Australia avoided recession off the back of strong Asian trade and 25 years of economic reform and low levels of government debt. Evidence of the major demographic and social shifts which have taken place within Western society since World War II can be found with the elections of national level leaders: United States (Barack Obama was elected president in 2009, becoming the first African-American to hold that office), France (Nicolas Sarkozy, a president of France of Hungarian descent), Germany (Angela Merkel, the first female leader of that nation), and Australia (Julia Gillard, also the first female leader of that nation). Western nations and the world Following 1991, Western nations provided troops and aid to many war-torn areas of the world. Some of these missions were unsuccessful, like the attempt by the United States to provide relief in Somalia in the early 1990s. A very successful peace-making operation was conducted in the Balkans in the late 1990s, however. After the Cold War, Yugoslavia broke up into several countries along ethnic lines, and soon countries and ethnic groups within countries of the former Yugoslavia began fighting one another. Eventually, NATO troops arrived in 1999 and ended the conflict. Australian led a United Nations mission into East Timor in 1999 (INTERFET) to restore order during that nation's transition to democracy and independence from Indonesia. The greatest war fought by the West in the 1990s, however, was the Persian Gulf War. In 1990, the Middle Eastern nation of Iraq, under its brutal dictator Saddam Hussein, invaded the much smaller neighbouring country of Kuwait. After refusing to withdraw troops, the United Nations condemned Iraq and sent troops to liberate Kuwait. American, British, French, Egyptian and Syrian troops all took part in the liberation. The war ended in 1991, with the withdrawal of Iraqi troops from Kuwait and Iraq's agreement to allow United Nations inspectors to search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The West had become increasingly unpopular in the Middle East following World War II. The Arab states greatly disliked the West's support for Israel. Many soon had a special hatred towards the United States, Israel's greatest ally. Also, partly to ensure stability on the region and a steady supply of the oil the world economy needed, the United States supported many corrupt dictatorships in the Middle East. In 1979, an Islamic revolution in Iran overthrew the pro-Western Shah and established an anti-Western