Full Court Press

    Whenever the debate about allowing gay people to serve openly in the military bubbles up, someone always grabs for the wreath reserved for whoever offers the most outrageous sound bite.

    After last week’s historic testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee by Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen  –“It is my personal belief that allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the right thing to do”–that hallowed wreath was seized by Michael O’Hanlon.

    A senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a venerable and quasi-liberal think tank whose motto is “Quality, Independence, Impact,” O’Hanlon managed to combine intemperance with pristine ignorance with this memorable declaration on CNN:

    “We can talk about this delicately or we can just be fairly direct.  There are a lot of 18-year-old, old-fashioned, testosterone-laden men in the military who are tough guys. They’re often politically old-fashioned or conservative; they are not necessarily at the vanguard, in many cases, of accepting alternative forms of lifestyle.”

    Up ‘till now, O’Hanlon’s main contribution on the Times op-ed page and everywhere else has been constant cheerleading for continuous escalation of American military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, and usually he is a bit more articulate than this. He told me that it was only because of his position in favor of the surge that Frank Rich and Glenn Greenwald had brought attention to this idiotic quote.  According to O’Hanlon, these journalists had considered him “their enemy” ever since O’Hanlon supported that escalation.  To which Greenwald replied, “There’s the little matter of the war itself–y’know, like, starting it.”

    In any case, the big news that Rich, Greenwald and FCP all missed upon reading O’Hanlon’s testosterone-laden quote is a little surprising: besides being ignorant and abusive, O’Hanlon was actually  providing ammunition to those who oppose his point of view! 

    It turns out that O’Hanlon is actually in favor of allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military.

    When I reached O’Hanlon on the phone at Brookings, I began by reading his quote back to him, which led to this exchange:

 O’Hanlon: Maybe I can start by speaking for myself, instead of responding to some pointed questions that you’re putting my way?

FCP: I’m asking you to respond to words that you spoke yourself.

MO: And you’re calling with some presumption that I want to have this conversation.  And that there’s something about this moment that’s good, when I haven’t called you back, even though I already got your message. [It’s true: after he ignored my first message, I had the gall to call him a second time.]  Let me just put a couple of things out there the way I would like to put them out there.  And we’ll come back to your point in a second, if you want.

FCP: Sure. 

MO: First of all, I am a supporter of repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and I have been in print on that point before.  I do not support the policy.  I actually believe that openly gay and lesbian individuals should be allowed to serve in the military.  I’m sure you’re familiar with how the media works.  And when you do a sound bite, you usually do 15 minutes in the interview, and they choose which sound bite to use.

    FCP is, indeed, familiar with the workings of devious reporters.  So after we finished our first conversation, I called O’Hanlon back to make absolutely sure I had understood him correctly:

   FCP:  If in fact we’d seen your entire interview with CNN, it would have been clear that you were in favor of repealing the policy?

   MO: Yeah.  I will acknowledge the conversation that you and  I had earlier–kind of thinking through all the nuances in the 18-year-old–20-year-old demographic and how some parts of that group are more, let’s say, progressive than they used to be, and other parts may not be. I didn’t get into all that in great detail in the interview.  But I always speak clearly about the overall policy whenever I have a chance.

    Taken together with “they choose which sound bite to use,” this seemed to suggest that in its on-air report, as well as a story on its website, CNN had knowingly misrepresented O’Hanlon’s position.   So I queried a CNN spokesperson:

    “I am writing you to try to confirm that O’Hanlon did in fact call for repeal of the current law in his full interview with CNN.”

    To which CNN’s Edie Emery replied, “During the CNN interview, Mr. O’Hanlan did not take a position in the interview.  He was not asked.”

    A subsequent e-mail to O’Hanlon asking him to clear up this little discrepancy has  yet to elicit any response.

    Now, for a moment, let us examine the substance of O’Hanlon’s remarkable statement.   I asked,

   “Are you familiar with any of the literature on this subject?  Or is this kind of off the top of your head?”

    To which he replied, “No, I’m familiar with the literature as well.”

    But when I followed up–“Which part of the literature is it that would support what you’ve said here on CNN?”–he suggested that I should “take a step back”; he never got around to answering that quetion.

