Dubai's not the Problem

Fire of Liberty
Here's Mark Steyn's interesting take on the whole Dubai Ports World debacle that erupted in D.C. this last month. Very interesting:

But Dubai, with less oil than its fellow emirates, can't depend on the global oil jizya. It's had to diversify into banking and tourism: These days it's like Hong Kong with an en suite Lawrence of Arabia theme park. Unlike almost anywhere else in the Arab world, it's moving toward a non-deformed socioeconomic structure. Next to Morocco, it's about the best shot at real reform among the existing regimes. To be sure, they're not hot for Jews and there are some pretty disgusting books for sale in their stores. But so what? You can say the same about Paris and London.

And yes, DPW is a "state-owned" bauble, just as King Willem III of the Netherlands was a founding shareholder of Royal Dutch Shell petroleum, just as Prince Maurits of Orange founded the Dutch East India Company, the original Royal Dutch shell company and the Halliburton of its day. In monarchical societies, economic innovation often begins with royal protection.

So saying "Get lost, Dubai" isn't a new steeliness so much as a retreat into an unsustainable bunker mentality more sentimental than Bush's liberty promotion. My National Review comrade John Derbyshire has been promoting the slogan "Rubble Doesn't Cause Trouble." Cute, and I wish him well with the T-shirt sales. But, in arguing for a "realist" foreign policy of long-range bombing, he overlooks the very obvious point that rubble causes quite a lot of trouble: The rubble of Bosnia is directly responsible for radicalizing a generation of European Muslims, including Daniel Pearl's executioner; the rubble of Afghanistan became an international terrorist training camp, whose alumni include the shoebomber Richard Reid, the millennium bomber Ahmed Ressam, and the 9/11 plotters; the rubble of Grozny turned Chechen nationalists into pan-Islamist jihadi. Those correspondents of mine who send me e-mails headed "Nuke Mecca!" might like to consider the broader strategic impact on a billion Muslims from Indonesia to Yorkshire, for whom any fallout will be psychological rather than carcinogenic. Rubble is an insufficient solution, unless you're also going to attend to the Muslim world's real problem: its intellectual rubble.

I just wish some folks in Congress could look at the whole DPW thing and the world in general like Steyn.