Spectator's Journal/The Kuwaiti Exception
Pipes, Daniel
SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL THE KUWAITI EXCEPTION Kuwait City It all started with the anguished com- plaints I read in the Kuwaiti press in late 1985. They made no sense at the time: how could it be that...
...The sheikh hosted a grand Bedouin-style lunch for me in the desert and then heaped gifts at my departure...
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...the result is similar...
...Do minimum wage laws improve the quality of life for the employed or increase unemployment...
...Indeed, with the demise of Lebanon, Kuwait has become an important cultural center for all Arabic-speaking countries...
...So far, the results are meager...
...They made no sense at the time: how could it be that American officials were pressuring the Kuwaiti government to release convicted terrorists, contradicting everything that was then known about U.S...
...The most widely read Arabic magazine, Al-Arab, comes from Kuwait and the Arabic version of "Sesame Street" originates here...
...Mutely, 150542 (paper) 88 95 THE ECONOMICS AND POLITICS OF RACE, T50406 (paper) 86 95 N.Y...
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...Second, I finally understood why generations of Britons and Americans have found societies of the deserts seductive...
...Both rose with the oil boom of the 1970s and both suffer from the glut of the eighties...
...30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1988 It also means that Kuwaitis, like Japanese, can preserve what they wish of their own culture...
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...Other papers followed suit...
...Although consumerism prevails, there is a chance—a better one than I would have guessed from a distance —that something worthwhile will come of this very expensive experiment...
...Both are free to choose on their own terms what they like from the West...
...I ended the article with a salute to the true Arab honor of the Kuwaiti emir...
...They have no official standing or power, of course, but they do provide a mechanism for the transfer of information and the exchange of opinions...
...How does drug prohibition create additional problems for the individual user and society as a whole...
...And Kuwaitis, urban descendants of the Bedouin tent-dwellers, continue to cherish desert life, often spending vacations encamped in the sands...
...policy...
...My expectations were not entirely off the mark, but the country has its attractions nonetheless...
...Anything more than twenty years old is antique...
...Kuwait has a real, if discreet, political life centered on the traditional institution called the diwaniya...
...What Aristotle wrote about every man needing a slave applies to Kuwait, except that every man, woman, and child in effect has two servants...
...Further, these workers keep easy work hours...
...Recent, figures indicate that 82 percent of the work force is foreign...
...The crowd a diwaniya attracts depends on the standing of the host...
...In the Meridien Hotel where I stayed, for instance, Egyptians and Lebanese worked the front desk (they speak Arabic, English, and French), Filipinos served food, and Indians cleaned the rooms...
...Unlike other OPEC members, which still depend on oil sales for income, the Kuwaitis have salted away so much that they now derive more from investments than from oil revenues, which allows them to endure a downturn better than other exporting states...
...This had never been apparent to me from three years of living in Cairo, a much more profound but at the same time a far more Westernized city...
...The United States has only 4 million tons...
...But they did...
...Long curious to see the place, I accepted...
...Accounts of the column reverberated on state-run television and radio for two days," said the Washington Post, "while minimal official notice was taken of President Reagan's personal letter to Emir Jaber Sabah...
...Until the 1940s, the Kuwaitis lived in a backwater delineated by Islam, the desert, pearl diving, fishing, and a bit of trade...
...Were a visitor to arrive in Kuwait not knowing the source of its wealth, he might not catch on for months...
...The article also noted that the Kuwaiti authorities had resisted our efforts as well as a wide range of terrorist challenges—including an attack on their oil facilities and an attempt to assassinate the Kuwaiti ruler...
...in theory, offices are open from 7:30 a.m...
...never before has a whole country enjoyed the benefits of wealth before learning the skills that created that wealth...
...After two hours of nothing but blank terrain only in the last seconds before touchdown does one finally catch the blue sea and the angular irregularities of a gray, anonymously modern city...
