Mullings: An American Cyber-column By Rich Galen

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Someone Else's Democracy

Friday July 4, 2003

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TRAVELOGUE ALERT: The First Installment of the Kuwait Travelogue (Kuwait Here. I'll Be Right Back) is on the Secret Decoder Ring page. It is another airline adventure - two airlines, three flights, three continents, about 1,283 hours of travel. The usual.

Sunday's Mullings will contain the first actual Kuwaiti experiences.

American-style Democracy is in the news everywhere this July 4th - including here in Kuwait where (a) they will be holding national elections for Parliament tomorrow and (b) by the time you read this I will have been to and back from visiting the troops at Camp Doha.

I can't think of a better place to spend Independence Day than with the kids who are keeping us Independent at, as they say, the pointy end of the sword.

Watching other countries practice democracy is like going to someone else's family for Thanksgiving dinner: Your family knows that your Uncle Al will do all the awful things he does every year.

Watching someone else's Uncle Al at someone else's house tends to make us want to eat fast, offer to help clean up, sigh with relief when the offer is declined, and then excuse ourselves from the premises as quickly as possible.

Kuwait is, like all the Gulf States, a hereditary monarchy. The head of state and head of government is the Emir. Kuwait became independent from Great Britain in 1961.

There are about 2.1 million people here, of whom about 1 million are citizens but only about 120,000 of those are permitted to vote. No women are among them.

Prior to 1996 the only people who were eligible to vote were adult males who had resided in Kuwait since before 1920 and their male descendants (at age 21). In 1996 this was liberalized to include adult males who have become naturalized citizens - for at least 30 years - and their male progeny.

The business of Kuwait is oil. Period. The end. About 2 million barrels per day. At a price of about $28 per, that works out to $56,000,000 in income each and every day.

The amount of arable land in Kuwait is .34 %, (that's thirty-four one-hundredths of one percent) which is like saying the total amount of arable land in New Jersey is the median strip on the Garden State Parkway.

Oil pays for everything: There are no personal taxes of any kind. There is universal free education through college, universal free health care, and universal government payments (92 percent of all Kuwaitis who work, work for the government).

The Parliament consists of 50 members who are elected from 25 districts and serve four year terms. There are no formal political parties but the members split up into three principal groups: Islamists, Tribalists (who vote with the Islamists) and the Secularists.

The Parliament can overturn an Amiri decree by a simple majority. One such decree - granting suffrage to women - was overturned by the Islamic/Tribalist coalition.

The royal family (in the Gulf States the royal families own, control, or influence everything) is not supposed to get involved in the electoral process, but there is a general understanding that the royals are using the current weakness of the Islamists (because of 9/11 and the Gulf War) to press their advantage and elect more liberal Secularist candidates.

So much so, that if the Islamists maintain or grow their numbers in Saturday's election it will be seen as a major upset and will be a blow to the ruling family's instincts toward liberalizing the cultural and political systems here.

There is no public issue about America or Americans - other than the Islamists decrying the "globalization" of American culture. Everyone understands that, were it not for the US (and the Brits before us), Uday and Qusay would be drag racing down Arabian Gulf Street this very day.

In spite of it all, the Kuwaitis have held elections on a more-or-less regular basis since independence, an activity in which other Gulf States have only recently decided to join.

So, I am here to watch the elections. There is no Uncle Al, but there is an Uncle Ali. And, while it is imperfect, he will be participating in an election - one whose outcome is of great importance to Kuwait and to the entire region.

Even some democracy is far, far better than none at all.

Happy Fourth.

On the Secret Decoder Ring page today: Chapter One of the Kuwait Travelogue: A Middle Seat; a link to the CIA's Factbook entry on Kuwait, and the usual things.

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