Behind the Scenes: The Persian Gulf War, Explained.

The newest deep-dive historical video hit my YouTube channel yesterday (August 18, 2023). It's about the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91, and it's my most in-depth and detailed video essay yet. As of this writing it's been a big success, with about 20,000 views. While embedding video in these blog articles--which most of you, I think, read as emails--is suboptimal, I include the video below in case you want to watch it or bookmark it for later. At 151 minutes it's the longest single video I've ever done. If you choose to embark on that admittedly daunting journey, you're going to get a lot of context. This article is about the video, how and why I made it, and some of my thoughts on the subject that I didn't include.

I lived through the Gulf War, which occurred during my freshman year in college. One of the things I highlight early on in the video is that there's something of a generational divide regarding it. If you lived through it and watched it unfold in real time, especially on cable networks like CNN which offered wall-to-wall coverage, it seemed like the biggest thing in history. But later events, especially 9/11 and the second American-led war against Iraq that began in March 2003, quite suddenly relegated the Persian Gulf War to a surprising position of obscurity in historical memory. It's not accurate to say it's forgotten, especially because there are literally hundreds of thousands of people walking the streets of America today (and other countries) who were personally involved, serving in the armed forces. But at the same time it's not talked about very much and there's not a lot of scholarly or popular culture focus placed on it. As such, it's a prime topic for the kind of video treatment that I'm now evidently becoming known for on YouTube.