Desert Storm was one of the largest mobilizations in American history.
What will its place in history be twenty years from now?
A Korea, a good fight, but not a triumph?
or will it just be ignored?
I guess it will be all but forgotten in twenty years even though we destroyed the fifth largest army in the world.

I think the liberals will keep whinning about how we didn't achieve our objective of killing Saddam Hussein....or how does that mantra go????

i think theres a lot of people who are NOT liberals who would be saying and HAVE been saying that we should of nuked sadaam.
in fact the liberal might be the only ones who say we shouldnt of wasted that sumbitch

I wish we would have too.  Just pisses me off that the ones who were against it now come along & bitch about not making goals that were never set & then trying to use that to make someone look bad.

for the us public and the brave service people, desert storm will perhaps be the greatest outright military victory ever achieved by the united states.  i'm sorry i missed it.  the brilliance of schwartzkopf and powell and others were remarkable.  the performance of our troops superlative.

on the darkside however, it was the most profitable war ever waged by the u.s.  the reagan admin spent billions with the bechtel corp to build massive underground ammo dumps in saudi.  ammo (bombs, shell, etc) was paid for 5 fiscal years earlier.  the arabs gave free fuel.  the other free nations gave 42+ billion dollars towards the war effort.  it didn't cost much - but the powers that be made a fortune.

steve

The Gulf War will probably go down similar to the Spanish American War. Little more than a foot note. Accomplished little. Caused more problems than it solved and was encouraged by big business(oil).

One of the objects should have been total destruction on the Republic Guard, Grin and Barrett is right in his above comment. If would would have destroyed his army, his "people would have take care of Sadam.

steve m, I'm afraid I have to disagree with ya. All Schwartzkopf and Powell did was use their incredible air and ground superiority to full advantage against what turned out to be a large, but 2nd rate army. Once the Iraqi air force was out of the picture, they (Iraq) had no prayer of winning. The greatest victory for the US has got to be WW2. We entered with a woefully unprepared military, but in 6 months, the USN had turned the tide in the pacific, and in 1944, an Army almost completely lacking in combat experience assaulted a shoreline defended by the greatest army in the world up until then. And booted their ass of the beach. Tom Hanks is right in that commercial where he says that they "helped save the world." We, the USA, kept the UK supplied through the U-boat campaign, sent vital supplies to the USSR, and put forth the vast majority of effort in defeating Japan. It was not our most one-sided victory, but WW2 IS our greatest victory.

Hate to break it to you guys, but the destruction of Iraq was not one of our goals.  In fact, preservation of Iraqi borders was probably goal 2 after booting them out of Kuwait.  This means we had to leave Iraq with an army capable of holding the country together.

In the south, if the Shiites (sp) had sucessfully broken off, they would likely have been absorbed by Iran.  Bad news long term for the region.

In the north, if the Kurds had broken off, this would have destabilized the whole region.  The whole Kurdish population are living like Palistinians - they don't own the area they call home and are treated like rabid dogs by the Turks, Iranian, Iraqis, and the old Soviet Union area.  As much as our government wrings its hands over the Kurds, they will never promote real independence for any of them.      

There are hard decicions that have to be made to keep the whole middle east from exploding.  There is too much history there for thier own good.  Saddam makes a good bogyman, but right now he accomplishes the greater good of keeping Iraq intact for middle east stability.