After the Iraq-Kuwait Storm: Smooth Sailing for Arab Gulf States

By Richard H. Curtiss

A month after the August 2, 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the publisher and the executive editor of this magazine visited Arab countries in which US Desert Shield military forces were stationed, and reported on the trip in the November 1990 issue. One year later, they revisited those countries. These are their first two reports. Others will be printed as space permits.)

Qatar: "Who Would Have Dreamed It Would Turn Out So Well?"

"Something must be going on in Qatar," the travel agent in Washington had said. "It's almost impossible to find an empty seat on any flight going in."

What's going on is that Qataris are returning home in droves, after longer-than-normal vacations abroad, to compensate for vacations cut short a year ago by the Aug. 2, 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

The early September air that envelops passengers deplaning in Doha is the same hot mid wave as one year ago. Much else is changed, however, in the most lightly populated of the six member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council. For one thing, until Iraq and Kuwait recover from the war, Qater's 400,000-barrel-a-day production makes it the ninth largest producer in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting States (OPEC).

On our arrival a year ago, US Ambassador Mark Hambley was hosting a reception to enable members of a 650-strong US Air Force contingent who had arrived Aug. 29 to meet Qataris who would be their hosts for the duration of "Desert Shield."

The last of those young Americans had departed last March 29, seven months to the day after their arrival, and only days after completing the last combat strikes over the Gulf, Kuwait and Iraq in what had turned into "Desert Storm. " There were no serious incidents, hardly even a fender-bender traffic accident, and the standard status-of-forces agreement that was to have regulated how such incidents involving US service members in Qatar would be handled by the judicial authorities of the two countries had not even been signed.

Now Ambassador Hambley is hosting young sailors from a US frigate out of Long Beach, California, one of 26 US Naval ships still in the Gulf. The frigate, carrying helicopters and, in the Gulf only, batteries of Stinger surface-to-air missiles, is making a routine flag-showing port call exactly like those conducted before the Gulf war.

When the frigate's sailors, in turn, host local dignitaries, as a hot sticky evening wind blows across the gently rocking deck, Qatari merchant Said Al Manna, who just a year ago advocated giving Saddam Hussain the contested but uninhabited Warba and Bubiyan islands and the rump of the Rumaila oil field in return for Iraqi agreement to withdraw peacefully and drop all further claims to Kuwait, greets us with a smile.

Yes, business is good, he acknowledges. Yes, he is relaxed, he admits. Then, with an intensity that recalls the frightened conversation of a year ago, he confides: "Who could have dreamed it would turn out so well?"

Like members of the public, Qatari government officials seem almost unable to believe their luck. A year ago, the entire Arab world was in shock. Saddam Hussain had broken two taboos when he unleashed the military forces of Arab and Muslim Iraq to seize all of Arab and Muslim Kuwait.

Then Kuwait's fellow GCC and other Arab countries had broken the third taboo. They and other Arab and Muslim countries joined with non-Arab, non-Muslim countries in a coalition against the invader, even after he labeled his move the first step on the road to the liberation of Muslim holy places in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem.

The reaction of the GCC countries to the Iraqi invasion had opened them to the charge of being a party to a US-conceived conspiracy to reduce the only Arab army capable of accomplishing that liberation, and, according to Saddam Hussain, of being a party to the desecration by foreign armies of the principal Islamic holy places in Saudi Arabia.

Would the Islamic masses be swayed by the Iraqi propaganda? Or would they see the UN coalition entered into by Qatar and its GCC partners as the only possible means to reverse the unprecedented military annexation of one sovereign UN member by another, and to prevent similar invasions, perhaps of their own countries, in the future?

Seven months later history had provided the answer. Qataris are still aglow about the role of their army, which participated with distinction in the brief but deadly battle with Iraqi armored columns in the Saudi Arabian town of Al Khafii, as well as in the actual coalition thrust, a few days later, into Kuwait.

When the troops returned to a royal welcome, Qatar's normally mild and soft spoken ruler, Sheikh Khalifa Bin Hamad Al Thani, shed his customary reserve and joined his son and heir-apparent, Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al Thani, the minister of defense, and the returning troops in an impromptu "Ardlia, " the traditional Bedouin war dance. Now informal photos of the broadly smiling ruler, brandishing a sword, pop up in store windows and in government offices alongside the sedately formal portraits of the emir and the heir-apparent.

