Saturday, October 10

The roll call votes in the House and Senate were not close. On October 10, 2002, the House approved the resolution 296 to 133. The Senate followed, 77 to 23. The Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq (AUMF) handed President George W. Bush the legal instrument to launch an invasion the following March. The debate lasted three days. The text cited the attacks of September 11, 2001, Iraq's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction, and Saddam Hussein's purported ties to al-Qaeda. The air in the chamber was thick with the rhetoric of imminent threat.

What was said on the floor diverged sharply from the private calculus. Many lawmakers expressed deep skepticism about the intelligence in closed-door briefings. They voted yes anyway, influenced by looming midterm elections, political pressure from the White House, and a desire not to appear weak on national security. The AUMF was not a declaration of war but a sweeping delegation of congressional power. It authorized force to "defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq" and to enforce UN Security Council resolutions. This language proved elastic enough to cover years of occupation and counter-insurgency.

The resolution's legacy is a case study in legislative abdication. Congress ceded its constitutional war-making authority based on flawed premises that later unraveled. No stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons were found. The connection to 9/11 was fictitious. The vote cast a long shadow, creating a precedent for expansive executive war powers and a protracted conflict that resulted in over 4,600 U.S. military deaths and an estimated 200,000 Iraqi civilian deaths. Subsequent attempts to repeal or replace the 2002 AUMF have stalled, leaving it, alongside the 2001 AUMF, as a dormant but potent tool for future presidents.

The water in the bay first drained away, a sinister recession. Then the storm surge came back as a wall. On October 10, 2018, Hurricane Michael made landfall near Mexico Beach, Florida, with sustained winds of 160 miles per hour. Its central pressure, 919 millibars, was the third-lowest ever recorded for a U.S. landfall. The sound was not just wind; it was the grinding tear of houses being unscrewed from their foundations, the explosive pops of pressurized structures failing, the constant hail of debris. In Mexico Beach, a community of about 1,200, roughly three-quarters of all buildings were destroyed. The surge scoured the sand down to the roadbed.

Michael mattered because it exposed the vulnerability of a region psychologically unprepared for a storm of this magnitude. The Florida Panhandle had no historical memory of a Category 5. Building codes were weaker than in South Florida. The storm’s rapid intensification—jumping from a Category 2 to a 5 in just 48 hours—left little time for the gravity of the threat to sink in. The damage pattern was clinical in its violence. Pine trees were not just snapped; they were stripped of bark and denuded, looking like telephone poles. Tractors were wrapped around the trunks of surviving oaks.

The impact was measured in a stark demographic shift and a revised risk calculus. The storm killed 57 people in the U.S. and caused $25 billion in damage. Towns like Mexico Beach are still rebuilding, but many residents never returned. The population of Bay County dropped. For meteorologists and insurers, Michael redefined the hurricane risk map. It proved that catastrophic intensification could happen just before landfall, even in the cooler waters of the northeastern Gulf, and that any stretch of coastline was potentially a target for the most severe category of storm. The landscape it left behind was not just damaged; it was fundamentally altered.

The meeting occurred in clandestine safety, likely in a church or a safe house in Havana. On October 10, 1980, representatives from five distinct Salvadoran revolutionary organizations—the Popular Liberation Forces, the Communist Party, the National Resistance, the Revolutionary Party of Central American Workers, and the People's Revolutionary Army—signed a pact of unity. They named their new coalition after Farabundo Martí, a communist activist executed after a peasant uprising in 1932. This was not a political alliance but the creation of a single army, the FMLN. Its founding formalized a civil war that had been simmering for months.

The merger mattered because it consolidated diffuse rebel efforts into a credible conventional and irregular threat to the U.S.-backed military junta. Before the FMLN, actions were uncoordinated. Afterward, the Front could launch simultaneous nationwide offensives, most notably the "Final Offensive" of January 1981. The war that followed lasted twelve years, killed approximately 75,000 people, and saw horrific atrocities by government forces and death squads. The FMLN became a political mirror to the state, administering territory, running radio stations, and fielding thousands of troops.

A common misunderstanding is that the FMLN was a monolithic communist bloc directed from Moscow or Havana. In reality, it was a fractious coalition of ideologies, from Marxist-Leninists to social democrats, held together by a common enemy. Internal debates were fierce, and tactical disagreements were constant. Its lasting impact is found not on the battlefield but at the ballot box. The 1992 Chapultepec Peace Accords ended the war and allowed the FMLN to transform into a legal political party. In 2009, it won the Salvadoran presidency, a former guerrilla commander, Mauricio Funes, assuming office. The army founded in secrecy became a pillar of a fragile democracy.

The Egyptian Boeing 737, EgyptAir Flight 2843, was over the Mediterranean, believing its diplomatic status granted it passage. Four U.S. Navy F-14 Tomcats from the USS Saratoga intercepted it. They did not radio. They approached visually, rocking their wings, signaling the civilian airliner to follow. When the Egyptian pilot did not comply, the fighters took up positions off each wing. The message was unambiguous. After a tense standoff, the jetliner descended toward Naval Air Station Sigonella in Sicily, escorted by American warplanes. It landed on October 10, 1985, surrounded by U.S. Navy SEALs and, minutes later, by Italian Carabinieri and police who pointed their weapons at the Americans.

This operation, code-named "Skeleton Key," was President Ronald Reagan's direct response to a terrorist atrocity. Days earlier, four militants from the Palestine Liberation Front had hijacked the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro. They murdered a 69-year-old American passenger, Leon Klinghoffer, shooting him in his wheelchair and throwing his body overboard. After negotiating their safe passage with Egyptian authorities, the hijackers were flown out of Cairo on this jet. The U.S. intelligence community tracked the plane. Reagan ordered it seized.

The event is often remembered as a bold American counter-terrorism victory. The more complex reality involves a severe breach of NATO ally sovereignty. The Italian government, led by Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, was furious that U.S. forces had effectively forced a civilian aircraft to land on Italian soil without permission. The standoff on the tarmac at Sigonella between American and Italian troops lasted for hours, a surreal confrontation between allies. Ultimately, the Italians took custody of the hijackers. The diplomatic rift took months to heal.

The interception established a template for later actions: using military force to apprehend terrorists internationally, regardless of diplomatic niceties. It also highlighted the legal and political quagmires such actions create. The hijackers were tried and convicted in Italy, though the mastermind, Abu Abbas, was on the plane and was released by Italian authorities, causing further U.S. outrage. The operation was tactically flawless and politically messy, a hallmark of the messy war against terrorism.