So internet has been hard to come by at times here in the UAE, and the blog posting hasn’t been frequent. (But, hey, I warned you it would be intermittent, and you don’t pay anything to read this!) Since I last posted, we have seen a lot.

This is quite a place. Our days are packed from eight AM to midnight, so I have very little time to reflect. In time, I’ll put together a series of postings from the trip, but I can only give quick observations while I’m on the road (as it’s 1 AM here and we’ve got another long day tomorrow!)

So first, the itinerary.

Day 4 we visited a strategic studies think tank in Abu Dhabi, where we spoke at length about foreign affairs. The Gulf States have much more in common with US foreign policy interests than I thought before this trip. We want to keep Iran in check; so do they. We want to keep Islamic fundamentalists from perpetrating terror attacks against our people; they want to create economic opportunity for the 70-100 million young people in the Middle East so that, as one official said, “we don’t have 80 million ticking time bombs on our hands.” We tend to look at “The Middle East” a bit too monolithically as Americans, and there are many issues on which we really agree. 

Later that afternoon, we visited a womens’ center. As I saw from a visit to a womens’ college, women have more rights here than pretty much anywhere else in the Middle East. The idea that a woman can have a career and a family is a possibility here. Women hold public office. Now, women and men are still separated in public spaces and it’s still a heavily patriarchal society, and certain careers still aren’t commonly pursued by women. There’s a lot of progress still t be made. But given that this country is thirty years old, and it’s doing pretty well in the middle of a very conservative region, I don’t know how much there is to complain about. (This is a complicated point I’ll probably pursue in a future post.)

On Day 5, we hit the road and saw the countryside. We had breakfast with the COO of Mbadala–an investment holdings company that received its capital from the Abu Dhabi government and now holds, among other crown jewels, a large percentage of the world’s natural gas, 5% of Ferrari, and 7% of The Carlyle Group. The COO was one of the biggest players in Abu Dhabi (EVERYONE wants to work for Mbadala), was U.S.-educated, and knew everyone we had visited with. This is a very small country–we would meet with important officials, see them at dinner that night at our restaurant, and then see them at the Abu Dhabi Awards the next day. We’re continuing to get a “Greatest Hits.” Anyways, the COO of Mbadala is only about ten years older than I am. Many of the leaders of the country are strikingly young. This is by design–the Emirati government, in planning for the future, is trying to give people my age as much on-the-job training as possible.

The rest of day 5 and 6 we explored some of the wilderness. We went to the open-air Friday market in Sharjah. We stayed on the coast of the Indian Ocean in Fujairah. We went 4-by-4-ing through the desert sand dunes (which, from what I understand, is what young Emiratis do for fun). We spent a day in the desert–land of falconing, ancient Bedouin tribes, and the UAE’s heritage.

Then we went to the opposite of the desert: Dubai, where I am now. Dubai has managed to add millions of people in one ten-year span. It doesn’t have the oil revenues or liquid capital of Abu Dhabi, so it has managed to use tourism and trade to invent an economic place for itself. It runs JAFZA, a free-trade zone that is the third-largest port in the world (you might remember the scandal from a couple of years ago, where Dubai Ports World received a contract to manage American ports, only to have Congress block the deal–they are a part of JAFZA). It has the financial stock exchange of the Middle East. It has real estate, including a famous island in the shape of a palm (already built–we toured it today) and two other palms in the planning, as well as an archipelago in the shape of the world. It is trying to create a future that, to be honest, doesn’t quite look sustainable. It is growing too fast with too little planning, at first glance, and lacks the foresight to envision what will happen to millions of people in the years to come. More reflections on Dubai to come–these are just my first impressions, but we’ve got another day in the city tomorrow.

My best to you all.

ERB