When I first joined the Center, I didn't know quite what to expect. During the years that my husband and I were in diplomatic service in the Middle East, we frequently experienced the crucial interplay between the personal and the political. On August 2, 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, my husband was the American ambassador in Kuwait. He was caught in the embassy when the Iraquis rolled in. I had come back to the States just a few days earlier, at the end of a three-year tour that we had shared in Kuwait, where we had met lots of officials and had made many friends among the Kuwaitis and within the diplomatic community and the American community there. That was probably the most dramatic point in our lives,