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The Real Dubai Ports Scandal

Yes, I know Dubai is a civilized country. It will have soon have a Guggenheim Museum and a part of the Louvre. It will have an opera house and a concert hall and a skiing facility and all the world's same designers and probably Haagen Dasz and a Frank Gehry building and many other symbols of culture and sophistication. Maybe it's actually Abu Dhabi that will possess most of these, instead of Dubai. But they probably come in duplicate.

Today's Times has a story by Eric Lipton about how this same Dubai and the wider polity to which it belongs, the United Arab Emirates, cannot be trusted to enforce the embargoes on the trade of weapons components to Iran and Syria. What will we do about this? Pretend.

The Iranian trade representative in Dubai doesn't seem disturbed. He says that anything they want moved gets moved.