ON POLITICAL FORTUNES AND SUDDEN REVERSALS





It is a given in Accounting that the sum of all Assets on a balance sheet will equal the total of its counterpart Liabilities. In politics, especially in Pakistan, an asset is not equal to but the reverse of a liability, the obverse of the same coinage. Flip it, and fortune can change that very asset into a liability.


Ask Lady Margaret Thatcher. In August 1990, she was reigning supreme as the Queen of the Conservative Party in the UK for fifteen years, out which eleven and a half had been as Britain's Prime Minister. She had fought and won three general elections in a row. She seemed unbeatable at home and unassailable abroad.


On 2 August, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, she was in Aspen (Colorado) with President George Bush. As she recalled afterwards, she told the president 'in the clearest and most straightforward terms' that her experience during the Second World War against Hitler's Germany and during her war against Argentina over the Falkland Islands, had taught her that 'aggressors must never be appeased.' She listened on the telephone for an hour to Saudi King Fahd while he asked her for British planes and troops to be stationed in Saudi Arabia to counter any attack on his country by Saddam Hussein. She reprimanded Jordan's King Hussein over lunch at Chequers that he 'should not be attempting to negotiate on Iraq's behalf but rather to implement sanctions against it.' From Downing Street in London, she encouraged Turkey's President Ozal to continue his costly support of UN sanctions against Iraq.


Yet, less than four months later, during a European Conference on Security and Cooperation in Paris, while Chancellor Kohl (who had never been one of her closest friends) was telling her that it was 'unimaginable' that she should be deprived of office, she found herself fighting for her own political survival back home. It was the only war in her belligerent career she thought she would never lose, but did. [EXTRACT]





Published in DAWN 24 March 2006.