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An Arab friend once told; all those pseudo-oil-kingdoms-with-small-populations (from Brunei till Qatar) are created by colonial powers of 20th century around th
by diminish 14y ago
An Arab friend once told; all those pseudo-oil-kingdoms-with-small-populations (from Brunei till Qatar) are created by colonial powers of 20th century around the oil fields to save the oil revenues from a larger population benefiting and controlling them. Those sultanates usually play the happy-sultan-cherishes-its-people-wow! game recently. But if you look around them, they are cut-off from poorer countries with larger populations.
I am skeptical of those oasis of happiness in the middle of a desert full of desperadoes.
- netcan 14y agoIn a sense this their continued existence is a testament to the post UN conquest-is-illegal world order. It's not as clean as that (the US has a substantial military presence in Bahrain, for example), but still.It would be hard to imagine such weak, rich, independent patches of land remaining that way for long in any other period. For now though they seem to be comfortably clustered. Out of all these mini states though, only Kuwait borders a poorer more powerful state (it was invaded in the 90s and was repelled by the US/UN).
- cafard 14y agoThe desert full of desperadoes immediately adjacent belongs to Saudi Arabia, no? Undoubtedly the colonial powers of the later 20th Century took full advantage in picking over the carcass of Ottoman Empire to settle things to their own advantage. Yet it's not clear to me that there were larger nearby populations with a compelling claim to the Gulf sultanates.