Commentary Magazine   The Dubai Effect  Max Boot is quite right
that the Middle East needs Dubai, and not only because it
embraces modernity and flouts the region’s taboos. It’s also an
example of good government, at least by the Arab world’s
standards, and good economics if you look past its excesses.
The United Arab Emirates’ most extravagant city-state has a more
or less transparent market economy and a degree of personal
freedom rarely found elsewhere in the Middle East outside Israel
and Lebanon. The government doesn’t micromanage the personal
lives of its citizens as in Iran and Saudi Arabia, nor does it
smother the economy with heavy state socialism as in Egypt and
Syria. Its bureaucracy is efficient — investors don’t spend
years acquiring permits and filling out paperwork before they
can open a shopping center, a hotel, or a Starbucks. The Islamic
religion is respected as it is everywhere else in the Middle
East, but clerics don’t make the rules.  Lebanon and Iraq have
both been hailed as possible mo