There's a great reply to this article in its comment section. It's so good I'm going to post it here: by [tom s](http://flickr.com/photos/tomspender) > Nice rant - but way off the mark. Here’s the point: Dubai is not a “business idea” - it;s a real place full of real people. The reason it is as it is is precisely BECAUSE there is no oil. If Dubai had unlimited oil it could sit back and be Saudi Arabia. Instead, it has successfully diversified away from oil in a daring and existentially vital bid to get to a point where they don;t rely on oil revenues at all. As a result, it has developed a western-style economy which is totally screwed now in the same way as credit-card economies like the US/UK etc. There’s plenty of vice in Dubai, even if it is rather charmless (as I imagine it is in Vegas). Every hotel has a bar full of Chinese/Djiboutian/Ukranian hookers, while the Moroccans, Syrians and Iranians are preferred by the rich Arabs and so have a higher status. There is also plenty of booze (although not much harder drugs). The key to understanding the place is to read between the lines rather than taking the letter of the law. The code of conduct is basically “do what you want - anything at all - but just don’t shout about it”. There are rules about what you do in public, but what you do in the privacy of your own home is between you and your conscience. While westerners are pretty visible in Dubai and tend to be the main preoccupation of other westerners abroad (like the writer of this blog), Dubai is in fact vital for millions of other people in a region of pathetically badly-run countries. It offers jobs and opportunity to Arabs from economic basket cases like Egypt, Syria and the Occupied Palestinian Territories as well as loads of Indians and Pakistanis and an investment environment which, while incredibly opaque, is far less risky than home - places like Iraq, Iran, Uzbekistan or Ukraine. The place is also a vital node on the global transport map between Europe and Asia. Westerners may well leave, especially if the place introduces tax, but that doesn’t mean Dubai is dead. Far from it. Dubai may not boast Parisian sophistication, and its own hubris has set it up as a target for opprobrium now things aren’t going so well, but I am still getting quite sick of all this nasty schadenfreude by western journalists who show up in Dubai, do an open-top bus tour for a couple of hours, and sneer that the place is a shithole and a “bad business idea”. It is not charming, but it has broken the pervasive Arab taboo of not achieving anything at all and for that it deserves recognition. And I can’t help feeling that it is exactly that that makes some foreign commentators uncomfortable.
GOODBYE DUBAI: Imagine proposing to build Vegas in a place where sex and drugs and rock and roll are an anathema. This is effectively the proposition that created Dubai - it was a stupid idea before the crash, and now it is dangerous. (via backtype.com)
There's a great reply to this article in its comment section. It's so good I'm going to post it here: by [tom s](http://flickr.com/photos/tomspender) > Nice rant - but way off the mark. Here’s the point: Dubai is not a “business idea” - it;s a real place full of real people. The reason it is as it is is precisely BECAUSE there is no oil. If Dubai had unlimited oil it could sit back and be Saudi Arabia. Instead, it has successfully diversified away from oil in a daring and existentially vital bid to get to a point where they don;t rely on oil revenues at all. As a result, it has developed a western-style economy which is totally screwed now in the same way as credit-card economies like the US/UK etc. There’s plenty of vice in Dubai, even if it is rather charmless (as I imagine it is in Vegas). Every hotel has a bar full of Chinese/Djiboutian/Ukranian hookers, while the Moroccans, Syrians and Iranians are preferred by the rich Arabs and so have a higher status. There is also plenty of booze (although not much harder drugs). The key to understanding the place is to read between the lines rather than taking the letter of the law. The code of conduct is basically “do what you want - anything at all - but just don’t shout about it”. There are rules about what you do in public, but what you do in the privacy of your own home is between you and your conscience. While westerners are pretty visible in Dubai and tend to be the main preoccupation of other westerners abroad (like the writer of this blog), Dubai is in fact vital for millions of other people in a region of pathetically badly-run countries. It offers jobs and opportunity to Arabs from economic basket cases like Egypt, Syria and the Occupied Palestinian Territories as well as loads of Indians and Pakistanis and an investment environment which, while incredibly opaque, is far less risky than home - places like Iraq, Iran, Uzbekistan or Ukraine. The place is also a vital node on the global transport map between Europe and Asia. Westerners may well leave, especially if the place introduces tax, but that doesn’t mean Dubai is dead. Far from it. Dubai may not boast Parisian sophistication, and its own hubris has set it up as a target for opprobrium now things aren’t going so well, but I am still getting quite sick of all this nasty schadenfreude by western journalists who show up in Dubai, do an open-top bus tour for a couple of hours, and sneer that the place is a shithole and a “bad business idea”. It is not charming, but it has broken the pervasive Arab taboo of not achieving anything at all and for that it deserves recognition. And I can’t help feeling that it is exactly that that makes some foreign commentators uncomfortable.