...Abuse us as they may, I thought, but foreign governments continue to set great store by the views of Americans...
...Indeed, a Kuwaiti who cannot speak English is at a severe disadvantage when he wants to make a purchase, give orders to his servant, or even lodge a complaint with the police...
...as a result, half the dishes returned to the kitchen untouched...
...minister of information...
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...I filed these clippings away as a curiosity and forgot the incident...
...On a more mundane level, the typical formal dinner I attended (for men only, of course) offered ten times more food than could possibly be eaten...
...The result is a fluency in moving back and forth between cultures, and an easy openness toward Westerners...
...Any man with the means can build himself a diwaniya, a large room with chairs and sofas around the edges where most evenings he holds an open house for male Kuwaiti citizens...
...My host, the minister of information, is a member of the ruling family (they avoid the term "royalty" in Kuwait) and a potential ruler of the country...
...What motivates our policy makers and causes their policies to fail...
...But is there anything beyond the fine buildings, the brand names, and the servants...
...He is able to look at the same facts as others, yet conceive webs of explanation that are much more subtle, sophisticated and accurate than those of his lessers...
...The diwaniyas are the courts of public opinion in Kuwait...
...Rulers are generous in a style reminiscent of A Thousand and One Nights...
...The second thing to know is that it is non-Kuwaitis who explore, drill, refine, transport, and consume this oil...
...The diwaniya remains strong...
...He examines the motivations of our nation's "deep thinkers" as they manipulate public opinion and influence policy decisions and explores the reasons why the "imposed solutions" are usually worse than the problems they are designed to solve...
...This means building a university, an institute for scientific research, a museum, a hospital special-izing in Islamic medicine (whatever that may be—no one could explain the concept to me), and the like...
...Is disinvestment in South Africa dismantling Apartheid or reducing job opportunities for blacks...
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...The achievement amounts to making the good life available in one of the most inhospitable regions on earth...
...to 1 p.m., when they close for the day, but I never got an appointment before 10 a.m...
...absent is that sense of persistent pressure that so afflicts the poor countries...
...to my surprise, Kuwait has some sophisticated intellectuals...
...Traveling from the United States, one reaches Kuwait from the northwest, across the huge, uninhabited Arabian desert...
...Gossip, jokes, storytelling, and deal-making take up much of the time, but politics is the pervasive theme...
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...The Bedouins' upper-class demeanor contrasts strikingly with the hum-drum of democratic ways...
...Those reserves are currently estimated at 10 million metric tons, the second largest in the world, after Saudi Arabia's 16 million tons...
...To imagine Kuwait, forget bazaars, citadels, crowded roads...
...How does confusing guilt with compassion defeat the intentions of social policy...
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...Oddly enough, however, the unearned quality of Kuwait's money has hardly affected the country's consciousness...
...it became the leading news item in Kuwait a few days later...
...Never before in history has an entire population depended financially primarily on investments...
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...Citizens exude a sense of well-being and superiority, of confidence and ease in comby Daniel Pipes mand...
...Foreign workers come from 130 countries and divide themselves along occupational lines...
...Known as Sheikh Nasir, he is an outgoing and energetic aristocrat—the very model of an Arabian leader...
...Citizens number only 600,000...
...expatriate laborers total twice that...
...Air conditioning is ubiquitous...
...It had not occurred to me that Kuwaitis would take note of the piece...
...Unable to figure out what to make of these reports, I filed them away...
...A year later, of course, they made sense...
...Never mind that Japan got where it is through indigenous effort and Kuwait got it all from payments for oil...
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...I left Kuwait with two dominant impressions...
...Food comes from, among other places, New Zealand, the Sudan, France, and Argentina...
...Few non-Arab workers speak Arabic, but almost all of them speak English, and they are so numerous that English has become a lingua franca...
...they are used to giving orders and being given the best in return...
...But virtually every trace of the older buildings, city walls, and roads has been obliterated, leaving the city without character...
