KUWAIT CITY, Kuwait – Once in a while during these nervous days on the borders of war, the conversations wander to the political, religious and ethnic roots of the region’s current problems. Here in Kuwait, the term “Bedouinization” keeps coming up.

Educated Kuwaitis look at their rising Islamic population – which has nothing to do, at least so far, with al-Qaida, but which could become fertile soil for the movement’s expansion – and their thoughts go to the 1970s.