Pressed for clarity, the minister put himself in the second group. Perhaps sensing that he had not quite tipped the balance, he added: "I don't want to leave you with the impression that there are fundraising activities on behalf of Hamas or Hezbollah in Kuwait. There isn't. We aren't allowing it."
Praise with faint damning? National Journal's Tish Durkin spent a couple of weeks asking a cross section of Kuwaitis whether Hamas merited the "t" word, and realized that compared with the general public, the minister of state for foreign affairs had issued a ringing denunciation.
The question is not whether Kuwait is with us in the war. It is whether Kuwait is with us on the definition of terrorism.
First, the good news. Compared not only with many of its neighbors but also with its own past, Kuwait offers many reassuring signs for America's future in the region. If you came here, you would find plenty of Kuwaitis who speak the lightly accented, heavily idiomatic English born of long-term student sojourns in the West -- and who can thus bemoan, with all due color, a recent 60 Minutes piece in which Mike Wallace, it is widely believed, overemphasized real, but rare, anti-American hysteria, while underplaying more-typical pro-American exclamations. ("I equate George Bush [the elder] with Muhammed the Prophet!" enthused one liberal, an irreligious, gray-haired man at a diwaniya, or discussion group. The sentiment, if not the comparison, is commonplace.)
Although Kuwaiti women cannot vote, you would find much to counter the image of the Arab female as an oppressed illiterate: For one thing, girls do so much better than boys on the entrance examinations to Kuwait University that in some fields, such as medicine and engineering, the university has instituted affirmative action for males. (Girls are less free than boys to drive around and hang out, so they study.) You would find an incandescent hospitality: Even the up-with-Taliban types are unlikely to give you a piece of their mind without offering an accompanying wedge of cake. You would not find the framework of squalor, repression, and insularity that so often furnish the timber of fanaticism.
No question, Kuwait exemplifies much of what the United States has to work with in this region. For that very reason, though, it is also quite a pure, and therefore potent, example of what the United States has to work against. Even here -- an Arab state that was delivered from the crushing hands of another Arab state by a coalition led by a non-Arab state -- there is compelling evidence that Arab nationalism is not, as it is sometimes described, a once-paramount ideology that was shattered by the Israeli victory in the Six-Day War of 1967 and replaced by Islamic fundamentalism.
On the contrary, Arab nationalism remains a powerfully evocative animal, equal parts fickle and regenerative. It retains an amazing power to color logic, interest, memory, and fundamentalism itself. Thus, you would find in Kuwait some people who feel that just because their country urged the United States to intervene militarily on its behalf in 1990, even if it meant killing innocent Muslim civilians in Iraq, there is no reason that the United States should not be excoriated for killing innocent Muslim civilians in Afghanistan a few years later. Just because Saddam Hussein decided to wrap himself in the glory of the Palestinian cause at about the same time that he decided to invade Kuwait, is no reason to reject the notion that Osama bin Laden acts, on some level, as a champion of Palestine. And just because the United States did a very big, very good thing here once, is no reason to alter one's general assumption that it does very big, very bad things most of the time. I have, for instance, grown used to hearing that the United States left Saddam Hussein in power on purpose, so as to preserve its pretext for a continued military presence in the region.
Again, perspective: There are plenty of Kuwaitis who reject such views, and who, insofar as they are critical of American policy, are reasonably so. That said, it is a serious mistake to dismiss as a fringe or waning element those who hold -- or at least express -- a view of the United States that is, at best, troubling.
There is, however, one issue on which all kinds of Kuwaitis, from the slickest secularist to the fieriest reactionary, do appear to agree, and that is the issue of the intifada. Here, the definition of terrorism is in large part a matter of geography: The crux of what makes an act a terrorist act is not the fact of randomly killing civilians at a disco or in a pizza parlor or on a bus. The crux of the matter is the location of randomly killing civilians at a disco or in a pizza parlor or on a bus. Jocular businessmen and bubbly environmentalists and plump, soft-spoken ladies have explained it to me thusly: If you have a problem with the actions of Israel within and around its borders, then you should do your random killing in and around Israel, and not go blowing up office towers in the United States. That's terrorism.
"Hamas is in what everybody calls 'occupied territories,'" said Victor Abdullah, a professor of political science at Kuwait University. "Occupied territories mean they are their territories. Who occupies them? The Israelis. How can they get them out?" Some Kuwaitis are less emphatic about this, and more troubled; some do draw the line at the notion of killing children -- but no one to whom I spoke failed to express a basic sympathy for what drives Hamas. As for Hamas's targeting of civilians, the typical retort is that the Israelis use their American-sponsored military might against innocent civilians all the time, and that this makes a joke of all the current President Bush's rhetoric about a war on all terrorists everywhere.
Elsewhere in this region, that mind-set would hardly be remarkable. Here, though, the breadth and bile of it did take me by surprise -- not only because Kuwaitis loved the United States in 1991, but also because they hated the Palestinians. In the streets of other countries, Palestinians cheered the Iraqi invasion. Yasir Arafat kissed the face of Saddam. Some of the half-a-million Palestinians then living in Kuwait collaborated with the Iraqis; all incurred stigma as a result. For years afterward, Kuwait and the Palestinian Authority had no official relationship. Kuwaiti donations to the likes of Hamas have reportedly dropped off -- not because of any post-1991 softening toward Israel; not because of a post-9/11 revulsion toward such violence, but because of residual bitterness over the Gulf War betrayal. Even so, even here, when it comes to the United States, Israel, and the Palestinians, no one has a good word to say about anyone except the Palestinians.
There was, however, one major exception to this rule. "I don't see the United States as siding with Israel," said the aforementioned Mohammed al-Sabah, an avowed fan of the Clinton Administration's peacemaking efforts and someone who appeared to be only half joking when he claimed to be "counting on the wisdom of Washington" to avert a full-scale regional war. So there: At least one Kuwaiti is convinced of America's bona fides as an honest, and earnest, broker.
On the street, though, the United States and its policy walk alone. And this is Kuwait. This is the 51st state. This is where they love us.
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