ABSTRACT
The Kuwayt crisis and war seriously affected all the states of Arabia. During the 1980s Arabia had experienced first the perils of the Iran— Iraq war and then the problems of the fall in the price of oil. By 1990 the states were, with few exceptions, less wealthy and more insecure than they had been in 1980. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwayt posed a still greater threat to the security of the states and of their regimes and to the wealth of their people. Apart from the chance of further Iraqi attacks, there was the possibility of Iraqi political and economic hegemony. Moreover, Iraqi propaganda, which depicted the patrimonial regimes of the Gulf as greedy, wasteful and exploitative, found much support inside and outside Arabia. Traditional Arabian regimes found themselves denounced simultaneously by strict Muslims for being too liberal and by secularists (including some of their allies) for being insufficiently progressive. Thanks to the USA the Iraqi threat was defeated and Kuwayt restored but the traditional regimes were obliged to spend the early years of the 1990s in attempts to create more acceptable political regimes and better systems of security than those which had been found wanting in 1990. It was their aim, however, to ensure that any changes should not alter the basic character of the regimes and by 1995 they appeared to have accomplished this aim. The political effects of the Kuwayt crisis were much smaller than had been prophesied. In social terms there were larger repercussions. Gulf states looked at their vast immigrant populations and decided that in general Asian workers were more politically reliable than Arabs; one consequence of the Kuwayt crisis was the expulsion (at least temporarily) of Palestinians and Yemenis. Economically, the apocalyptic prophecies of disaster were completely confounded: the oil price rose in the short term enabling the Gulf states to defray painlessly most of the costs of the military operations, but in the longer term it fell back to the sort of levels which had prevailed in the late 1980s. Oil production was quickly restored even in Kuwayt and the predictions of epic pollution were not realized. The oil states resumed the pursuit of economic diversification, education, health and the good life.
