KUWAIT: A recent poster in central Kuwait city offered a blessing to America for its war preparations from the people of Kuwait with the following plea: "Find our missing prisoners of war".
Although Islamic fundamentalism has been on the rise in a country straining under the influx of US troops, the issue of 605 POWs who have been missing in Iraq prisons since the first Gulf war has convinced most Kuwaitis of the need for war.
As a delegate at talks last week in Jordan between Kuwaiti and Iraqi officials over the missing POWs said: "Until we find out what has happened to our missing POWs we consider the first war against Iraq to have never finished." The talks, like so many earlier efforts since 1991, stalled on Iraq's refusal to hand over any prisoners or to even accept their existence - this is despite a UN resolution requiring them to do so. It is one of the issues, along with the harbouring of weapons of mass destruction, currently threatening to bring war to the region.
"Saddam Hussein has had his last chance to make peace between our two countries," said the delegate. Such intransigence on the part of the Iraqis has meant that although Kuwait has cleared away the mines and rebuilt its oil wells, there seems little possibility that the wounds of the first Gulf war will heal whilst the POWs remain unaccounted for.
The missing Kuwaitis have become a dominating theme in Kuwait's national life. Their plight is taught in schools and mosques, and slogans such as "never give up hope" appear on bank notes and restaurant menus.
At the centre for POWs in Kuwait, relatives meet each evening to remember their missing loved ones.
The centre has become a secular national shrine, with pictures of the missing POWs, mostly young Kuwaiti men, lining every wall along with artist's impression of Iraqi cells.
Although 12 years have passed since any of the prisoners were last seen alive, hope, improbably, still remains that an American-led war against Iraq will liberate the POWs.
Stories are exchanged between the families of sightings of Kuwaitis from Iraqi and Iranian prisoners released during a political amnesty declared by Saddam Hussein before Christmas.
But the harrowing accounts the families give at the centre about the arrests and torture of the POWs at the hands of Iraqi forces before they were sent to detention centres in Iraq, would seem to suggest that few have survived. Mohammed al-Attar, one of the volunteers at the centre and the father of one of the missing, described how he visited the local police station six weeks after the invasion where his son was taken after being arrested.
"I could see my son's car outside the station, but the Iraqi soldiers denied any knowledge of him. I was shouting so loudly though that my son heard from the cell where he was being held. 'Father, I'm here'," he said. "Those were the last words I ever heard him say before he was taken to Iraq."
Experiences like this explain why, in the worlds of al-Attar, most Kuwaitis "would like to see Saddam dragged through the streets of Baghdad by the Americans".
They also explain why Kuwait, despite the vast oil wealth that has seen the country rebuilt over the past 12 years, remains agonised by the invasion.
"How can we forget such things?" said Hamed al-Barjas, curator at the centre.
But painful though it has been for the families of the missing, the constant recounting of their stories is also helping to slowly define a new sense of Kuwaiti national identity and provide a solace in religion at odds with the growing Islamic extremism in the region.