Kuwait Diary

Five Years On

Recent events have vindicated my views expressed in 2003 when I wrote the diary during the days of the second Gulf War. I heard the news of Obama's election with a sense of huge relief. The world was perhaps becoming a better place. The mad years were finally behind us. After the pseudo intellectualism and spin of the neo-cons that had put wool over the eyes of the American public, great hope has been generated around the world by the election of Barack Obama. He not only has genuinely intelligent people backing him, but he is a genuine intellectual himself. His world view coincides to a large extent with the points that were made in these posts years ago -- that there was no Al Qaida in Iraq, that the epicenter of terrorism and the training camps were in Afghanistan and Pakistan and that American was fighting the ‘wrong’ war.

Much has been made of the wrong 'intelligence' of the weapons of mass destruction without which, perhaps, the US would not have gone to war. Less has been said about who actually fed the misinformation to the US agencies. We should understand that Saddam Hussein had suppressed the majority Shias in Iraq for a long time through brutal force and there were opposing forces that were trying to topple him, unsuccessfully. The opposition, including Iraqis living in exile, needed a great force to fight on their side. So they conned the US into getting into a war with the bogey of the weapons of mass destruction. Of course there weren't any. It is still painful to remember those days when Colin Powel was made to give 'evidence' to the United Nations on the discovery of the existence of weapons of mass destruction, when the UN itself had reached the conclusion that there were none. Do revisit these posts on the drama of trying to discredit the UN weapons inspectors led by Hans Blix. They were replaced by American weapons inspectors who only confirmed the findings of the UN weapons inspectors. Iraqi exiles like Ahmad Chalabi had the last laugh. Their objective of the removal of Saddam Hussein had been achieved with the money from the ordinary US taxpayer.

The US has been made to spend billions of dollars of US tax payers money in the Iraq war that has taken the country from a budget surplus during the Clinton years to the significant deficits of the Bush era funded mainly by the Chinese. It does not take great intellectual understanding and insight to conclude threat the current financial crisis is the result and culmination of the Bush era policies, especially the long periods of very low interest rates to support the war, that ultimately led to the real estate bubble and the subsequent collapse from the sub-prime mortgage blow up. The recession (officially accepted as GDP contraction for two consecutive quarters) that has followed affects not only Americans but the whole world, as the links through globalization have strengthened over the years. Europe has suffered the most and Asia has been affected to a lesser extent. If global economic trends were anything to go by, the balance of economic power that was gradually shifting to the South led by the rise of the BRIC ( Brazil, Russia, India, China – as coined by Goldman Sachs) countries led by China, has gained pace. The chain effect of the Bush policies has only accelerated this trend, as the Western world struggles with a recession expected to last two to three years with growth rates of zero to two percent in North America, Europe and Japan, while China grows at 8% annually. It's going to be a long and painful road ahead, but, there is now real hope instead of fear. We must learn the lessons from the history that we have all lived through while we swung with the wild pendulum.