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Realizing the Sabahs' vision of a modern city-state required land expropriation -- an action that normally leaves individuals poorer but that the Sabahs contrived as a wealth spreader. After a straight-up appraisal of land and homes, people were compensated at rates that often surpassed five times market value. The newly "homeless" pocketed most of the money, since they were given low-interest loans to build new houses and were granted land that had previously been used by grazing sheep and goats.
The Sabahs also instituted a cradle-to-grave welfare system. Education, health care and every public utility were provided free, or nearly so. And every Kuwaiti -- even the illiterate -- was guaranteed a government job for life, as intriguing a way of distributing the booty as was ever invented.
To serve the prosperous and perform most of the work, large numbers of foreign workers were attracted to Kuwait by wages far higher than those they could command at home. In the role of contractors, importers, landlords and bankers, many Kuwaitis found themselves members of a privileged minority set above the expatriate work force. A law enacted in the late 1950s required foreign businessmen to take Kuwaiti partners, another risk-free method of wealth creation that made millionaires of many overnight.
"It is wonderful on paper," says Hasan al-Ebraheem, a former Kuwaiti Education Minister. "But it has had awful repercussions." By the time of Saddam's invasion, the cleavage between Kuwaitis and non-Kuwaitis had worsened considerably. Foreigners account for more than 60% of Kuwait's population and more than 80% of its work force. "Oil exacerbated the underlying tensions," says Saad Eddin Ibrahim, an Egyptian political sociology professor at the American University in Cairo. "The fantastic wealth made all Kuwaitis keener on emphasizing their Kuwaitiness because being Kuwaiti meant enormous privileges."
It is not that the Kuwaitis were ungenerous. The welfare-state umbrella covered non-Kuwaitis almost as well as it protected the natives. Expatriates could prosper, and many did. But everything about the rest of a foreigner's life in Kuwait was demonstrably second class. As naturalization was almost impossible, an expatriate's stay in the country depended on the whim of his employer. Noncitizens could be deported without recourse, and they frequently were when economic demand slackened or political crisis threatened. Foreigners could not own homes or land. Those who worked for the government were eligible for subsidized housing. Those employed in the private sector were forced to find lodgings on the open market, which often meant living in slums, since rents were exorbitant. In time, a housing apartheid grew, with some of the Palestinian neighborhoods dubbed "Gaza" and "the West Bank." Even the Kuwaiti-born children of foreigners could be expelled from the only country they had ever known if they were unable to find work on their own account when they reached 18.
There was something of a two-tier system among Kuwaitis themselves. Like preferred shareholders in a corporation that issues A and B stock, only males whose forebears were residents before 1920 were entitled to vote -- a mere 85,000 out of 826,500 Kuwaitis.