In a nutshell, this is what I see as one of the problems that Kuwait needs to deal with and soon. The parliament, known as the National Assembly, has never wielded as much power as it needs to be able to oversee mismanagement in the ministries and other parts of government.

Nor has the parliament ever had enough clout to be able to stop the flagrant crony capitalism which stunts investment for the majority of people here and abroad-while filling up the pillows of a few wealthy and well-connected insider Kuwaiti wheeler dealers.

Unlike in other democratic lands, the Kuwaiti parliament can't vote out the prime minister-who in Kuwait is chosen by the unelected members of the various factions of the royal family. In short, in these ways, the Kuwaiti system is not much different than the one which functions in Saudi Arabia.

BLAMING IT ALL ON PARLIAMENT

On the other hand, very unlike in Saudi Arabia and in the various other emirates in this Gulf region, "The ruling Sabah family acquired its position not through conquest, but with an agreement among the coastal traders of the region in the mid-18th century. After gaining independence from the British in 1961, the emir approved a written constitution that sharply limited his power in relation to Parliament."

For this reason, Worth rightfully notes, "In some ways, Kuwait is the most democratic country in Arab world, aside from Lebanon. There are Arab republics - in Yemen, Egypt, Algeria, Syria and Iraq - but despite their democratic forms, these countries have generally been more autocratic and repressive than the region's monarchies. Even in Lebanon, democracy is limited by a sectarian system of power-sharing."

One Kuwait University Political Science Professor, Ghanim al Najjar, claims, "This ruling family is different from any other ruling family in the region ....They are part of the political process, not on top of it."

Nonetheless, it is quite obvious to any political observer (esp. political scientist) that the Kuwaiti National Assembly has never had the constitutional tools to properly run the country and allow for more than the currently mediocre political and economic system, i.e. which 21st Century Kuwaiti's have inherited today.

One of the favorite activities of ardent royal family supporters in and out of parliament has been to always blame the National for its own disintegration and failures.

On the one hand, this can be true.

For example, a very conservative parliament was elected in the late 1990s and again early in this decade. Suddenly, the public schools and all universities were made segregated by the new parliaments. In other cases, women's working rights were curtailed, e.g. women were not allowed to work after 8pm in the evening

These sort of conservative innovations by the male-only parliaments up to now have, in fact, hurt all levels of education and economic development in the country by demanding, for example, two sets of teachers for the boys and the girls classes--as well as unnecessarily having required new sport halls and classrooms to be built all over the land. This requires some students at the university level to wait several years for required courses to be offered for his or her gender.

Other parliaments did other economically horrible and populist things, like having the state take over the debt of billions of dollars of debt from its citizens-some citizens who were already quite wealthy. [This kind of abuse happens in the USA and the UK, though, too. There have been debt forgiveness for Savings & Loans and investors in recent years which even aided Bush family members, like Neil Bush.]

The most recent time this debt forgiveness scheme occurred in Kuwait was back in the early 1990s, i.e. just after the Gulf War.

However, there were also representatives in the most recent parliament demanding 1000s of more dollars as outright loan forgiveness by the government in 2007 and 2008. [The emir opposed this plan.]

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