   Then I tried to point out the fundamental fallacy in his statement:

    “Actually, all of the statistical polling data of both soldiers and non-soldiers would suggest that 18 year-olds, having grown up in a culture in which gay life was very much part of that culture–unlike 50-year-olds and 60-year olds–are in fact, I think, according to most poll data, the ones most likely to be accepting of this change.  And that’s why your quote jumped out at me as not being reflective of the data as we know it.”

    O’Hanlon called that “a fair counterpoint,” but went on to say “there is also a group of very young people who are not the most cosmopolitan in our country…  Not to, again, paint with too broad of a brush but there is a certain over-representation especially in sort of the infantry ranks and the combat ranks of a fairly traditional mind set, mentality, on these kinds of issues…I still stand by what I said.  I think this particular group of people is a little less tolerant than the image you’ve got of the average American eighteen-year-old.”

    To fully understand O’Hanlon’s willful ignorance on this subject, it is necessary to consult Unfriendly Fire, Nathaniel Frank’s brilliant and definitive book on this subject, published last year.  Frank’s theme is that Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell long ago became a joke, and having a policy that is unenforced, unenforceable, and widely mocked only undercuts military discipline by keeping on the books policies that are not followed or respected.

    But it is Rear Admiral John Huston (RET.), former JAG of the Navy, and one of the formulators of the current policy, whose testimony is most relevant.  Huston told Frank that even ten years ago, in 2000,

   “Things had changed so considerably, that I think 18- and 19- and 20-year-olds were just laughing at us because we didn’t understand what they were thinking. Young people had so dramatically opened up to the idea of working alongside openly gay people that us crusty old farts protecting them was just a joke.“

    “This is a policy,” Huston continued, that was “devised primarily by men who, like me, were born in the ‘40s and grew up in the ‘50s, but was being imposed on people who were at that time born in the ‘70s and grew up in the ‘80s. Now it’s born in the ‘80s and grew up in the ‘90s or the early 2000s. So there’s this huge gulf, and the changes that have occurred since then…” Hutson trailed off and took silent for a moment of thought. “I mean, I’m an Episcopalian, guess who my bishop is?” He was referring to Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church, who was elected to the position in 2003. Hutson went on. “Queer eye for a straight guy,” he said slowly, getting the title of the television show almost right, “Ellen DeGeneres, things are so much different now than they were then.

    Hutson also said that the unit cohesion argument has now been “been completely reversed.” Telling military members that they “can’t deal with” open gays, that they’re not mature enough or well disciplined enough, “is divisive.” Today, stopping discrimination and instituting a policy of equal treatment “will enhance rather than detract from unit cohesion..It will make us a stronger force rather than a less strong force and it’s a good thing for the country.” Hutson’s biggest fear is that the U.S. military, an institution he reveres and is proud to have served, is “falling further and further behind” where the American public is. “This is what’s discouraging to me,” he said. “I don’t want an institution for which I have great affection to be antiquated in its ideas. The military is better than that.”

    If people like O’Hanlon read books like Unfriendly Fire, instead of pontificating without a clue about what they were talking about, we might actually get the rapid change in policy that the country deserves.

  As Nathaniel Frank told me today, “the problem with the debate you’re having with O’Hanlon is that this issue has a history of ungrounded alarmism that is out of proportion to other military policy changes. Operationally, having women in combat is a much tougher change for the military, but politically, it’s the gay thing that has caused all the doomsday scenarios. Any policy change can incur short-term adjustments, but in this case the research strongly suggests that short-term adjustment costs will be far outweighed by the long-term benefits.”

    Aaron Belkin, who is Frank’s colleague at the Palm Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where all of the most serious research on this subject has taken place, put it this way:

   “Dr. O’Hanlon is correct in noting that the last thing the military or the country needs now is a polarizing debate. The way to avoid that is for the President to sign a stop-loss order suspending implementation of the ban, or for Senator Levin to include a moratorium in the Chairman’s mark up of the defense budget bill. The current plan to study rather than to act will invite the polarization that Dr. O’Hanlon fears.”

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 It is my personal belief that allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the right thing to do…For me personally, it comes down to integrity; theirs as individuals and ours as an institution.
                                  –Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff

    Admiral Michael Mullen brought honor to his office and to his country today with some of the most courageous testimony Congress has ever heard from a chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

    Declaring, “I have served with homosexuals since 1968…everybody in the military has,” Mullen placed his personal prestige squarely behind Barack Obama’s commitment to repeal the hideous policy of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, which has done so much to weaken America’s national security since it was enacted in 1993.

