Tiny Little Country, Great Big Oil Reserves

Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait threatened world petroleum reserves and prompted a U.S.-led international coalition to re-invade and give the Iraqis the boot. The two invasions left Kuwait in shambles. Their formerly well-equipped military had to be rebuilt essentially from scratch.

Kuwait is one of the few countries allowed to buy F-18s...	...and the M-1 Abrams tank

Luckily for the Kuwaitis and U.S. arms merchants, Kuwait is a tiny little country with great big oil reserves. Kuwaiti petrodollars fueled a rapid military rebirth and the U.S., for the most part, happily supplied the arms. For a brief, shining moment, Kuwait was America's third-largest arms customer, and under Bill Clinton, the good times have kept rolling. The U.S. has approved over $4.9 billion worth of weapons sales to the Sheikdom of Kuwait since 1993, including McDonnell Douglas (now Boeing) AH-64 Apache helicopters, General Dynamics M1A2 tanks, M109A6 self-propelled howitzers, Rockwell Hellfire anti-tank missiles and 13,000 Hydra-70 rockets.

U.S. arms sales in the Clinton years Direct government sales Government-approved sales (scale in millions of dollars)

Kuwait, like another of our largest customers, Saudi Arabia, is a monarchy in which ordinary citizens have no more power to change their head of state than do their Iraqi neighbors. Although the nation does have an elected parliament and a constitution, the al-Sabah family rules the nation by right of birth. And Kuwait, you may recall, is also a patriarchy in the classical sense, one of those places where women are unable to even drive, much less hold power. With a population under 2 million, the Kuwaitis -- as they demonstrated in 1990 -- can hardly threaten or even resist larger neighbors such as Iraq. However, as an oil-rich dynasty operating without popular mandate, it is in the al-Sabah family's interests to maintain a high level of "readiness."

-- Mat Honan

Flags courtesy of World Flag Database
Photos by AP/Wide World Photos