Count the ways in which Dubai is precarious. It is caught between the desert and the ever-fraught Gulf. Besides Iran, its neighbours include an ambitious Saudi Arabia and an anarchic Yemen. It relies on the hard power of the erratic US, whose Fifth Fleet patrols those unquiet waters. Dubai is not even the sovereign centre of its own state, which is Abu Dhabi. It has little oil. In the home peninsula of a world religion, it allows a degree of hedonism that some might regard as a profane incitement.