Reporter's Notebook: Dubai, Part 2

UNITED ARAB EMIRATES, Feb. 9, 2005 — -- On any street in Dubai, you're likely to find men in long flowing dishdashes speaking on one of the latest GSM phones and getting into a Porsche Cayenne turbo, a BMW 7 Series or a more exotic car like a Ferrari or Lamborghini.

The streets aren't paved with gold here and these men aren't oil barons (less than 6 percent of Dubai's money comes from oil), but they are the wheelers and dealers of this boomtown. Whether you're wearing the traditional dishdash or an Italian suit, bring your money and leave your politics behind -- it's a simple idea that has created quite a unique society.

This is a country where the ruler, Crown Prince Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, drives himself around in a boxy white Mercedes SUV with just one bodyguard. He is said to jot down license plate numbers of people who are violating traffic laws and have their licenses yanked when he returns to his modest palace. He races in endurance horse rides and can be seen wandering downstairs to the Starbucks at his office building. Compared with the recent inauguration of President Bush, this sort of access to the leader of a country seems unimaginable. An ordinary Emirati can approach the sheik, unusual even for the Middle East.

The vision and plan for Dubai that the sheik has laid out and the projects that are already under way are just half the story. The way the people click with the systems in place is just as interesting.

Watch one of the latest channels on the airwaves in Dubai -- a fashion and lifestyle channel called INtv -- with shows ranging from clothes and cars to events and trends -- and you realize that Dubai is anything but a sleepy little Arab nation steeped in conservative religio-political ideology. Its conservative neighbors, including the other emirates that make up the United Arab Emirates, seem to turn a blind eye toward this young upstart because so many of the most interesting non-oil-based investment opportunities are centered at this emirate.

Watch INtv and you might learn how to tell a lot about the man in the dishdash across from you. For example, an Omani wears a different type of head wrap than a Kuwaiti, and an Emirati models his facial hair differently from a Saudi. Superficial distinctions aside, Dubai has become quite the salad bowl for people from the Middle East and beyond.

More than 85 percent of Dubai's population is from somewhere else. You'll bump into very few true Emiratis. When you actually do, you'll notice that they did their schooling overseas at American or European universities and have come back to lead their country. You'll find women as well as men in positions of power, as entrepreneurs running start-ups in the free-trade zones as well as in other segments of society. You'll find Europeans of all sorts escaping the chills of their homelands on the beach resorts. You'll find Lebanese, Syrians, Libyans, Saudis, Kuwaitis -- and then there are the Asians.

It's a reality that smacked me in the face rather quickly: most of the blue-collar work in Dubai is done by South Asians. I am of South Asian descent myself, so perhaps this is what someone from Mexico feels like when they go on holiday to the southwestern United States. In Dubai, Indians and Pakistanis work construction jobs night and day. For all the building that is going on, the bulk of the sweat equity is from the backs of my people.

They live in labor camps and work under conditions that have at times been exploitative -- a reality recently gaining traction in the local press. They drive the taxis and mop the floors of hotels. Joining them in the hospitality industry and behind the counters of drug stores are East Asians and Southeast Asians and Africans. I'm sure there are examples of these minorities moving upward in Dubai as well (I met a few of them), but the number of foreign minorities doing menial work is visible from the moment you set foot here.

This sort of racial hierarchy occurs in a city that prides itself on offering the best the world has to offer. The Burj Al Arab hotel is an example of what can easily be considered the opposite end of the spectrum, and of how architecture can become iconic to a city. The world's largest dedicated all-suite hotel boasts 202 suites wrapped around a triangular atrium so tall that the Statue of Liberty could fit inside it. The entire hotel is shaped like a sail and the entire shore-facing side is made of two layers of Teflon to keep the heat out and the cool in. The royal suite here will set you back more than $10,000 a night, and several times in the past year, the hotel says, they've been at 100 percent occupancy.

Tourism is one of the anchors of Dubai's success. The city is planning on expanding its population and tourist visitors by three times in just the next five years. Land development projects fly off drawing boards to boardrooms and onto the streets with an unparalleled speed.

The city has also launched ambitious plans in the health care and education sectors, not just to train its own population but because of the unmet demand of its neighbors in the United Arab Emirates and the rest of the Arab world. A fact of life for most people from the Middle East is that regardless of how wealthy they are, if they want their kids to go to an American university or take their parents to the best medical clinics in the world (which are often in the United States) it has become much harder since 9/11.The same goes for getting jobs in the United States, or even getting tourist visas for shopping and entertainment.

Dubai is trying to bring the best of the West to the Middle East. It is creating a place where the resources of Harvard Medical School and the Mayo Clinic are a short drive from jobs at Microsoft and Dell, which are close to malls featuring Prada and Cartier.

This isn't pure capitalism. Let's not forget that this is still a dictatorship, benevolent to the entrepreneur perhaps, but malevolent in certain interpretations of women's and workers' rights as chronicled by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. While the possibility is greater here than in most places in the world that if you have a good idea, you'll be able to act on it, Dubai is still such a small society that it is absolutely necessary to be connected with the right people.

For example, we Americans generally take it for granted that the proceedings of the Supreme Court are open to the public. But in Dubai, major grievances between men (it's mostly men who are in the conversations) are settled behind closed doors in the high court.

Walking down through one of the myriad malls during the shopping festival (a monthlong event where essentially every major store in Dubai has a sale), you'll notice Muslim women covered head to toe in traditional abayas and you'll also find women who look like they just stepped out of an MTV hip hop video. Every Emirati knows that such a liberal attitude wouldn't fly outside Dubai's city limits -- not in conservative Sharjah, for instance, the next city up the coast.

So why doesn't Dubai have a big target on its back for attacks by radical Islamic groups? One theory is that Islamist groups see Dubai's freewheeling economy as an opportunity for money-laundering. The U.S. investigation into the 9/11 attacks found money trails leading to the United Arab Emirates. Dubai is working with the world economic community to target and turn over questionable funds, but identifying the shade of gray that's paying for the new concrete being poured all over this town is tough to do.

Another theory is that perhaps the best thing Dubai has going for it is its lack of history. There seems to be a void: Dubai imports the best Italian restaurants and the best American hotels and the best European stores -- without highlighting much of its own history. What you start to realize is that history, especially in this part of the world, can come with a lot of expensive baggage -- mainly politics. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is front and center in most of the Middle East. Foreign policy toward any third country is measured by how and whether they take a stand on this strife. In Dubai, the focus is on profit, not politics.

It's this fragile balance of ethnicities and cultures and religions glued together by potential that seems to keep the lights on at this desert oasis. Hopefully it will be a beacon of hope for the region, not just another mirage.