    “No matter how I look at this issue, I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens,” said Admiral Mullen. “I also believe that the great young men of our military, can and would accommodate such a change–I never underestimated their ability to adapt.”

    The contrast between Mullen’s bravery and Colin Powell’s cold cowardice  could not have been more dramatic.   Back when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs in 1993, it was an unholy alliance between General Powell and Georgia Senator Sam Nunn which made it impossible for Bill Clinton to keep his campaign promise to allow gays to serve openly in the military.

    Within the last year, both Nunn and Powell have called for a re-examination of the policy–but neither of them has shown anything like the valor of Admiral Mullen, or former Joint Chiefs chairman John M. Shalikashvili, who called for a repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell three years ago in The New York Times.
   
    Although Powell rose to the pinnacle of the American military because of the courage of President Harry Truman, who ended the segregation of the armed forces, Powell never understood his obligation to do the same thing for gay people that Truman had done for African-Americans.

    Instead, Powell declared,  “Skin color is a benign nonbehavioral characteristic. Sexual orientation is perhaps the most profound of human behavioral characteristics. Comparison of the two is a convenient but invalid argument.”

    Today, Senator Roland Burris shamed Powell by drawing the exact comparison Powell had shunned.  After expressing his “deep admiration” for Admiral Mullen and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who also declared his support for a new policy, Burris recalled:

    You go back to President Truman, who took the audacity to integrate the services.  At one time my uncle couldn’t even serve in the military–and we’ve moved to this point where [African-Americans are] some of the best and brightest that we have.  Generals, and even, now, the commander in chief is of African-American heritage… The policy must be changed and we must have everyone who is capable, willing and able to defend this great tradition of ours to have the opportunity to serve, regardless to their sexual orientation…I hope we will get moving on this issue, and not be wasting the tax payers time on something that is so basic to human rights and individuals in this country.

    Secretary Gates declared, “The question before us is not whether the military prepares to make this change, but how we best prepare for it.”

    John McCain was a parody of an out-of-touch old man.  “I’m deeply disappointed in your statement,” the Arizona Senator told the secretary of defense. “Your statement is obviously one that is deeply biased.”

    In an implied rebuke to McCain, Senator Mark Udall of Colorado recalled that it was another Senator from Arizona, Barry Goldwater, who observed, “You don’t have to be straight to shoot straight.” 

     Udall told Admiral Mullen, “the centerpiece of your statement will long be remembered for its courage and integrity.”

   What makes McCain’s position even more embarrassing? The Washington Post points out tonight that his statement today reverses the honorable position he held three years ago: “The day that the leadership of the military comes to me and says, ‘Senator, we ought to change the policy,’ then I think we ought to consider seriously changing it because those leaders in the military are the ones we give the responsibility to.”  (McCain’s spokesman explained that since Mullen’s position was a “personal” one, the chairman of the joint chiefs no longer counts as a military leader.)

    Even Joe Lieberman, who opposed the current policy back in 1993, remains sane and sensible on this subject. “What matters most is not how a military person lives their private sexual life” but whether “they are prepared to risk their lives for their country,” the Connecticut Senator declared.  “Someone in a tank today is going to care a lot more about the capability and the courage of that soldier than about his sexual orientation… I thank you both for saying the question now is not whether but how.”

    Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, is another strong supporter of a repeal of the law, while his counterpart in the House, Missouri Rep. Ike Skelton, favors a continuation of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

    In the days before today’s testimony, Elisabeth Bumiller scored a scoop by reporting in The Times  that the Pentagon would ease its enforcement of the current policy, by taking no action “to discharge service members whose sexual orientation is revealed by third parties or jilted partners.”

    But Bumiller–as well as Craig Whitlock and Michael D. Shear, writing in the Washington Post –all failed to report the most significant legislative development in the fight to repeal the law: the fact that Democratic Congressman Patrick Murphy now has 187 co-sponsors in the House on a bill to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

   The only news story which mentioned that fact was Yochi J. Dreazen’s article in The Wall Street Journal.       (Although Bumiller omitted Murphy, The Times did mention him and his bill in an excellent editorial on January 28.)

