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But Dubai is pretty infamously known for being created by slave labor. You claim the rulers bent the dessert into a successful city, but neglect to mention who actually did the manual labor. Slaves. Slaves create the buildings, slaves maintain the infrastructure. Without slavery, the city collapses. That is not a successful city. Successful cities are good places to live for a large majority of their inhabitants. Mistreatment of foreign workers, trapping them with debt, and stealing their passports so they can't leave is all pretty well documented at this point. The city is a hellhole if you are not a tourist or rich.
I see that the city is an impressive feat from the perspective of human ingenuity and mastery over nature. But the leaders deserve no praise. Anyone so explicitly utilizing modern day slavery for an achievement that is impressive but obviously totally unnecessary is a pathetic loser.
By all means, dare to dream and attempt what others believe to be impossible. But if your construction project that mainly exists to show off how great you are, requires trampling on tens of thousands of human lives, then it is time to let go of it, and do something else.
That's entirely fair.
But is the claim that it's all built on the back of slaves substantively true?
The largest estimates for this phenomenon by NGOs top out at around 100k people, about the same absolute numbers as the UK (though much more concerning proportionally). A big issue that ought be stamped out for sure, but hardly a systemic necessity to run the place.
My estimation is that it's one of those real social problems they have, as any society does, and that they're trying to address it. Not that it's some kind of ostensible social choice, like their political system.
Iran's issues in contrast seem much more like deliberate choices of its ruling class.
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