Saturday, February 25, 2006
All the things you wanted to know about Dubai.
But didn't know where to look, are provided by this report from Newsweek.It would seem to be that everything you heard about the place is true:
Ah, Dubai. It’s a glitzy tourist Mecca and boom-town extraordinaire now, with spectacular hotels, water parks, indoor snow skiing, the world’s tallest building under construction and vast networks of man-made islands visible from outer space as a palm tree and a map of the world. Built from the sand up purely to facilitate business and pleasure, there really is not and never has been any place quite like it.....Feeling better about the deal yet?
.....To be sure, Al-Maktoum had a useful tradition to build on. Dubai was, is, and ever has been a place for traders, entrepreneurs, moneymen, intriguers, smugglers and spies. In a region of notorious bureaucracy and protectionism, Dubai looked quite lawless because its rulers wanted, well, less law.....
......You don’t create a wide-open trading environment, of course, without attracting some controversial, even dangerous, customers. If Somerset Maugham’s description “a sunny place for shady people” was apt for Monaco, he should have seen the sun and shadows in Dubai. The nuclear network of renegade Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan ran some of its black-market trade through there. Part of the money underwriting the 9/11 attacks on the United States went through Dubai’s banks and moneychangers. Iran’s government and the Iranian people have often used the emirate to bypass the embargos and boycotts imposed on them.
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