Editor's Letter

A Country in Exile

The face of Saddam Hussein is notorious in the gallery of America's Most Wanted, but few people could identify or characterize the rulers of Kuwait, in whose cause the world stands poised for war, until the emir arrived in the U.S. at the end of September. Who is Sheikh Jaber al-Ahmed al-Sabah? Who is Sheikh Saad al-Abdullah al-Sabah? What kind of rulers were they? Are the multinational forces in the Saudi desert there to make the world safe for democracy—or despotism?

We asked Christopher Dickey to tell us. From 1985 to 1988, he covered the Middle East for The Washington Post and then for Newsweek, and his recent acclaimed book, Expats, looks at the new Arabia and the expatriates who created it. The Kuwaitis, he tells us, were before the invasion "among the most hated people in the Arab world, and the alSabah among the most hated Kuwaitis." What had once held promise as a rich little welfare state had become an autocracy of money as a "shriekingly wealthy" elite grappled with the new imperatives of keeping power in a changing Persian Gulf.

Though the al-Sabah have for the time being lost their country, they have kept their power. Kuwaitis are united behind them, and their wealth is so astronomical that, with a wave of his credit card, the emir can shake the foundations of the world's big-name companies and its greatest banks. The al-Sabah, Dickey writes, are "a country in exile." His report, on page 154, suggests that despite their eviction to the playgrounds of Europe they may still have the resilience to outlast the man who deposed them.

Editor in chief