Page 176 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

Sorcerers’ Apprentices 173

with a defence force of only 10,000 men, should have required the amount of
arms said to be involved in the arrangement was a mystery; unless, as was
suggested at the time, many of the larger weapons were intended to fill the gaps

left in Egypt’s armament by the October 1973 war which the Russians
themselves refused to fill directly. Some of the smaller arms may also in time
have found their way by circuitous routes to revolutionary or terrorist organ­
izations. Whatever the Kuwait government’s intentions may have been in
contracting these engagements, for the Russians they were a positive windfall.
Kuwait still has the finest harbour in the Gulf, and it still possesses a good deal
of the strategic significance it possessed at the turn of the century, when it was

looked upon as a logical terminus for the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway. For the
Russians it offers an attractive alternative to Iraq as an outlet to the Gulf, an
alternative made all the more feasible by the latent hostility which exists
between the two countries. Small wonder, therefore, that the former shah
was reported to have referred with disgust to Kuwait as ‘the Finland of the
Gulf’.
According to the Kuwait government, these various transactions with the
communist bloc are to be interpreted as evidence of Kuwait’s desire to estab­

lish and preserve her independent and non-aligned status between East and
West, and of her need to disarm or placate potential adversaries, jealous of her
prosperity and good fortune. If this is so, what then of the other side of the
ledger, where Kuwait’s relations with the West are recorded? Certainly the
bulk of the shaikhdom’s trade and financial dealings have been with the West,
whether in the sale of her oil, the importation of goods and services or the

investment of her surplus revenues. They could hardly have been otherwise.
The Kuwaitis have never lacked business acumen, nor have they allowed
themselves to be deterred from seeking and exploiting opportunities for profit
by the kind of considerations which might inhibit other peoples. What pro­
vokes doubt about Kuwait’s alleged ‘even-handedness’ is not her commercial
relations with East and West respectively but her political attitudes and
conduct. While the Kuwait government has been very free with its censures
and anathemas against the West for its supposed misdeeds, it has been remark­

ably reticent in commenting upon the activities of the Soviet Union and its
satellites around the world. Anti-Western diatribes were the standard fare of
debate in the Kuwait national assembly, which, until its dissolution in August
1976, fairly rang every day with denunciations of Western, and particularly
British, ‘imperialism’ - an imperialism, it might be remarked, which had
profited Kuwait very handsomely in the past and still serves her well today.
Kuwait has been in the forefront of those states which have pressed for and

obtained astronomical increases in the price of oil to Western consumers, and
e voice of its minister of finance and petroleum for most of the decade, Abdur
Rahman al-Atiqi, has been one of the most strident and malevolent among
ose raised in vilification of the West - as will be seen more fully later when we