The world’s fastest city

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Author Jim Krane talks to Kat Slowe about the real Dubai, revealing lesser known sides to the city that he will be discussing in his new book, and describing the inspiration for his story.

“A lot of a lot of people who have actually heard of Dubai do not realise that it is an Arab city that is in the Middle East,” author and journalist Jim Krane states. “Too often when I would contact people back in the States, they would always tell me: ‘Oh, you’re in the UAE. Wooooh, keep your head down. Are you in the military?’

“I’d be like: ‘No, I’m a journalist reporting on the place.’ They would say: ‘Wow, I’m going to pray for you.’

“I think: ‘What are you? I have to write a book about this place. You people really just don’t understand it.’”

And so, Krane, an Associated Press (AP) journalist and former consultant to HH Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE, and Ruler of Dubai, started to detail his perspective of the Middle East. His book, provisionally titled Dubai: The Story of the World’s Fastest City, is to be published in the US this September. In it, he will be giving an account of the impressions he garnered from living in the region and discussing a number of controversial topics, such as the environment, demographics and labour.

Krane was sent to Dubai by the AP in 2004 from Baghdad, where he had been covering the aftermath of the US invasion. To begin with, he was not keen about the idea of going to Dubai to live: “I was sort of hoping for a post somewhere else, some place more interesting, maybe in Europe or East Asia. I knew that there was going to be an opening in Vietnam. I was kind of hoping for that.”

Krane’s desire for ‘interesting’ by this point no longer extended to Baghdad, his experience of which had created in him a vast sense of disillusionment towards the government of his home country, America.

“The last thing I worked on in Iraq was the big US onslaught of Fallujah in 2004,” he explains. “When that was over I left Iraq and that was a major bloodbath, with huge aerial bombardment and a lot of street to street fighting.”

Krane was positioned at a command post behind the front line, obtaining all the intelligence reports. Though there were other reporters who were with troops in the town, he realised he was receiving a broader view from commanders at the post and he also had access to highly classified video streams from some of the unmanned aerial vehicles, which were flying over the city.

While he was there he tells of how he saw ‘car bombs going off and suicide bombers blowing themselves up,’ not to mention the ‘aerial bombardments, gun fights and rockets, and mortars hitting hotels, or restaurant buildings.’ Yet it was not the pure violence that affected Krane the most, but the futility and pointlessness of the actual invasion, which he watched do so much damage to the country and its people.

“In Iraq, what affected me the most was seeing the futility of the US effort, and it just sort of dawned on me that these guys had no idea what they were doing, and they were just screwing things up,” he says.

“By the time I left the country, not only did the US efforts show no improvements, but the place was just getting worse and worse, and more and more violent.

“At the time I had a very low opinion of the US government, the Bush administration in particular, and of these Republican party operatives that were spinning the news to try to get president Bush re-elected, which actually happened.”

When Bush was re-elected, Krane admits he was “disgusted by the whole affair.”

“It seemed like the whole invasion was a huge mistake and that there were these republican operatives spinning the news so that Americans back in the States couldn’t get the true story,” he adds with indignation. “They were deriding the coverage that we journalists were providing and calling us biased. In the meantime, they are presiding over the destruction of a country for no good reason and claiming otherwise.”

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