President Saddam Hussein brought in the new year with perhaps the largest military parade Baghdad had ever seen. When new, UN-prohibited missiles passed by, the TV commentator exulted: "These are the ones we rained down on the Jews." That was a reference to the 37 Scud missiles that Iraq unleashed on Israel during Desert Storm, or the Mother of Battles in official Iraqi parlance.
It began 10 years ago today and brought the heaviest and most sustained aerial bombardment since the second World War.
It was not the official objective of the 500,000-strong US-led military coalition to bring Saddam down, only to liberate Kuwait.
Even so, George Bush the father, president at the time, could scarcely have imagined that Saddam would still be there 10 years on. With his parade and his personal theatrics Saddam could hardly have displayed more contempt for what Desert Storm was supposed to achieve, or sent a more provocative message to Bush Jnr.
After the liberation of Kuwait, divesting Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction became the whole raison d'etre of the UN sanctions, and the central plank of US policy.
Regionally and internationally things are changing, however. No leader has profited more from the Palestinian intifada than Saddam. No one profits like him from the obloquy which the intifada has earned the US throughout the region. It is not for love of Saddam that Arabs have been rallying so forcefully against the whole sanctions and "containment" order that Iraq continues to endure, but because these are seen to typify double standards on the part of the US which penalises Arabs but never Israel. True, key elements of "containment" remain in place, as do core economic sanctions.
But international opposition to them grows remorselessly. Leading members of the Bush team, notably the Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, are certain to push for a more forceful interpretation of the Iraqi Liberation Act.
If, under Bush Jnr, the promotion of a popular insurgency does become the chosen US means of deposing the tyrant, it will be rather ironic. For, in the eyes of the Iraqi opposition, which has long insisted that insurgency is the only realistic means, the reason Saddam remains in place 10 years on is that, in the immediate aftermath of Desert Storm, Bush Snr betrayed the great Shia and Kurdish uprisings which he had initially encouraged.
But a US-sponsored uprising now would be far more dangerous than it was then. The basic reason Bush held back - the risk that Iraq, this strategically pivotal country, would disintegrate into chaos and the competing interventions of outside powers - seems as valid as ever.
And some observers point to a host of plausible new reasons for his son to hold back also: the impact on an Arab world already aroused by the intifada, the hostility of Arab governments, the deepening unpopularity of the US, the threat of soaring oil prices. Truly, where Iraq is concerned, it is "the mother of legacies" that, via eight years of Clinton, one Bush has conferred on another.
Mr Niall Andrews, the Fianna Fail MEP, has described UN economic sanctions against Iraq as a "man-made disaster which can be alleviated by the UN Security Council at the stroke of a pen".
"We all know of the fact that 5,000 people are dying a month in Iraq as a result of the ineffectiveness of the UN Food for Oil programme. The UN sanctions committee on Iraq is also holding up hundreds of millions of pounds worth of economic and humanitarian aid contracts," he said.