On 1 October, West and East Germany died at and were reborn as a unified nation. Less than a year after the Berlin Wall was made redundant by the opening of the East German borders, fireworks lit up the sky over Berlin and the City’s streets were once again filled with tearful, celebrating Germans.

Talks on reunification began in March this year, shortly before the conservative Alliance for Germany was elected in East Germany’s first free elections. Alliance leader Lothar de Maiziere, appointed prime minister on 12 April, agreed terms for economic union with West Germany. On 1 July the West German Deutschmark became the currency of the whole of Germany, replacing the East German Ostmark, and on 12 September the Allied victors of World War II signed a treaty in Moscow giving full sovereignty to the future united Germany.

The new country will face a difficult time dealing with East Germany’s economic problems, but today a long and dearly held dream has been realised.

On 3 August, Iraqi armies swept into Kuwait and, in what one US military officer has called a "a cake walk", seized control of the entire country in just 24 hours.

Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had spent months testing Western tolerance before striking and had elicited onlt mild responses. He’d escalated his anti-American rhetoric, executed an Iranian-born British journalist and threatened Israel with chemical weapons. Emboldened, he’d accused Kuwait of undercutting Iraq’s petroleum revenues and stealing from a border oil field. When Kuwait’s concessions proved inadequate, (and his veiled last-minute warnings to U.S. ambassador April Glaspie provoked only diplomatic flattery), Hussein sent in 100,000 troops.

It took only five hours for soldiers – some of them arriving in buses – to ring the capital, but their apparent effort to capture the Kuwaiti royal family failed. The Emir, Sheikh Jabir al-Ahmad al-Sabah, and several other members of the Sabah royal family escaped in a limousine convoy across the border into Saudi Arabia.

Kuwait is little more than a city state, but its vast oil resources have made it fabulously wealthy. In contrast, Iraq is one of the poorest countries in the region, crippled by war debt, with a burgeoning population and lacking the natural resources of its neighbours.

Iraq has always regarded Kuwait as part of its nation, torn from it by Western powers after World War I. But disputed border claims as well as the beleaguered Iraqi economy lie behind the invasion. Since 1988, when hostilities ceased in the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam Hussein had asked countries to cancel US$70 billion in was debts. Some, such as Saudi Arabia, have complied; Kuwait refused. Kuwait was made to pay the price of that refusal.

However, much to Hussein’s surprise, the invasion drew wide condemnation. The Arab Leugue voted 14 to five to demand withdrawal, and even the Soviets, (Iraq’s biggest arms suppliers) joined in a U.S.-led embargo. America’s formerly pro-Hussein president, George Bush, favoured an even more aggressive option: a military move to consolidate the "new world order".

Bush had often used that phrase to welcome the waning of the U.S.-Soviet power struggle and the emergence of the United States as the sole superpower. Now, answering Saudi Arabia’s request for protection, he launched Operation Desert Shield. Some 500,000 U.S. troops gathered in the Saudi Desert and the Persian Gulf; the forces backing them came not only from traditional U.S. allies, but also from Syria, a Soviet client state. Moscow offered diplomatic aid; its former satellites provided technical advisors. Within months, the defensive Desert Shield became the offensive Desert Storm.