    Congressman Murphy is a two-term Democrat from Pennsylvania, who served in the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division and was the first Iraq veteran elected to Congress.
“The momentum is clearly on our side,” Murphy told the Journal.  “It’s time for Congress to have the guts to stop turning its back on talented and professional soldiers just because they’re gay. I served with great soldiers who were thrown out just because they were gay. I was disheartened that the Constitution that I took an oath to support and defend was really being abused by that policy.”

    Among Murphy’s other reasons for supporting repeal of the law through his own Military Readiness Enhancement Act:

• Since 1994, over 13,000 servicemembers - the equivalent of 3 ½ combat brigades- have been discharged as a result of DADT.
• In the last five years, while our country has been engaged in two wars, the military has discharged over 800 mission-critical troops under  “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” including over 50 Arabic linguists.
• Up to $1.3 billion in taxpayer money has been wasted discharging otherwise qualified troops under DADT. It costs the military at least $60,000 to recruit and train each new servicemember, and much more to prosecute and pursue separations under DADT.

    Polls show roughly 60 percent of the American public is in favor of allowing gay people to serve openly in the armed forces, and passage of Murphy’s law by the House now seems extremel likely.  Getting a filibuster-proof majority of sixty votes in the Senate would be very difficult indeed, but Senator Levin suggested today that the reform could be enacted by a simple majority, if the law change was made through an amendment to the Defense Appropriations bill. 

    If Barack Obama can finally bring this new measure of equality into law, it will go a long way toward diffusing the anger of his gay supporters, who are deeply disappointed by the president’s paltry achievements on behalf of the gay community during his first year in the White House.    It would also give him one of the most important progressive victories of his presidency.

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Update: AFSCME weighs in on the side of justice here.

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Second Update: On NBC Nightly News, Admiral Mullen’s historic testimony was story #2; on CBS, story #3, and Pentagon correspondents Jim Miklaszewski and David Martin both did pedestrian pieces.  Only ABC’s Martha Raddatz distinguished herself with the novel idea of including someone who could be directly affected by the policy change–Lt. Dan Choi, the gay Arabic-speaking linguist now facing dismissal for publicly announcing his sexual orientation.  Diane Sawyer’s World News was also the only network broadcast to lead with the story.

Kudos to Diane.

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Third Update: See Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council prove his worthiness to live in Uganda by calling for the recriminalization of gay sex, during a debate with Aubrey Sarvis of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network on the Chris Matthews Show.

Question: Why do so many of the most virulent opponents of equal rights for gay people seem so…gay?

Answer: People who know they are straight never feel the least bit threatened by those who are not.   This is the experience of gay people everywhere.

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Fourth Update: From another fine editorial in The New York Times: “The United States has traveled far since 1993 on gay rights. It is ready for a military built on a commitment to equal rights for all.”
Lest we forget–whatever its other failings–this newspaper has done more to promote gay equality in the last twenty years than all the other newspapers in the world put together.
Quite a contrast to a previous New York Times.

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Fifth Update: Seventeen years too late: Colin Powell finally gets it right. 

“In the almost 17 years since the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’legislation was passed, attitudes and circumstances have changed.  I fully support the new approach presented to the Senate Armed Services Committee this week by Secretary of Defense Gates and Admiral Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”
 

Above the Fold

   It’s a toss up as to which is worse: the news out of Massachusetts and the Supreme Court, or the way some network news broadcasts are covering these disasters.  Call it a pitcher’s choice.

    Let’s start with Massachusetts, where Martha Coakley will be remembered as one of the most incompetent Senate candidates of modern times. Overconfident and out-of-touch: with just six weeks between the primary and the general election, Coakley took a full week off for Christmas, according to Nagourney, Zeleny, Zernkike and Cooper  writing in the Times. 

    The race formally ended two weeks later on January 15th, when Coakley identified legendary Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling as a Yankee fan.  Is there anything more important to the average Massachusetts voter than the Red Sox?   No, there is not.   And a candidate trying to become the first woman ever elected to the United States Senate from Massachusetts really needed to know that.

    The failure of the Democratic establishment to recognize that a disaster was brewing until it was too late to do anything about it is also a severe indictment of White House political guru Rahm Emmanuel, the DNC and the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee, all of whom seem to have been asleep at the plate.

