What can we learn from the baffling stance of the Kuwaitis? First, the past conduct of the United States counts for nothing in the present crisis. For months Americans have been amazed that Muslims showed so little appreciation that we helped save Islam from the Russians, fed starving Somalians, and prevented Kosovars from being annihilated. We were damned by Russians, Armenians, many eastern Europeans, and Orthodox Balkan peoples for ousting Milosevic by force and attacking a Christian European country — but oddly, never praised by the Islamic world for saving Muslims and therein incurring such wrath from our natural allies and friends. In this regard, it is not our duty "to get the message out," but rather the Kuwaitis' to admit the truth of the past; it is not our problem to assuage their hurt, but their very real need to lessen our anger that is rising, not diminishing, each day since Sept. 11.
So the case of Kuwait is an example of ungratefulness of a completely different magnitude — one that puts the French of the late 1940s to shame. Quite simply, by autumn 1990 Kuwait had ceased to exist. Invaded and conquered by Iraq in a matter of hours, it was already annexed by Saddam Hussein as a "province" of Iraq. Exiled Kuwaitis of the royal family, who ran from Saddam's tanks, still managed to fly over here to swarm Washington for nearly six months. They immediately began imploring Americans not to give up on them. We were to spend our blood to do what they themselves either could not or would not. Horrific stories of gratuitous Iraqi butchery were staples of congressional committees and the evening news — as we Americans were asked to become allies with an autocratic Islamic state to save it from another Arab dictatorship. In late 1990 purported notions of pan-Arabism, common Islamic brotherhood, and regional solidarity didn't seem to matter much to the Kuwaitis — when the neighborhood viper had slithered in to swallow their country whole.
No Arab state or European nation took the initiative in freeing the Kuwaitis. American servicemen spearheaded their emancipation — and then graciously allowed a token armored column of Kuwaitis to enter their homeland first to "liberate" their enslaved population. If few had seen the Kuwaiti princes scamper out of town when the Iraqis came, the world now witnessed on television their staged triumphant return. Somewhere in between the two events was the intervention of the Americans.
What can we learn from this ungracious about-face? Again, the answer surely is not that we must mediate more, "work harder" on public relations, or learn more about Kuwait. What we know about it is already depressing enough. Since there is not a single democracy or free media in the Arab Middle East, there is almost no chance that religious figures, politicians, academics, intellectuals, and average people can debate honestly the growing contradictions between Islam and the modern world — or Islam's need for Western expertise and the ensuing resentment that such dependency apparently incurs. Instead the success and power of the United States — and to a lesser extent of Israel — in Pavlovian outbursts become the cheap targets when venting Middle-Eastern frustration at internal economic failure, religious hypocrisy, government autocracy, and endemic cultural contradiction, whether in an impoverished Egypt or the affluent Gulf.