Roy Munson
02-24-2006, 05:00 PM
Web-Exclusive Commentary
By Christopher Dickey
Newsweek
Updated: 1:47 p.m. ET Feb. 24, 2006
Feb. 24, 2006 - Back in the 1980s, everybody’s favorite Dubai bar was a Tex-Mex joint called Pancho Villa’s. A little guy from the Indian province of Kerala greeted you at the door decked out like a diminutive mariachi. The margaritas came in copious pitchers, the nachos were as good as you can get most places east of the Mississippi, and the British part-owner was an aging rock and roller who liked to regale the clientele on ladies’ night with his favorite hits from Dire Straits to the Eagles’ “Hotel California.”
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. That’s something to keep in mind as you look at the debate about whether a Dubai company, Dubai Ports World, should be allowed to run six U.S. ports. It also helps explain why DPW has facilitated a political reprieve for President George W. Bush by temporarily postponing the date on which the company will take control of the terminal operations, letting tempers and rhetoric cool.
Clearly a lot of the criticism has been xenophobic. Notwithstanding pro forma demurrals, the driving theme here is that “Arabs”—usually talked of generically as if there were no difference between those in Dubai, say, and those in Baghdad or Benghazi—can’t be trusted to operate American ports. When Bush says the posturing on Capital Hill is sending the wrong signal to some of the few friends the United States has left in the Arab world, he’s right. (Too bad he’s sent so many of the wrong signals himself on other Middle Eastern issues.) And it’s obvious much of the debate is conducted by people who have no idea what kind of place Dubai is, and what kind of people—or person, really—runs it.
If it’s true, as some pundits like to say, that in the 21st century the world is flat, then from Dubai you can see all four corners. The neighboring emirate of Abu Dhabi got oil, but Sheikh Mohammed al-Maktoum had imagination. As the genius behind the city-state’s development long before he officially inherited Dubai’s top position earlier this year, al-Maktoum has spent the last three decades building up his city’s modern port facilities, its first-rate airport, its superb airline, its dramatic skyline, its reputation as a place where people from all over the world can come to do business with maximum comfort and minimum hassles.
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. Even before independence in the 1970s, when the British were supposed to be running the show in what were then called “The Trucial States,” Dubai’s big industry was shipping contraband gold to India so brides there could avoid the heavy taxes on their glittering dowries.
In a region of constant war during the 1980s, Dubai made itself a vital neutral ground, and stayed at peace. Back when I was hanging out at Pancho’s, the Ayatollah Khomeini and Saddam Hussein (backed by the United States in those days), were attacking each other’s shipping with a vengeance. But at Pancho’s, it was said, you could hoist a beer with the crew off a tanker just shelled by an Iranian gunboat—and throw darts with the Iranian shooters, too.
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.
But, like other great cities of trade and intrigue, from Istanbul and Beirut to Singapore and Hong Kong, Dubai has also been extremely useful to intelligence services that want to keep an eye on the people moving through it. Various U.S. government agencies have exploited Dubai as a window into the Iran of the ayatollahs, the warlords’ Afghanistan, the lawless wilds of East Africa. And in the fight against Al Qaeda, Dubai’s cooperation has been quiet but considerable.
In July 2001, weeks before the September 11 attacks, authorities in Dubai picked up a French-Algerian suspect named Djamel Beghal who turned out to be a fund of information about terrorist plots in Europe and, indirectly, against the United States. Among alleged terrorists he is supposed to have recruited were the failed “shoe bomber” Richard Reid and Zacharias Moussaoui, the so-called “20th hijacker” in the 9/11 plot.
That the French and American intelligence services were not able to put all the pieces together in time to stop the attacks on New York and Washington was not the fault of the Dubai authorities. Beghal’s lawyers have accused the emirate’s investigators of torturing a confession out of him. Beghal claimed in a French court last year that they beat the soles of his feet, ripped out parts of his fingernails and inserted knitting needles, or something like them, in his “most intimate parts.” The Paris court, unimpressed, sentenced Beghal last March to the maximum 10 years on terrorism conspiracy charges. "Had he not been arrested in the United Arab Emirates,” the court declared, Beghal “would have returned to France to head up, with the help of the other defendants, a terrorist mission." An alleged plot to blow up the American embassy in Paris almost certainly was prevented. The networks uncovered as a result of Beghal’s detention continue to lead to arrests and convictions, including that of the hook-handed jihadi preacher Abu Hamza in Britain last month.
