That's "Qu'aiti", not "Kuwaiti"

In the process of researching this post, I made an interesting discovery. When I was writing my dissertation about the Dhofar Rebellion,

"Muscat was in deplorable condition....I had seen what could be done in the Hadhramaut and in the Qu'aiti State in particular, with a revenue about one half of what the Sultan of Muscat drew in customs duties; yet here there were no medical services in the whole country. I made a tour soon after my arrival with an economic expert and a representative from the Development Division at the British Embassy in Beirut. The latter told the Sultan after the tour that, in twenty years experience of most of the countries of the Middle East, he had never seen a people so poverty stricken or so debilitated with disease capable of treatment and cure."[1]

[1] Townsend, John; Oman, the Making of a Modern State; St. Martin's Press; New York; 1977; pp. 66

In the interest of full disclosure, while that quote is properly cited here, and was properly cited in my dissertation, I absolutely ripped the citation off from this 1985 paper for the Marine Corps Command and Staff College by Major John B. Meagher, and I feel like I found the same quotation in Tony Geraghty's Who Dares Wins: History of the Special Air Service (the 2002 edition is linked, but my copy is the 1983 edition). I thought to myself, "Of course! In the 1950's, Kuwait was still a poor backwater! It would have been a perfect contrast to Sultan Said's mismanagement of Oman!"

No, dear reader. No.

In fact, while researching that other blog post, I learned that there was a sultanate called Qu'aiti, which was one of the Protectorate of South Arabia's four constituent parts. When the Protectorate collapsed upon British withdrawal in 1967, the four tiny monarchies collapsed and were subsumed into South Yemen, and are now part of the Hadhramaut Governorate in the present day Republic of Yemen. In no way was this the State of Kuwait, famous since 1990 as the venue for Saddam Hussein's final episode of military adventurism.

Let it never be said that I don't admit when I'm wrong... Even when I technically never voiced this particular instance of inaccuracy in presumption.