As we consider how to shape our legacy in Iraq, it's worth taking a peek at Kuwaiti cereal boxes.

Special K is sold in Kuwait, but every box has a piece of white paper pasted over an image of a young woman exercising.

It's not a sexy image, unless you've spent a month in the desert alone with a herd of camels, but it's still considered too explosive for Kuwaitis to handle.
For that matter, women themselves are still too much for Kuwait to handle.

Twelve years after Americans lost their lives to liberate Kuwait, women still don't have the vote.

As for men, they can vote, but most political power is still firmly in the hands of the ruling Sabah family.

Meanwhile, religious fundamentalism has been on the rise, with more women wearing the veil, and for the past few years even university classes have been segregated by sex.

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Americans fought the 1991 Gulf War with the best of intentions, and it was the right thing to do.

But after the war, we lost interest in the area. So Saddam stayed in Iraq, Saudi Arabia again became a closed society and Kuwait continued to amble along as a family-run country.

"For what had they died, those 390 Americans?" asks Rick Atkinson in his book about Gulf War I, Crusade. He answers, perhaps too harshly: "The conflict had been waged on behalf of cheap oil, friendly monarchies and Washington's strategic goal of preventing the emergence of a hegemonic power inimical to America's interests in the Middle East."

In fairness, the U.S. did nudge the Kuwaiti rulers to revive the national assembly, which had been suspended. Kuwait has become more politically open, with free speech and a free press. And its youths have a foot planted squarely in the 21st century.
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it would have been nice if we had helped Kuwait achieve something loftier, if we had nudged it to become a model for the Arab world in more than dating. It's now clear that we missed our chance.

This President Bush seems less likely to make that mistake. He and his team include conservative idealists who want to leave the Middle East more democratic than ever before.

Their intentions are honourable.

But they also have a limited attention span, and they seem inclined to rush out of Iraq.

» TheStar.com - What we can learn from Kuwaiti cereal boxes