THEN WHY DOES THE RIGHT WAKE UP SCREAMING?

OSAMA'S NIGHTMARE: Las Vegas in the Arabian Desert (Ullrich Fichtner, 9/14/06, Der Spiegel)

[D]ubai these days is mostly a noisy, rough, unkempt city -- one of the world's largest construction sites. Construction work is going on throughout most of the urbanized coastal strip, and the jackhammers can still be heard from the terraces of seaside hotels at night.

In five or six years, the around-the-clock construction work will produce a patchwork metropolis, a place with many town centers, divided up into theme parks for living, working, shopping, going out -- a post-urban city the likes of which has never existed before. And it will be an architectural mess: an aesthetic blend of Shanghai, Las Vegas, Disney World and southern Tenerife.

Outside the dark windows of Olaf Fey's Mercedes coupe, Dubai moves by like an endless construction site. Far outside of town, in Jebel Ali, the ground is being levelled for the construction of the new giant airport. Closer to the city, you can spot the contours of what will be Dubai Marina. Now it's a forest of uncompleted building structures. In three years it will be a city in its own right, with 124 apartment towers and space for 150,000 people.

Closer to the city center, one construction site follows another. Our trip takes us past gigantic offshore construction projects with names like "The Palm" and "The World," artificial islands for Europeans who have grown weary of civilization. It continues through new business districts like "Knowledge Village" and "Media City." Then, near the city center, there's a cluster of skyscrapers being built with names like "Business Bay," "Old Town," "Dubai Living" and "Festival City." In the middle of a gray sand field riddled with cranes stands the foundation of what will soon be the highest building in the world, Burj Dubai. In two or three years it will stand 180 to 200 stories high, up to 800 meters (or 2,625 feet) -- more than twice the height of the Empire State Building.

World records are a major consideration in Dubai's urban planning schemes. When Olaf Fey drives through the city, he points left and right, stringing together superlatives: the tallest building, the biggest shopping mall, the largest airport, and the biggest entertainment park, complete with the highest Eiffel Tower in the world, slightly higher than the original in Paris.

What about the large port in Jebel Ali? "Oh," Fey says. He doesn't have any contacts there. "That's not really very interesting." But Fey's answer is a long way from the truth.

Jabal Ali is the largest seaport ever built. The cranes, the ships, the wharfs -- everything is enormous. Take a tour through it and you'll feel like you're seeing the backdrop to an overblown sci-fi flick. The view from one of the giant cargo cranes is also striking: Millions of cargo containers form straight rows as far as the eye can see. There are ten or twelve such rows, each as broad as a highway. They seem endless, and they're as colorful as the world economy itself.

This panoramic view of the port facility is as overwhelming as London must have been in the 18th century, or Paris 150 years ago. It's a view that says: History is being written here; this is where old certainties break down. Dubai's port shatters the belief that America, Europe or China are the most modern of today's societies. It foreshadows an entirely different 21st century -- and an Arab world altogether different from the one the West thinks it knows.

The port recounts the magical tale of Dubai's rise to glory: Twenty years ago, four companies operated a few cargo cranes in this free trade zone. Today 6,300 companies from 100 countries have a presence here, and they are joined by new companies every day. A nodal point of world trade has taken shape in an extremely short time, linking India and Africa, China and Europe. It's as if the world had always been waiting for this transfer point.

That the port was built in the first place is owed to the boldness of Dubai's ruling Maktum family. When construction began in the 1970s, they had two things: money from oil sales and their old tradition as tradesmen -- not much more. What they added was the audacious plan to transform a barren stretch of desert into a buzzing free-trade zone and a tourist playground.

Ever since then, they've been handling capitalism like a construction kit.

There's a differenmce between being the Stupid Party and just being ignorant.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 14, 2006 11:36 AM