Looking Back at Desert Storm (1991 Article) by the U.S. News & World Report staff
Saddam Hussein called it "the mother of all battles," and indeed, as hundreds of missiles and warplanes swarmed over around the birthplace of Abraham, there was something almost biblical that transcended the spectacle of prime-time pyrotechnics and space-age war machines. It manifested itself in dry throats and mute stares as the first wave of exultation crested and broke after Iraqi SCUD missiles began falling on Israel and the realization grew that the megalomaniac Iraqi leader may have to be dug out of the rubble around him, perhaps at the cost of a large number of lives. Oddly, though, the gas masks, missiles and even Hussein's own overwrought rhetoric seem to have done what President Bush was never quite able to do: elevate the conflict from what some critics have charged is a crass fight for oil and jobs to what it has been since August 2, when Hussein sent his troops crashing into Kuwait -- a war between right and wrong.
For a nation steeped in the bitter broth of Vietnam and jolted since by disasters in Beirut and the Iranian desert and by the invasions of Grenada and Panama, the massive air armada arrayed against Saddam Hussein has evoked a renewed sense of power and purpose. Flying 2,107 combat missions in the first 48 hours of the war, allied air forces were able to deliver as many as 5,000 tons of bombs a day on Baghdad -- nearly double the amount dropped by the Allies in the epic 1945 bombing of Dresden, Germany. "History in the making," Col. Ray Davies breathed as he watched a squadron of American F-15E attack fighters vanish into light cloud cover and up into a moonless sky over the Saudi desert. Back home, even as a nascent peace movement puddled up in cities small and large, polls showed Americans rallying behind the decision to go to war and rejecting assertions that the president should have waited longer before attacking Iraq…
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25 Years Later Since Operation Desert Storm, In Photos - Houston Chronicle