Word: kuwaiti
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Without a country to govern, many in Taif have little to do but worry. They dial around the world in search of news, play countless rounds of hand, the 14-card Kuwaiti version of gin rummy, and recall receiving Iraqi television transmissions at home in Kuwait. "Saddam was on all the time," says a Kuwaiti minister. "On any given day you could see him instructing women on how to make tomato paste, or children on how to brush their teeth. It was some of the best comedy around...
Until he was 12, Khalifa attended elementary school in Baghdad, where his Iraqi-born mother went to live after her husband died. Khalifa learned English at a private academy in Cairo, and like every Kuwaiti who wanted a college education before Kuwait University was inaugurated in 1966, went abroad to study. Before being graduated with a B.A. in mathematics from San Francisco State University, Khalifa spent two years at Berkeley, where his chemistry lab partner was Mario Savio, the radical student leader who founded the Free Speech Movement. "To be at Berkeley in the '60s was wonderful," says Khalifa...
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...
...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...
...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...