalk,\u201d with ground combat over in a mere 100 hours.<\/p>\n Think of it as the trifecta moment:\u00a0Vietnam syndrome<\/a>\u00a0vanquished forever, Saddam\u2019s army destroyed, and the U.S. left standing as the planet\u2019s \u201csole superpower.\u201d<\/p>\n Post-Desert Storm, the military of which I was a part stood triumphant on a planet that was visibly ours and ours alone. Washington had won the Cold War. It had won everything, in fact. End of story. Saddam admittedly was still in power in Baghdad, but he had been soundly spanked. Not a single peer enemy loomed on the horizon. It seemed as if, in the words of former U.N. ambassador and uber-conservative\u00a0Jeane Kirkpatrick<\/a>, the U.S. could return to being a normal country in normal times.<\/p>\n