ABU DHABI LETTER: Last weekend, while the eyes of the world's media were on the elections in Iraq, the wealthy citizens of the United Arab Emirates, at the other end of the Persian Gulf, were getting on with business.
In Abu Dhabi, the richest of the seven small states that make up the UAE, they were welcoming an army of businessmen from 37 counties to an international trade exhibition and scientific conference on "Environment and Sustainable Development".
All the major Western oil companies were represented, together with over 300 other technology, engineering, transportation and services companies from the US, Britain, Germany, France, the Netherlands, India and Iran, among others.
Abu Dhabi has the third-largest oil deposits and the fourth-largest reserves of natural gas in the world and, as a consequence, has seemingly limitless resources available for national infrastructure development.
It undertakes gigantic engineering projects and building development on a scale and at a pace that would stun the Irish planning system. Abu Dhabi City, built in the desert over the past 40 years, is an Arabian fantasy of coloured crystal skyscrapers, shaded public parks and futuristic architecture.
One of the hereditary rulers of this benign autocracy, Crown Prince Mohammed Al Nahyan, deputy supreme commander of the UAE armed forces, welcomed the visiting business delegations last week. Abu Dhabi was, he said, "an oasis of stability, peace and friendship" in the Persian Gulf and there was no better time than now for the Gulf region and the wider world "to come together to review their policies and practices".
His words were more than polite formalities. Abu Dhabi and its fellow emirates are oases of prosperity and stability in a volatile region and there have been no complaints from the US or anyone else about the lack of democracy.
There is no thirst for it either among a population guaranteed free high quality housing, free health care, free education, scholarships to study abroad and, of course, no income tax.
UAE citizens are outnumbered in their own country by immigrants from India, Pakistan and the Philippines, who do all the labouring and services work. Nobody has a vote.
Business is now what Abu Dhabi does best. It has ambitions to rival Hong Kong and Singapore as a business and financial services centre, and to rival the Mediterranean and the US as a middle and upmarket tourist destination.
In the neighbouring emirate of Dubai, on the day before the Iraqi elections, the ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed Al Maktoum, supreme commander of the UAE armed forces, announced plans for the largest luxury tourism development in the world.
The "Dubai Waterfront" will dwarf the already vast tourism developments under construction in the emirate, all of them begun since 2001.
Dubai's oil and gas reserves are not as large as those of Abu Dhabi and have a life expectancy of another 40 years. In consequence, it has begun to diversify into free trade parks, media and IT services, and into tourism on a scale to surpass Las Vegas.
The first phase of the Waterfront project, to be built on the last remaining undeveloped stretch of Dubai's 80 kilometre coastline, is scheduled for completion in 2010. It will reshape the coastline of the country and, when completed, will cover an area of 440 square kilometres, larger than Greater Dublin. Much of the land will have to be reclaimed from the 10-metre seabed of the Persian Gulf.
According to Nakheel Corporation, the state-owned company behind the project, it will add 800 kilometres of new coastline, 900 kilometres of roads and canals, and accommodation, in soaring apartment blocks, villas and hotels, for 400,000 people.
At its centre will be be a seven-star hotel in the world's tallest building. Monorails, running just above water, will connect the hub to its extremities. A German company has plans to build the world's first underwater hotel.
At the official launch of the scheme, Sheikh Al Maktoum said the concept had been developed by an international consortium of architects, engineers and town planners assembled by Nakheel during 2004. Their goal was to "create a destination never before seen in Dubai or anywhere in the world", he said. Preliminary infrastructure costs will be in the tens of billions of dollars.
The Waterfront is the latest in a series of large scale tourism developments in Dubai, which began in 2001 with the Palms, two artificial islands in the shape of date palm trees, reaching 14 kilometres into the Gulf. They are now nearing completion.
The Palm islands were followed in 2004 by a third even larger artificial island, the Palm Deira, whose foundations are already visible above sea level, and then by the World Islands, an archipelago of man-made islands shaped like the continents of the globe.
Prices per island, including a mansion in the style of your choosing, begin at about €6 million.
All this frenzy of investment and development means the Emirates have as much at stake as anyone else in the future stability of the region.
They see themselves as a model for Arab interaction with the wider world and believe their good fortune in natural resources, and their largely contented populations are living proof that there is a stable and prosperous alternative in the Middle East to US-style "democracy".