Over the last fifty years, the city of Dubai has been transformed from an arid township into a vision of the future. In the 1950s, Dubai had a population of a few thousand souls who scraped a living in a waterless desert by picking dates, diving for pearls, or sailing in wooden dhows to trade with Iran and India. It was as poor as any village in Somalia or the Sudan. Today freewheeling Dubai is everything the rest of the Arab world is not. It is capitalism on cocaine, Las Vegas without the gambling.