By Mickey Rapkin By Mickey Rapkin It was early morning but already hot as hell as seven Toyota Land Cruisers careened through a Mideast desert. Our driver, dressed in a traditional white flowing thube, pointed to a pine-scented “no smoking” sign dangling from his rearview mirror and smiled, promptly offering me a cigarette. It was late March and a bit disorienting how quickly the towering glass skyscrapers of Qatar’s capital city of Doha gave way to white-walled suburbs and then to oil refineries before opening up into a sprawling desert. The sun was so strong — the sand so endless — I half ex…

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