    Of course, we didn’t lose just because Coakley was a terrible candidate–all those independents who voted for Obama plus a lot more switched eagerly to the Cosmo model because of the gigantic dissatisfaction with everything that is going on in Washington.  Now, in the wake of the Massachusetts result, Congressional Democrats seem to be running for the hills instead of making every possible effort to pass a health care reform bill.

    Having devoted most of 2009 to this effort, is there anything  they could do that would do more to reinforce their reputation for incompetence than a decision to abandon health care right now?

    No, there is not.

    Two days later the Supreme Court weighed in with one of the most radical decisions in its history, wiping away dozens of federal & local laws and decades of precedent, with a 5 to 4 vote to give corporate America even more complete control over the government than it already enjoys.

   Why didn’t the rest of us realize that this was what America needed the most right now?

    And the next time you hear someone repeat the idiotic myth that liberal judges are the real “activists” in the judiciary–well, just slap them.

    Here is part of Rachel Maddow’s excellent  summary of the decision’s effects:

    [This is] one of the most radical Supreme Court actions in years.   Corporations are free to inject unregulated billions, absolutely unlimited money into the political system now.   If you are a regular person who’s ever made a campaign donation before, forget about ever having to do that again.  What’s the point of an individual trying to make a donation if Exxon or some other corporation can quite literally match and therefore cancel out the combined donations of every single individual donor in the nation in one check, in every year, in every state, in every race?…This ruling rolls back decades of protections against corporate interference and control of governance…I personally think it is impossible to overstate the impact of this decision on American politics.

    In a scathing 29,000 word dissent, some of which he read from the bench, Justice John Paul Stevens declared that “five justices were unhappy with the limited nature of the case before us, so they changed the case to give themselves an opportunity to change the law.”  Stevens continued,

    At bottom, the Court’s opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt.   It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense.   While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.

    Given the gigantic importance of this decision to American democracy, some of us naively expected that this was the news that would lead each of the network evening news broadcasts that night.

  Forget about it.  Over at ABC, where Diane Sawyer is having the rockiest debut of any new anchor in memory, these were the stories deemed more important than the Supreme Court’s action at the top of the broadcast:

* A recall of Toyota automobiles
* A really, really big mudslide in California
* John Edwards’ belated acknowledgment of paternity of the daughter he had with his mistress
* Obama’s sweeping new proposal to reform the banking system
* A “pillow talk” story which apparently was enchanting the cable news networks.

    For the first nine minutes of her broadcast, Sawyer managed to say nothing at all about the Supreme Court.   But a little later, she did manage thirteen whole seconds to report that Nancy Pelosi had declared there were not enough votes in the House to pass the Senate version of the health care reform bill.

    FCP also loved the way Sawyer and just about everyone else that night seemed to assume that when it came to judging the worthiness of Obama’s announcement that he would push for the broadest reform of the banking system since the Depression, the only thing that really mattered was the reaction of the stock market.  Therefore:

    Market down; proposal, bad!

    This is roughly equivalent to reporting that the government is planning a  new crackdown on child molestation–and then using the reaction of the nation’s most prominent child molesters to gauge the worthiness of the government’s proposal. 

    Except, of course,  that the banks always prefer to molest adults.

    Was this the most disgraceful series of “news judgements” FCP has ever witnessed on a network evening news broadcast?

    Yes, it was.

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Above the Fold

 Dubai–When the world’s tallest tower was inaugurated last week, the lavish ceremony began with bag pipes and seven precision parachutists, each one jumping from the top of the 2,717 foot tower into the same small spot just in front of the VIP area, which was populated by hundreds of local residents in turbans and flowing white robes, and an equal number of business-casual-attired Westerners.

    What bridged the cultural divide between the suited and the robed?  Everyone from Judy Miller–yes, that Judy Miller–to the Sheikh of Dubai was texting, almost all the time.

   The new building, nearly twice the height of the Empire State, features the world’s
highest swimming pool, (76th floor), the highest observation deck, (124th floor) and the highest–and probably smallest–mosque (158th floor).  It’s a mix of offices and apartments, with an Armani Hotel at the base (the designer’s first).  Some days the temperature is 15 degrees warmer at the base than it is at the top.   When the building went on the market two years ago, it sold out within two days, although Dubai now has a glut of office and residential space all over the city.

   The big news of the inaugural evening was the building’s exact height (a state secret until then) and the name change announced by  Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai.

