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It was Khalifa who designed many of Kuwait's successful investment strategies, and Khalifa who reorganized Kuwait's oil industry following the government's 1975 takeover of the Kuwait Oil Co. -- a joint venture of Gulf Oil Corp. and British Petroleum. And now, to no one's surprise, it is Khalifa who is at the center of his country's most ambitious effort: the attempt to reinvent Kuwait. If implemented in its entirety, the intricate and politically tricky plan could transform the demography, character and economy of what everyone involved is calling New Kuwait.
A mere generation ago, the people of the Arabian shore of the Persian Gulf led a life little different from the one their ancestors had led since the advent of Islam. During migrations in search of water and trading locations, mainly from the Najd region of what is today the central part of Saudi Arabia, a group of tribes called the Bani Utub settled the town of Kuwait (in simple translation, Little Fort) in the early 1700s. With trade the major source of income, the tribes established a unique political system. Of the three most , influential families, the Khalifas and the Jalahimas concerned themselves with commerce; the third, the Sabahs, governed. Having voluntarily created an oligarchy of competing interests, Kuwait, in effect, was ruled by popular consent. The contract among the families was the seed of a quasi-democratic tradition that has persisted for nearly three centuries.
When the oil money started accumulating seriously in the early 1950s, the Sabahs concocted a sophisticated scheme for distributing the windfall. Kuwait City, where 80% of the population still lives (or lived before August), was a town of mud huts. The Emir set about building a modern metropolis, a place not unlike Houston, with its skyscraper business center surrounded by villa-style suburbs. In Kuwait, too, each "suburb" became a self-contained microcosm of a city. The neighborhoods were established as cooperatives. Each had its own supermarkets, schools, medical centers and municipal services.
While merely convenient before Aug. 2, the system has served as a lifeline since the invasion. By all accounts, Kuwait City is functioning well for Kuwaitis; however onerous the occupation, Iraq's control of the city is not total. Neighborhood committees provide a range of services one would think impossible in the circumstances: food that was secreted in the early days of August is distributed according to need, rudimentary medical service is available, and as the world now knows, scores of foreigners were successfully hidden from Iraqi authorities for more than four months.
Some of those foreigners actively helped the resistance. "We taught them how to make homemade Claymore mines and various antipersonnel devices," says Joseph Lammerding, an American engineer who worked for the Kuwaiti military. "You would take quarter sticks of TNT, which are commonly used in oil drilling, dip them in glue and roll them in buckshot," he explains. "Then you would set them off in the middle of a group of Iraqis. To make homemade plastic explosives, you would cook a mixture of diesel oil and powdered soap."