Then there was Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, also known as Mullah Bilal, who played a key role plotting the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, blowing an enormous hole in the side of the American destroyer USS Cole in Aden harbor in 2000, and attacking a French oil tanker off the coast of Yemen in October 2002. Among Nashiri’s ambitious plans were plots to hit American warships in the Strait of Gibraltar and the purchase of a 400,000-ton freighter that could launch smaller boats to be used against ships like suicide torpedoes. The mother-ship, too, was supposed to be filled with explosives, making it arguably the biggest conventional bomb in history. But Nashiri was spotted in Yemen, tracked to Dubai, and nailed there in 2002. Quickly handed over to the American authorities, he has since disappeared into one of the CIA’s secret interrogation facilities.
No wonder President Bush calls Dubai an important ally in his war on terror, and doesn’t seem much worried about the commitment of DPW to the security of American ports or, for that matter, the commitment of the Dubai government to the security of the United States. Human rights groups may want to question Dubai’s approach to these issues, but you wouldn’t think the Republicans would be raising objections.
Certainly among the many Americans living and working in Dubai there’s a lot of disappointment with the way the DPW deal was handled. “Dubai has been so helpful to the U.S. in so many ways,” says T.B. “Mac” McClelland, a former U.S. Marine major who is now a business and security consultant. “And now we’re saying that’s not enough.” But the let-down is about more than just ports and posturing, ill-informed prejudice and homeland security. It’s really about how you see the world.
Dubai has a commercial vision—it is a commercial vision—that fits perfectly into the realities of the 21st century. It’s an open city for an open world. The United States, on the other hand, looks increasingly wary, withdrawn, insecure and ill informed. Jingoism, xenophobia and thinly disguised racism may help win votes, but they won’t make the United States any safer. Indeed, Americans risk becoming like those characters in the Eagles song we used to hear at Pancho Villa’s: “We are all just prisoners here, of our own device.”
By Christopher Dickey
Newsweek
Updated: 1:47 p.m. ET Feb. 24, 2006
Feb. 24, 2006 - Back in the 1980s, everybody’s favorite Dubai bar was a Tex-Mex joint called Pancho Villa’s. A little guy from the Indian province of Kerala greeted you at the door decked out like a diminutive mariachi. The margaritas came in copious pitchers, the nachos were as good as you can get most places east of the Mississippi, and the British part-owner was an aging rock and roller who liked to regale the clientele on ladies’ night with his favorite hits from Dire Straits to the Eagles’ “Hotel California.”
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. That’s something to keep in mind as you look at the debate about whether a Dubai company, Dubai Ports World, should be allowed to run six U.S. ports. It also helps explain why DPW has facilitated a political reprieve for President George W. Bush by temporarily postponing the date on which the company will take control of the terminal operations, letting tempers and rhetoric cool.
Clearly a lot of the criticism has been xenophobic. Notwithstanding pro forma demurrals, the driving theme here is that “Arabs”—usually talked of generically as if there were no difference between those in Dubai, say, and those in Baghdad or Benghazi—can’t be trusted to operate American ports. When Bush says the posturing on Capital Hill is sending the wrong signal to some of the few friends the United States has left in the Arab world, he’s right. (Too bad he’s sent so many of the wrong signals himself on other Middle Eastern issues.) And it’s obvious much of the debate is conducted by people who have no idea what kind of place Dubai is, and what kind of people—or person, really—runs it.
If it’s true, as some pundits like to say, that in the 21st century the world is flat, then from Dubai you can see all four corners. The neighboring emirate of Abu Dhabi got oil, but Sheikh Mohammed al-Maktoum had imagination. As the genius behind the city-state’s development long before he officially inherited Dubai’s top position earlier this year, al-Maktoum has spent the last three decades building up his city’s modern port facilities, its first-rate airport, its superb airline, its dramatic skyline, its reputation as a place where people from all over the world can come to do business with maximum comfort and minimum hassles.
