larry johnson reviews our most recent war; 

 

While the US certainly suffered some reputational damage and significant economic costs from its unprovoked attack on Iran, the United Arab Emirates may really be the big loser. Let’s focus on Dubai.

Think of Dubai as the World’s most expensive adult theme park that has no emergency exit. For decades, Dubai sold itself to the world as what would happen if Las Vegas and Disney World had a child together, raised it on sovereign wealth, and sent it to finishing school in Monaco. The result was a city of genuinely staggering audacity — an indoor ski slope in the desert, a hotel shaped like a sail that awards itself seven stars because five simply wasn’t enough, palm-shaped islands visible from space that are slowly sinking back into the sea from which they were so expensively extracted. It was, by any measure, the greatest theme park ever built for people who found actual theme parks insufficiently gilded and too puritanical.

The supposed genius of the Dubai proposition was always its geographical logic: i.e., it sits at the crossroads of global trade, pumps enough oil to build the infrastructure, and then gradually replace the oil revenue with everything else — tourism, finance, real estate, the inscrutable business of being a place where very wealthy people park very large amounts of money while asking no inconvenient questions. Oh, did I mention money laundering and hookers?.........more..........