"Time goes, you say? Ah no!/Alas, time stays, we go."

It's amazing to me that I've seen almost no mention of this on the blogs or Twitter, but yesterday was the 20-year anniversary of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. It's so obvious as to seem absurd to write it, but: Iraq is a very different country today. Saddam is dead. Iranian cultural, political, and economic influence is at a high point. (Iranian imports to Iraq will total close to $7B this year, according to a report this morning on NPR.) And Kuwait still plays host to something like half a dozen U.S. military installations.

But I'm getting ahead of myself: U.S. forces weren't involved in the conflict until January of '91. On August 2, 1990, four divisions of Iraqi armor and mechanized infantry rolled across the southern border, crushing Kuwaiti resistance in less than three days. It's easy to forget amidst the massive loss of life of the post-Saddam period, but Iraqi and Kuwaiti deaths totalled close to 3,000 during the brief war.

I have an awful, awful memory, but one of the distinct memories of my childhood is sitting on the floor in my dad's office looking at the front page of the Dallas Morning News that morning, the big headline reading something like "IRAQ INVADES KUWAIT." For reasons that aren't entirely clear to me, that date has always stuck in my head. I remember the Challenger, I remember the 1986 Super Bowl, and I remember the Berlin Wall coming down, but this is probably the first international event that I remember learning about by reading the newspaper. (Ill portent?)

While glancing around the Google to see if I'd missed some major commemoration of the anniversary yesterday, I came across an interesting article on al-Jazeera. It's by Nashwa Nasreldin, an Egyptian-born woman who grew up in Kuwait and attended the New English School with several other expatriates. She was 10 when the Iraqis invaded -- exactly my age -- and lost touch with her classmates until several reunited on Facebook. A few of them went back to the school recently for a reunion, and film Nasreldin shot there has apparently been turned into a TV program.

Alas, time stays, we go.