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Most Western oilmen realize this, yet reform necessarily lags behind royalties. It is easier to extract a million barrels of oil than to educate a whole people to a new, precarious, speeded-up way of life. Moreover, oil companies must beware of interfering too much: the sheik they prod may also cancel their concession. Yet (as Iran proved) if the company doesn't prod, the internal discontent can become so explosive as to endanger its position. Damned if they do, and damned if they don't, the companies move circumspectly, and in most cases with surprising skill. To bring the Persian Gulf from the era of Mohammed to the age of Stratocruisers is in many respects as difficult a task as Lenin set himself to. It must be done by precept and persuasion, with no secret police to compel obedience. As a piece of social engineering, this job, being attempted by capitalists who abhor the word revolution, bears comparison with the Russian Revolution.
TIME'S Middle East Correspondent James Bell has toured the Persian Gulf area for the past five weeks, observing the revolution. His report:
KUWAIT
The only thing small about Kuwait (rhymes with do right) is its size—6,000 square miles of overheated, waterless, treeless land at the northern end of the Persian Gulf. Everything else about it is fantastically big:
¶ Kuwait is gushing oil at the fastest rising rate in the world. From nothing in 1945, production zoomed to 240,000 barrels daily in 1949 to 650,000 barrels last year—and it is still going up. A few more heaves and Kuwait will top Saudi Arabia's nearby Aramco field, now the world's No. 1 producer.
¶ Kuwait's Burgan Field is the richest in the world. Its proven reserve of some 15 billion barrels equals roughly half the entire U.S. proven reserve and one-sixth of the world total. Comparison: the U.S.'s East Texas field, which intoxicated U.S. oilmen in the '30s, held only 5 billion barrels.
¶ Kuwait's loading dock at Mena al Ahmadi, which thrusts nearly a mile out into the Persian Gulf, is the world's largest.
¶ Kuwait's Sheik Abdullah al Salim al Sabah will get more than $200 million in oil royalties this year, the biggest oil royalty cut in the world. He probably has the biggest annual income of any man on earth. All this has come to a land no bigger than New Jersey, which was still living meanly at the close of World War II in an economy based mainly on pearling and Gulf shipping. The men responsible for this revolution—in a land where slaveholding is still legal—are a few Westerners, 45 Americans and 625 Britons, representing the Kuwait Oil Co. (a joint operation of Gulf Oil Corp. and Britain's Anglo-Iranian). Typical of the Americans are the Charles Jacksons of Cairo, Ill. Jackson, a weather-beaten well driller, runs his rig with the help of six Kuwaitis who are paid on a scale ranging from $1 to $2 a day. Jackson worries about his Kuwaitis: "They work all right if you watch them, but if you go away you come back and find them asleep."