The Council makes it a specialty to chronicle the potential threats, cataclysms and thaws the United States faces overseas. Not surprisingly, Middle Eastern roils figure prominently in the Council’s quarterly journal. Four of the latest issue’s 13 main pieces are Middle East related, a 31 percent ratio—or a .308 batting average, if you’re in baseball withdrawal. If you include Sens. Hillary Clinton’s and John McCain’s foreign policy essays, the bulk of which are focused on the Middle East, the ratio approaches 50 percent.
The Middle East’s 13 Percent Share
Against that, the Times’ seven favored Middle Eastern destination, out of 53, represents for that much-maligned region an acceptable 13 percent of the world’s choicest vacation spots. Not a bad counterpoint. Then again, let’s not forget that the likes of Muhammad, Christ and a long run of like-minded prophets before them chose the Middle East rather than, say, the Yukon or the Kuril Islands, to make their mark. There’s something inherently attractive about the Middle East, even, if not especially, for the gods.
Lesser tourists should find themselves no less enchanted. So what are the Times’ suggested destinations? Laos and Lisbon rank first and second (not sure if those rankings mean anything at all), but sunny Tunisia comes in, appropriately enough, in the bronze spot at #3, now that it is “undergoing a Morocco-like luxury makeover.” (Never mind that the same Times just two Sundays ago devoted the cover story of its magazine to remind us that Morocco was undergoing an al-Qaeda-like make-over.) But who’s to argue with Tunisia’s teasing of paradise with its Saharan sun baths and sheltering skies?
Libya Rising
At #10, between Courchevel (a French ski resort) and Hvar (the Riviera of Croatia), comes Libya. It’s a return to grace of sorts for that country which, until its leader, Muammar Qaddafi, lit one terrorist match too many in the mid-1980s, was every other Texan oilman’s second home.
A couple of years ago Qaddafi decided that building himself a nuclear capability would be more expensive and less rewarding than testing the tamer waters of globalism. Here he is being rewarded with vacation spotting. As the Times has it, “It’s on and off (and on again) for Libya.” Visa hold-ups and red tape aside, “[t]he eldest son of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the leader of Libya, is developing a carbon-neutral resort along the country’s pristine Mediterranean coastline, home to stellar Greek and Roman ruins and endangered seals. Luxury hotels and golf courses are planned, as well as a new airport in Tripoli.” Plan ahead.
Road Trip: Iran
We then get an interesting run of vacation spots: Prague, Quito, Liverpool, Munich... and Iran. This may come as a shock to some western readers, but Iran really isn’t any more dangerous, and in many ways may well be less so, than, let’s say, Omaha. Steaks aside, it’s certainly more variously fascinating than the easternmost edge of Nebraska.
Besides, “What Axis of Evil?” the Times asks. “Upscale tour operators are tiptoeing into Iran next year, offering trips that explore the ancient country’s Persian treasures and olive-green desert plains.” And “California-based Distant Horizons is organizing two 18-day trips that start in Tehran and then weave through the once-forbidden countryside, including stops in Shiraz and Isfahan. Prices start at $5,390 per person.”
Back in the dark days of the cold war, when the Soviet Union was slouching toward irrelevance, the half-dead Brezhnevian empire was starved for hard, foreign currency. Opening its once-forbidden (and forbidding) countryside to tourism was one of its methods of stretching life support a little longer. Iran’s economy isn’t doing so well these days. Tourism to the rescue?
