The view from Dubai
The purpose of this brief posting is to present the link to last night’s Press TV, Iran program about latest developments in the Ukraine-Russia war. I had the pleasure of sharing the panel with Fred Weir, long time foreign correspondent in Moscow who is most closely associated with the Boston newspaper Christian Science Monitor.
I have several comments to add here to the discussion last night. But first I wish to share some impressions on my whereabouts, Dubai. I arrived here a couple of days ago and like so many arrivals in Dubai, I am here on a brief rest period before moving on. I will be headed to Muscat and thence to the Seychelles. Given my journalistic interests, what all of these stopping points have in common besides attractive warmth and sunshine in the midst of the European winter is a seasonal influx of Russians. By that I mean Russian tourists in all price categories, who are drawn here by the visa-free regime of the emirate and also by its transit status to the world at large. In this sense, Dubai stands alongside Istanbul as the Russian gateway for international air travelers under conditions of the Europe-imposed air embargo on Russia.
We ran into a couple of Russian tourist groups at the entrance to one of Dubai’s better known souks, where their guides had deposited them for 40 minutes of shopping. I hasten to add that the busloads of Russian tourists were much more fortunate in having professional Russian guides from their tour organizer who actually knew something about Dubai and who actually could communicate that to them in flawless Russian. My wife and I were less fortunate to have been assigned by our hotel a “local” Pakistani driver-guide. His van was impeccable and he meant well, but his “special English” was unintelligible and his knowledge of the history and culture of Dubai was nil. Needless to say, we paid a hefty price for his services. But in Dubai, who counts money, after all?
At the end of the day, we did get a good impression of the distinctions between Old Dubai, dating back two hundred years but mostly built 60 to 40 years ago, and New Dubai which is an ongoing construction site. I take my hat off to the emirs and their advisers: new Dubai is fantastic, a kind of London City, Manhattan and Singapore rolled into one and set on the tip of Arabia. We made a brief visit to the justly famous Palm residential complex that is now being duplicated in a second “frond” that is set for release in 2027.
The Bollywood stars and top business executives who are the basic clientele will be spoiled for choice. Add to them the very wealthy Russians who are establishing residences here to compensate for their losses to confiscation in Greater London.
I expect in later essays to have a word to say about the Russians I meet en passant during my sojourn. But first I want to share my thoughts from the last part of my flight into Dubai from Brussels. As we passed over Basra, Mosul and then the stretch of Iranian coastline in our approach to landing in Dubai, I was reminded of the devastating consequences of United States interventions in this part of the world, both by proxy, as in the case of the Iran-Iraq war and by direct invasion of American forces in the two wars on Iraq, in the Syrian civil war, not to mention in Afghanistan.
And how does this relate to the topic of the day, the Ukraine-Russia war? There is a direct line inasmuch as all of these events form part of the American effort to maintain and enforce its post-Cold War global hegemony. Of course, in Europe this point is missed entirely. The mindset accepts without qualms the destruction of entire cultures with their historical monuments, the murder of hundreds of thousands if not millions of civilians as collateral damage to American tank columns and carpet bombing. That is the way of the world. What racist Europe cannot tolerate is that white, blue-eyed Ukrainians on their doorstep, living on the same continent, might be victims of war.
The Emirates Airline map of the greater Middle Eastern region on which our flight path was projected gave me a different but valuable lesson on geography. Till now I had seen maps showing Afghanistan or Uzbekistan drawn from the perspective of Europe and or of Russia. Now these countries were shown from the perspective of the South, and it instantly became clear just how close geographically Kabul or Tashkent are to Iraq, to Iran. This may sound trivial, but it changes your mindset 180 degrees.
Now, allow me to add one comment to what you are going to see in the video of last night’s Press TV program. The moderator first asked about the 36-hour cease-fire which President Putin had proposed to respect Orthodox Christmas, January 6-7. What was missing from the question and also from my fellow panelist’s answer is that the very proposal was controversial because of recent measures taken by the breakaway Ukrainian Orthodox Church within the context of its rejection of everything Russian: namely, the Kievan church hierarchs have renounced the pre-Revolutionary calendar used by the Russian Church and are now officially celebrating Christmas on December 25th. In this context, the very reason for a cease-fire was absent as seen from the perspective of Zelensky’s regime.
As regards, the second issue under discussion, Russia’s hypersonic missiles, namely the Zircon that was fitted on the Admiral Gorshkov frigate that Putin sent out to sea this past week, I remarked that this missile is primarily intended as a destroyer of aircraft carriers and their escorts. It can be launched from surface vessels like the frigates, but also by submarines from under water 30 or 40 meters down. And in addition to threatening enemy navies, it can serve as a strategic weapon against land targets. I assume that in this assignment, a frigate like the Gorshkov could be posted in the Atlantic to target Washington, D.C. or other American cities. The whole point of the launch of the Gorshkov just now was to remind the Pentagon that there will be a price to pay if the supply of advanced offensive military hardware to Ukraine crosses certain red lines, not to mention if American warplanes based on aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean were to intervene directly in the Ukraine war.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023
Russia says still observing 36-hour truce despite artillery attacks by Ukrainian army