...The men wear the characteristically flowing Arabian gowns and have not gone over to shirts and pants as in the rest of the Middle East...
...First, enormous wealth permits Kuwaitis to enjoy an unusual degree of confidence in their relationship to Western civilization...
...Geography and history pale beside the country's unique economic and social life...
...arms-for-hostages deals with Iran became public, I retrieved the Kuwaiti reports and published an article in the Wall Street Journal telling how the United States government had tried to spring convicted terrorists...
...the present is not guilty of the sins of the past The Washington Post The political clashes of the 1980s have gone deeper than usual, emotionally as well as intellectually, and ultimately involve differences in our whole vision of man...
...I compared Kuwait's actions favorably with the empty bluster about terrorism coming from U.S., Israeli, and West European officials—all of whom had recently appeased terrorists...
...The sexes continue to live separate lives and are not pushed together by economic dictates...
...This impression is confirmed by a drive through Kuwait City, where 90 percent of Kuwait's residents live...
...It is the ultimate rentier society...
...Kuwaitis contribute little but raw material to the industry that sustains them...
...The demographics of Kuwait are unusual, to say the least...
...Goods are snapped up from the ultra-fashionable luxury stores with branches in Rome, New York, and Kuwait...
...There are ambitions to accomplish something, to have a constructive role...
...Are the "humanitarian activities" of the United Nations promoting peace—or war...
...In a society of aristocrats, surrounded by predatory neighbors and out-numbered by aliens, these opinions count...
...the stores, brightly lit and modern...
...One can look at Kuwait as a very expensive experiment for social scientists to study...
...The best of the Middle East drifts to the oil-producing states for work, interesting foreign visitors pass through, and many citizens travel abroad...
...there is no free lunch...
...he first thing to know about Ku-1 wait, of course, is that it has an immense reserve of oil under its sands...
...In this they resemble the Japanese...
...Do government subsidies increase the cost of education...
...Having Kuwaiti citizenship is tantamount to holding an aristocratic title...
...AsSlyasa, for example, had a banner headline across the front page, "Emir Jaber Only Ruler Refusing Deal With Terrorists: Stand Represents True Arab Honor...
...Consequently, I expected Kuwait to be a dull, parasitical society, where foreign workers do all the work, citizens lounge in decadent luxury, and nothing serious happens...
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...There are more cars with telephones here than in Manhattan...
...When the U.S...
...even among government employees (the favorite occupation of the citizenry), two-thirds are foreign...
...And the similarity of the two goes beyond architecture and city planning: Kuwait shares with Houston a scorching climate and an almost complete absence of evident history...
...society does not owe anybody a living...
...It came as a surprise when a letter from the Kuwaiti ambassador in Washington arrived, inviting me to visit his country as a guest of the Daniel Pipes, author of In the Path of God: Islam and Political Power (Basic Books), is director of the Foreign Policy Institute in Philadelphia and editor of Orbis, its quarterly journal...
...A swirl of activity—a war to discuss, business to transact, parties to attend, consumer items to enjoy—makes the contingency of their affluence a distant and rather theoretical point...
...Then oil suddenly thrust Kuwaitis into the world economy, made them rich, gave them power, and deluged them with Western culture...
...What is of real interest in Kuwait—and what makes it most unlike Houston—is its population...
...The roadways are enormous, efficient, and clean...
...T he ultimate question to ask about 1 Kuwait and the other oil-exporting countries is: What have they to show for the hundreds of billions of dollars extracted at great pain from much of the world's population...
...Education has flowered...
...Those of us who trudge to the grocery store every week cannot help but feel giddy at this extravagance...
...In Kuwait the old saw about the American who told the sheikh how much he admired the sheikh's golf clubs—and then received not a bag of golf clubs but the deed to an 18-hole golf club—hardly seems like an exaggeration...
...this place resembles Houston much more than the ancient cities of the Middle East...
Vol. 21 • April 1988 • No. 4
