To build upon the sand.

• Author: Reed, Amy Charlene
• Position: North Carolina firms' reconstruction contracts with Kuwait

Foolish is one way to describe Tar Heels who forecasted a big windfall from Desert Storm.

It is almost 11 p.m. in Kuwait City, and Bobby Rupert has just returned to his $250-a-night hotel room after a long evening of meetings. The Harnett County builder who specializes in housing for construction workers is in town hoping to cash in on the rebuilding of Kuwait, a prize some American business people have been drooling over since the dust settled from Operation Desert Storm in February.

But after many fruitless meetings, Rupert is weary and frustrated. "Everybody in the world is tooting their horn about the business opportunities over here," he says. "But the damage to buildings is nowhere near as bad as we thought it would be. There is not the structural damage that we believed at first had occurred."

Even the optimistic U.S. Department of Commerce has cut its estimates of reconstruction work from $60 billion to $25 billion over the next five years. Since it sent more soldiers to Desert Storm than any other state, it's logical that North Carolina also sports its share of fortune hunters looking to clean up Saddam Hussein's mess. But Rupert and others have learned that making a buck in the desert kingdom won't be easy.

When the war ended and the grateful Kuwaitis began talking of billions of dollars of reconstruction work ahead for their allies, the ballyhoo began. Both blue-suits and blue-collars worked themselves into a frenzy over rumors of multimillion-dollar contracts and $70,000-a-year laborer jobs. The Gulf Reconstruction Center, which the Department of Commerce set up in Washington, answered 6,000 calls an hour in the weeks following the cease-fire. J.A. Jones Construction Co. of Charlotte, which has had close ties with Arab governments for decades, received 12,000 resumes.

But the work has fallen far short of expectations. As of June, the Commerce Department estimated that Kuwait had awarded approximately 300 contracts to American companies, totaling $500 million. Rupert is losing money on the one job he finagled in Kuwait. jones had no work for its 12,000 applicants as of late june. Other North Carolina-connected companies are having trouble even getting in to take a look around.

It's not that there isn't gold at the end of this rainbow. With 90 billion barrels of oil and $80 billion in foreign assets, Kuwait is no Bangladesh. Its cash flow is strained, however, as the oil wells burn and the yearlong shutdown of its petrochemical industry continues. The kingdom, whose 580,000 citizens are ruled by a 3,000-member royal family, has sold $20 billion of stocks and other overseas assets since the war ended, but it prefers to use proceeds from...