The emir of Qatar is still smiling as world petroleum prices rise to $19 a barrel with no sign of decline, and the country's almost unbelievable offshore gas deposits move closer to commercial exploitation. The money already flowing in is replacing the losses the tiny state suffered from helping to finance Saddam's war against Iran, and later the coalition's rollback of Iraq from Kuwait. A year ago, no Qatari government official could have predicted how quickly the area would recover from the invasion shock, or the surge of confidence and new investment apparent in every corner of the realm.

The Latest Rumor

On this trip, however, a member of Qatar's cabinet repeats over lunch the latest rumor, in an area where conspiracy theories flourish whenever unexpected events need to be explained. A year ago, Arab leaders in the Gulf described the invasion of Kuwait as the first step of a Saddam Hussain conspiracy with Jordan, Yemen, Sudan, the PLO and perhaps Tunisia to subvert and take over all of the GCC countries. By contrast, from Morocco to Syria, the Arab "street, " citing, among others, statements by some peace activists in the US, charged that Saddam Hussain had fallen into a US "trap" to lure him into invading Kuwait with the belief that he would not be opposed, and then crush him.

Now, a Libyan emissary has arrived with messages from Muammar Qaddafi informing Arab rulers in the Gulf that Saddam Hussain was a US agent all along. The Iraqi invasion, according to Qaddafi deputy Ahmad Qaddaf Al Dam, was a provocation, designed solely to provide the United States with an excuse to entrench its forces permanently among the Gulf oil fields.

Qaddafi's "evidence" is the just-signed US treaty with Kuwait to station US forces and pre-position US military supplies there, with possibly more such treaties to come. The Qatari official doesn't believe the Libyan story, he says. Nevertheless, what do two visiting Americans have to say about it?

He is mildly reassured when we scoff at the Libyan invention. He is genuinely astonished, however, when we assure him that, with President George Bush's press conference explaining why he wishes to postpone US loan guarantees and possibly other aid to Israel, the tide of US-Israeli relations has been reversed for the duration of the Bush presidency, and probably for all time.

But, he asks, won't the AIPAC-controlled Congress overrule Bush? Assured that presidents who take sound foreign policy initiatives forthrightly to the people have their way with Congress, and eventually with the press as well, he is delighted at the thought that the 43-year stranglehold, as viewed by Europeans and Arabs, of Israel's lobby on US Middle East policy, has been broken.

Rumors travel rapidly in the Middle East. Hard, factual news follows slowly, if at all.

The view from the Doha Sheraton, one of the truly great hotels not only of the Middle East, but of the world, is peaceful. A year ago, every morning the quiet was shattered by US F-16s. Now, on weekdays, one or two Qatari Air Force jets make a daily reassuring pass near the city. Somehow the windows don't rattle menacingly as they did a year ago, however, and there are no such military flights on the Thursday-Friday weekend. Instead the wind blowing off the blue Gulf waters in front of the hotel is alive with the whine of jet-skis and power cruisers roaring among sailboats and traditional fishing dhows crossing the broad bay that links the tall buildings of downtown Doha with its sparkling white, all-new suburbs.

Something in the Wind

The view this year is seldom clear, however. There is something in the wind. Some days, it seems to be a mist from the sea, other days, dust from the desert. But however the day starts, by late afternoon the haze reveals the dark hues of smoke from Kuwait's burning oil fields, 400 miles to the north.

The US ambassador calls the result "smoid," a constantly varying mix of smoke, oil and dust that has lowered average temperatures in Bahrain and Qatar by about seven degrees throughout the summer, and resulted in unseasonal, but sometimes oil poisoned, rains across Saudi Arabia and south to Yemen.

During our visit to Qatar the smothering of 10 Kuwaiti oil well fires brings the total extinguished to 350. The news gives increasing credence to the optimistic Kuwaiti prediction that the last of the 700 fires, still costing Kuwait $100 million a day, will be extinguished in March of 1992.

Meanwhile, the heavy air of Qatar looks, to the young sailors from Long Beach, much like the smog of adjacent Los Angeles. It is the first look at the Gulf for most of them, since the ship was not involved in the Gulf war. Older members of the crew, however, remember this same ship's role in protecting the very first US-flagged Kuwaiti tankers in the Gulf, when the US began the 1988 "tilt" toward Iraq that ended the nine-year Iran-Iraq war, but inadvertently set the stage for Saddam's lunge into Kuwait.

When the ship again visits the Gulf, two or three years in the future, the air may once again be clear, the butcher no longer in Baghdad, and the governing mullahs in nearby Iran more concerned with the quality of life than the quality of death for their suffering people. By then, perhaps, the US-Qatar status of-forces agreement may be signed, but its actual use confined to US sailors "showing the flag" on routine, peacetime visits.

Richard Curtiss, a retired US foreign Service officer, is executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.