Gust: "There's a little boy, and on his 14th birthday, he gets a horse. And everybody in the village says, 'how wonderful, the boy got a horse.' The Zen master says 'we'll see.' Two years later, the boy falls off the horse and breaks his leg, and the [villagers] say 'how terrible!' And the Zen master says, 'we'll see.' Then, a war breaks out, and all the young men have to go off and fight, except the boy can't because his leg's all messed up and everybody in the village says 'how wonderful!'

Charlie: "And the Zen master says 'we'll see.'"

Gust: (smiles) "So you get it."

What Charlie gets is a lesson about world events – that every action has unintended consequences.

On the 20th anniversary of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, we'll explore how a great deal of the course of U.S. foreign policy in the 20 years since can be traced to this one moment, and in turn, how events that preceded it may have influenced Saddam Hussein's decision to invade a neighboring country.

And as the story above suggests, this is hardly a new phenomenon - we'll explore other examples with Dr. Robert Citino, Associate Professor of History at the University of North Texas, and a fellow at UNT's Military History Center. He's the author of eight books including "Blitzkrieg to Desert Storm: The Evolution of Operational Warfare."

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