It was August 2, 1990, and Saddam Hussein, formerly Washington’s man in Baghdad and its ally against fundamentalist Iran, had just sent his troops across the border into oil-rich Kuwait. It would prove a turning point in American Middle East policy. Six days later, a brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division was dispatched to Saudi Arabia as the vanguard of what the U.S. Army termed “the largest deployment of American troops since Vietnam.” The rest of the division would soon follow as part of Operation Desert Storm, which was supposed to drive Saddam’s troops from Kuwait and fell the Iraqi autocrat. The division’s battle cry: "The road home... is through Baghdad!”
In fact, while paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne penetrated deep into Iraq in the 100-day campaign that followed, no American soldier would make it to the Iraqi capital -- not that time around, anyway. After the quick triumph of the Gulf War, the Airborne's paratroops instead returned to Ft. Bragg, North Carolina. And that, it seemed, was the end of the matter, victory parades and all. Naturally, the soldiers using that battle cry did not have the advantage of history. They had no way of knowing that it would have been more accurate to chant something like: “The road home always leads back to Baghdad!” After all, when the First Gulf War ended in the crushing defeat of Saddam’s forces and he nonetheless remained in power, the stage was set for the invasion that began Iraq War 2.0 a dozen years later. Perhaps you still remember that particular “mission accomplished” moment.
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