Full Port Press

The New York Times (and other misguided liberal columnists and bloggers) are engaged in a bizarre full-court press to ram the UAE-Ports deal through. Krugman is, as usual, the sensible, if skeptical outlier, but The Moustache of Understanding, Brooks, and Kristof are falling all over themselves trying to make the ports into a litmus test for Arab-bias. It all sounds very noble, very Grey Lady-ish, but it still makes no real-world sense. I have to assume that despite their world-traveling, these guys have never encountered a foreign-run corporation operating on American soil. Sure, the UAE will keep a lot of white, American faces visible, but the nuts and bolts of the operations will certainly be controlled from the UAE, and we will all have to take it on faith that things will be done in strict good-faith.

The UAE has a long history of complicated (to be generous about it) relations with radical, militant Islamists. Even when they are in a public stance of direct and forceful opposition, the back-channel monies and communications continue to flow. From their point-of-view, there is no inconsistency because that is simply the way they keep the lid on the powder keg they sit on at home. They will present, and perhaps even believe, they are completely committed to protecting US interests, but that will be subject to the same sort of hidden hedge-betting that is an integral part of their home rules.

What all this translates into is an unacceptable risk. Perhaps not a certainty of disaster, but certainly a significant and unnecessary risk. So until further notice, they do not get the keys to our ports, or our airports, chemical plants, etc.

I have a suggestion for the Times and like-minded liberals, straining to reach out to the Arab world. A better way of demonstrating a just and enlightened attitude toward Arabs would be to not elect to invade their countries on false pretenses, not kidnap, not hold-without-charge, not murder, not torture, not humiliate and not rape their citizens. And the best and most meaningful way these guys can do this is to not support the Administration’s ongoing efforts to make that sort of treatment a permanent part of our foreign and domestic policy.

The difficulty with this approach for this sort of liberal (leaving out Brooks and his ilk) is that it frustrates the subtext of this support – the straining, unforgivable need to reach out once again to the Bush Administration. After having been seal-clubbed to a bloody pulp over and over again over the last six years, they still are asking, bleating, “why can’t we be friends”? The Bush Administration club is not a surgical instrument. It is the bluntest and crudest of instruments. It is all about battering away for all their worth, never pausing a second to engage in the kind of nuanced reasoning that these back-sliding, gutless liberals return to like a compulsion.