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. Even before independence in the 1970s, when the British were supposed to be running the show in what were then called “The Trucial States,” Dubai’s big industry was shipping contraband gold to India so brides there could avoid the heavy taxes on their glittering dowries.
In a region of constant war during the 1980s, Dubai made itself a vital neutral ground, and stayed at peace. Back when I was hanging out at Pancho’s, the Ayatollah Khomeini and Saddam Hussein (backed by the United States in those days), were attacking each other’s shipping with a vengeance. But at Pancho’s, it was said, you could hoist a beer with the crew off a tanker just shelled by an Iranian gunboat—and throw darts with the Iranian shooters, too.
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.
But, like other great cities of trade and intrigue, from Istanbul and Beirut to Singapore and Hong Kong, Dubai has also been extremely useful to intelligence services that want to keep an eye on the people moving through it. Various U.S. government agencies have exploited Dubai as a window into the Iran of the ayatollahs, the warlords’ Afghanistan, the lawless wilds of East Africa. And in the fight against Al Qaeda, Dubai’s cooperation has been quiet but considerable.
In July 2001, weeks before the September 11 attacks, authorities in Dubai picked up a French-Algerian suspect named Djamel Beghal who turned out to be a fund of information about terrorist plots in Europe and, indirectly, against the United States. Among alleged terrorists he is supposed to have recruited were the failed “shoe bomber” Richard Reid and Zacharias Moussaoui, the so-called “20th hijacker” in the 9/11 plot.
That the French and American intelligence services were not able to put all the pieces together in time to stop the attacks on New York and Washington was not the fault of the Dubai authorities. Beghal’s lawyers have accused the emirate’s investigators of torturing a confession out of him. Beghal claimed in a French court last year that they beat the soles of his feet, ripped out parts of his fingernails and inserted knitting needles, or something like them, in his “most intimate parts.” The Paris court, unimpressed, sentenced Beghal last March to the maximum 10 years on terrorism conspiracy charges. "Had he not been arrested in the United Arab Emirates,” the court declared, Beghal “would have returned to France to head up, with the help of the other defendants, a terrorist mission." An alleged plot to blow up the American embassy in Paris almost certainly was prevented. The networks uncovered as a result of Beghal’s detention continue to lead to arrests and convictions, including that of the hook-handed jihadi preacher Abu Hamza in Britain last month.
Then there was Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, also known as Mullah Bilal, who played a key role plotting the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, blowing an enormous hole in the side of the American destroyer USS Cole in Aden harbor in 2000, and attacking a French oil tanker off the coast of Yemen in October 2002. Among Nashiri’s ambitious plans were plots to hit American warships in the Strait of Gibraltar and the purchase of a 400,000-ton freighter that could launch smaller boats to be used against ships like suicide torpedoes. The mother-ship, too, was supposed to be filled with explosives, making it arguably the biggest conventional bomb in history. But Nashiri was spotted in Yemen, tracked to Dubai, and nailed there in 2002. Quickly handed over to the American authorities, he has since disappeared into one of the CIA’s secret interrogation facilities.
No wonder President Bush calls Dubai an important ally in his war on terror, and doesn’t seem much worried about the commitment of DPW to the security of American ports or, for that matter, the commitment of the Dubai government to the security of the United States. Human rights groups may want to question Dubai’s approach to these issues, but you wouldn’t think the Republicans would be raising objections.
Certainly among the many Americans living and working in Dubai there’s a lot of disappointment with the way the DPW deal was handled. “Dubai has been so helpful to the U.S. in so many ways,” says T.B. “Mac” McClelland, a former U.S. Marine major who is now a business and security consultant. “And now we’re saying that’s not enough.” But the let-down is about more than just ports and posturing, ill-informed prejudice and homeland security. It’s really about how you see the world.
Dubai has a commercial vision—it is a commercial vision—that fits perfectly into the realities of the 21st century. It’s an open city for an open world. The United States, on the other hand, looks increasingly wary, withdrawn, insecure and ill informed. Jingoism, xenophobia and thinly disguised racism may help win votes, but they won’t make the United States any safer. Indeed, Americans risk becoming like those characters in the Eagles song we used to hear at Pancho Villa’s: “We are all just prisoners here, of our own device.”