   What had been known during construction as the Burj Dubai had suddenly become the Burj Khalifa, in honor of Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, President of the United Arab Emirates, and the head of oil-rich emirate Abu Dhabi, which so far has provided $25 billion to prop up its over-extended neighbor.   “Abu Dhabi has the oil, Dubai has the chutzpah,” a local expat explained.

    That meant the $1.5 billion glass and steel structure designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill had  set another record–the highest naming fee for any structure in the history of the planet.

    After the bag pipes, the parachutists, and the Sheik’s speech, the tower exploded from top to bottom in a spectacular fireworks display, echoed in the moat in front of it by the world’s largest fountain, whose geysers pulsated and swayed in time to an Arabic Ode to Joy.

    Drowning in bad publicity since last November, when the state-owned Dubai World group succumbed to the worldwide credit crunch and requested a six-month freeze on $26 billion of debt repayments, Dubai saw a chance to use the opening of the spectacular new structure to improve its image.

    “Brand Dubai” is a new government office headed by Mona Al Marri, a dazzlingly attractive former journalist who was previously president of the Dubai Press Club.  Created five months before the crash to coordinate all media affairs, Brand Dubai invited three dozen journalists and architects from around the world to a conference on sustainable architecture, which was thrown together just three weeks before the inaugural ceremony for the stunning new Burj (“tower” in Arabic.)    New York’s Cooper Union was recruited to be the co-sponsor of the all-expenses paid junket, to which FCP was invited.

    Besides Judy Miller, conference members included Marie Brenner of Vanity Fair, and Hendrik Hertzberg of the New Yorker, as well as former Clinton White House Special Counsel Lanny Davis, who carried a personal message of congratulations from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  Also present was the architect of the 38-story monstrosity at Broadway and 99th Street, which is twice as tall as its neighbors, and could well be the worst building erected in Manhattan in the last forty years.  Its violation of the scale of the neighborhood was so severe, it inspired a change in the zoning law to prevent any future imitators.  

    That architect’s presence was appropriate, because Dubai is one over-the-top skyscraper after another.   Oddly, the only one which seems understated is the world’s tallest, because its elegant, set-back  design makes it fit perfectly on top of its gigantic base. 

   The city has exploded from a sleepy port just thirty years ago into a center of tourism, commerce and American-style consumerism, featuring 12-lane highways and a brand new (mostly above ground) Metro with wi-fi.   It boasts twenty-eight shopping malls (including the world’s largest, with a gigantic aquarium with sharks and barracudas) and a panoply of man-made islands. Streets filled with hundreds of Mercedes, Bentleys and Rolls Royces, and the presence of Tiffany’s, Cartier, Bloomingdales, Galeries Lafayette, and just about every other major Western brand you can imagine, combine to give the desert city something of the feel of a crowded East Hampton on a July afternoon.

    It’s a strange mix of ultra-modernism, and medieval instincts, the latter leading to zero tolerance for gays and drugs, and the periodic seizure of foreign newspapers, whenever they get a little too harsh towards one of the sheiks. Two years ago a Canadian changing planes at the Dubai airport was caught with .6 of a gram of hash and two poppy bulbs.  The fact that he had been working as a consultant for the U.S. State Department’s Afghan poppy elimination program did not prevent him from receiving a four-year prison sentence.

    There is one under-the-radar gay bar, but half of its patrons are apparently undercover policemen.

    It’s also a place where the “properties” section of the Gulf News features ads for villas, hard by another one offering “Labor Camp For Rent–183 rooms, generator provided; water + electricity extra.”   The labor camps are for the foreign workers who do virtually all of the construction, and are kicked out of the country as soon as their jobs are over.   Last year, 27,550 were arrested for over-staying their welcome.  In 2007, the US State Department estimated that less than 20 percent of the UAE’s population of 4.4 million are citizens–and 93 percent of its workforce is foreign.

    The big question is whether the Burj Khalifa will mark the end of Dubai’s glory days or the beginning of its resurrection after the financial bust.  The betting here is that the oil money of its neighboring emirate and the undaunted ambitions of Dubai’s Sheikh Mohammed will gradually lead to the city’s financial revival.  But the plan for a massive new seawater canal through the center of the city to create waterside properties in the desert hinterland is probably on hold– forever.
   
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