Reddit reviews America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History

I tend to see the split around the turn of the century as several events that coalesced into a major societal shift (toward better or worse is up for debate:)

• Columbine Massacre (which I guess was technically Millenials, but it represented a big change in the way that society viewed young people so the blowback had strong repercussions across the environment that young people were allowed to experience.)
  
  
• Bush vs Gore Supreme Court case. I think that this one was pretty important because it was the most visible point in a long time that the system was not well understood or ... working. Prior to this, many of us just sort of assumed that all voting was the same everywhere, and that standards were in place. Maybe this was just me being young.
  
  
• 9/11 : I was attending a SUNY college (not in NYC) at the time. It seemed like EVERYONE knew at least one or two people who were in or near the towers. They kind of closed the school as an afterthought. What burned into my memory was in the hours after the chaos (maybe around 1800 that day?) where Dan Rather announced with some gravitas that there were now fighter jets patrolling the skies over NY. And then we had armed soldiers in the train stations. I'd argue that was the first real use of the "New Media" -- cnn.com barely handling the load (they stripped down the entire site to keep it online) and the whole "replay the same thing over and over" routine started there.
  
  
• Beginning the third Gulf War (2003) - For me, this was different because many, many pieces worked together that ordinarily would not. The media seemed amazingly pro-war. (As somoene who grew up in the aftermath of Vietnam, this was offputting) - I recently read America's War for the Greater Middle East and it put a lot of context around the sustained PR campaign that made selling the 2003 invasion possible. I tend to also view this as the point where the political rhetoric began scaling up.

"America's War for the Greater Middle East" is an excellent read/listen. Good historical overview and critique of our strategy, or the lack thereof, in CENTCOM.