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Ground report from the UAE
TLDR; Passing thougths from a UAE resident amidst the Iran war. Nothing groundbreaking, but you all might appreiate the perspective of someone closer to the action.
Where have you been?
I was approximately 2 years younger the last time I posted here. Work, relationship, life all got in the way of forum posting for multiple hours a day! I didn't stop browsing though.
How are you?
In the midst of the fog of war. I am barely sleeping. Not because I am scared, but because the emergency alerts are really loud. And because my girlfriend is scared and I stay with her on video call for support. I am typign this at 7:18AM GST.
Your experience may vary, but seeing missiles fly over my head and interceptors fire from less than a mile away changed me as a person. I am aware it can be much worse but I wasn't ever expecting to experience this!
To the point I could partion my life into 'before and after the missiles'. I was driving from Abu Dhabi to Sharjah at approximately 7PM on the 28th of February when interceptors started firing from less than a mile from me. I sped upto 120 miles/hour to GTFO of there. An overwhelming majority of the drivers did not speed up, they slowed down. Idiots!
From then on; emrgency alerts, booms and thuds and drones are a daily thing. I'm not really worried about me or my closed ones physical safety per se. But there is this background vibe that something is wrong no matter how much I try to ignore it. It's quite mentally draining, and this is despite me not being scared for my safety or livelihoood at all!
How is everyone else?
Seems to be roughly three camps of people broadly.
Business as usual
Unlike the last time something was supposed to last for 2 weeks. The government is encouraging you to carry on as normal, head outside even! For obvious reasons, the UAE's entire selling point is that it's safe, and now "it's safe, even with suice drone flying around". Sucks to see large swathes of people not only buy this shit wholesale but parrot it endlessly.
Social media idiocy is in full swing. The most grating are when someone reports hearing fighter jets in their area, and gets mobbed by the most sanctimonious people on earth "kindly" asking them to not share intel with the enemy. As if a forein adversary is relying on civilian reports from reddit of a jet flying at Mach 2. I can go on all day! To be fair, no one was mentally prepared for this, they are "doing their part", whatever helps them sleep at night.
A sad casuality of said idiocy was the abundance of on the ground footage that was available for the first 2 days. The government sent out warnings against posting said videos backed by heavy fines. Much fewer footage is being posted on social media, but they're circulating widely in whatsapp groups.
So what scares you?
"Things are never so bad they can't get worse"
Cue to the last time something was going to be over in "two weeks". Despite a handful of civilian casualities and a majority of the drones and missiles being intercepted, this is unsustainable. The government says otherwise, but I would be shocked if there's more than 2 weeks of air defense munitions left!
Oh also, the UAE imports 80% of its food and has vitually no fresh water. The Straight of Hormuz being closed off for long enough and a desalination plant being hit would turn into a nightmare to put it lightly! I would probably regret not evacuating at that point. I give a 20% chance of things getting that bad.
I am also skeptical of the success rate of the interceptions. Iran prety much hit everything they would have hit (This list is not exhaustive):
The government claims these were hit by debrey after interception. Oh wow, debrey just happend to land on 4/4 active airports!
It'll be interesting to see what the long lasting impacts are on the gulf states from this war. Missiles are landing in Tel Aviv and they've had years to build proper defenses against precisely this threat, if Iran throws its toys out of the pram there's a decent chance the whole "rich man's playground" trope for these countries permanently ends. Of course they'll still be rich given all their oil, but it would still be a different paradigm for how these countries are seen by the rest of the world.
(Kuwait for one has been declining for the last 20 years in a row, it would be interesting to see if this is the crisis that finally finishes them off and they get swallowed up by the peloton of the rest of the arab states that don't have serious oil money.)
In the end the economic success of the Gulf states is more about relative rather than absolute stability and quality of life. Dubai’s economic prosperity isn’t really reliant on rich people; most people - even in the ‘expat’ rather than indentured servant class - aren’t rich.
Instead, it just has to be nicer and more convenient than Russia or India or much of Africa. The middle class that sustain demand in Dubai don’t have Monaco or Gstaad or often even Singapore as an alternative - the alternative is Mumbai, Moscow, Nairobi, Baghdad, Baku, Tashkent, Dhaka.
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