Qatar, the country in which we’ve built up new logistics bases, and from which our attack on Iraq will most likely be launched, may present a model for a modern Middle East (link for subscribers only, unfortunately).

In the past seven years, this tiny emirate has gone through a social revolution that has given women — and men — freedoms unheard of in most of the Arabian Peninsula. From lifting the prohibition on alcohol to abolishing censorship, Qatar has gone to great lengths to underscore just how different it is from Saudi Arabia. In the capital of Doha, which the Lonely Planet guidebook called the “dullest place on Earth” just a few years ago, nightclubs advertise happy hours and women cruise down the palm- tree-lined boulevards at the wheels of oversize sport-utility vehicles.

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Even relatively liberal Saudis voice frustration with the tiny emirate. “A small country will always be a small country, and influence can only be gained by cultivating ties with neighbors and working with them as a team,” scoffs Abdelaziz al Fayez, a member of the foreign-affairs committee in Saudi Arabia’s appointed legislature, Majlis al Shura. The Qatari social reforms, he adds, just “show a willingness to uproot their roots in order to please outsiders.”

That makes some Qataris both angry and proud. “It’s not important whether our reforms bother the neighbors, it’s important whether they satisfy the Qatari society,” says Ahmed Ali, editor of the biggest of Qatar’s three Arabic- language dailies, Al Watan. “Maybe change in this entire traditionalist region will start right here, in the smallest country.”