Joe Gandelman of The Moderate Voice rounds up the aftermath of the ports deal failure, with links to MSM and bloggers aplenty.
Meanwhile, Jim Geraghty's TKS blog is swiftly becoming the most interesting part of National Review Online. Read this post covering the Washington Post's poll re: US attitudes toward Islam. It's a nice bookend to this TKS post on post-tipping point politics, and Winds has carried a series of items poking into this theme of late. See Armed Liberal's "Ports, Autarky, Gated Communities, and BBQ," and the Guest Blog response "Exit Zero on The Real War." Plus my own "Trans-shipments, Toons & Tipping Points" and a follow-up collection of coal-mine canaries in "Our Darkening Sky: Postcards From the Edge"
Heck of a job, Congress.
Heck of a job, Bush!
I guess Karl Rove is busy with other stuff, or has developed a tin ear about politics. Who could have guessed that some people might wonder whether it was a good idea to have a company owned by an Arabic country running our ports?
They could have handled this well, and gotten a sensible outcome, by saying something like: "We've got a tough decision to make, balancing two competing values. There's security for our ports, and support for our allies in the Islamic world. Let's hear everyone's thoughts on both sides, and then we'll make the call."
Let everyone talk it out, debate it back and forth on the talk shows, before the decision is announced. At least pretend that you are listening to the people. The value of this is that you can educate public opinion by acknowledging that there's a balance to be struck.
The Bush administration's failure was to follow its reflexive bent toward secrecy. They know what they want to do. They don't want to listen to what the people think; they want to tell the people what to think.
The fuel behind the fury here is not anti-Islamic bigotry (although I won't deny there's some of that). Rather, for many people this has turned out to be the last straw.
Is this a government, "of the people, by the people, and for the people"? They sure don't act like it.
It is anti-whatever bigotry until Congress threatens to rip Baltimore, Houston, Newark, Newport News, New Orleans, Savannah, Wilmington(NC), and Brooklyn away from the Saudi-owned company that dare not be mentioned. Atleast with respect to those in the know. For the average American I have no problem chalking it all up to sheer ignorance.
But this is all window dressing. I'm sure the bigwhigs in Abu Dhabi understand American politics probably better than most Americans. The real story is the typically shoddy treatment given by the press. PBS had a thorough discussion about the true nature of the ports deal ONCE then went right back to the "control the ports" meme. The rest of the media didn't even put forth that meager effort. No one can expect an informed populace if the gatekeepers of knowledge are utterly incompetent or worse.
One can happily criticize the news outlets, but that can't possibly be the "real" story. If the Bush administration had presented the pros and cons of this decision, it would have been covered, analyzed in detail from all possible points of view, and debated fully (rationally and irrationally) by the American people.
At the end of the day, the Bush administration would be in a position to say, "We've heard all sides of the debate. It's a tough call, but here's our decision." Congress always retains the power to step in, but the political incentive wouldn't have been there: no "Gotcha!" Congressional hearings would just be "Me, too!", and would have been irrelevant.
You're seeing the fallout from two acts of incompetent governing (Katrina and the ports) by a lame-duck President. Both of those could have been done right, but they weren't. There's lots of finger-pointing to shift the blame to whoever the speaker doesn't like, but ultimately, the buck stops with the boss. And the boss isn't paying attention.
What is instructive is that the Arab and Muslim street is affecting Main Street.
I believe that the patience of the American people is simply at an end. With Muslims in general, who are seen as the enemy pure and simple.
Any candidate who wishes to explore this in detail can IMHO ride it into the White House. Yes including the Saudi port leases, the Chinese, and so forth.
The elite including GWB are profoundly out of touch. This includes Rove who should have known how idiotic this looked.
As far as the prospect of declining Arab investment, who cares? They are nothing but terrorist-financing rentiers anyway, and America is better off without them or their funds which inevitably get commingled with Al Qaeda.
UAE princelings go hunting with bin Laden, and assisted Tehran with it's nukes, and act as a terror finance network (and was up to it's ears in Oil-for-bribes and BCCI and other scandals). So it's not as if UAE was worth anything anyway.
The US Navy is the only guarantor of UAE not being annexed by tribal rivals Saudi or Oman, so they need us no matter what. They are a tribal rabble with a modern face, and no one should be fooled into thinking they are France or Spain (difficult Western nations that are at least modern and relatively transparent).
The USSR was our ally during the last half of WWII, in the extremely vital fight against the Nazi threat.
If a state-owned company based in the USSR were in a position to run our ports, would it have been bigotry to reject the offer?
Suppose we had gone ahead and accepted that offer from our allies, as a show of support. Do you suspect it would have turned out to be a good idea?
Of course it's the real story. It's entirely about the ignorance and gullibility of the American people and their feckless, myopic media. Unless there's some other explanation for the discrepancy between the treatment of Dubai Ports World and the National Shipping Company of Saudi Arabia. The HoS and the ulema they fund built the madrassas in Afghanistan/Pakistan/etc. and as we all know 17-of-the-19-hijackers-came-from-Saudi-Arabia(TM...thank you peacenik and isolationist anti-war blowhards). Given all the boilerplate that's been spewed the last 5 years I doubt you'd find 2 Americans in a row that would say that the Emerits is a bigger threat than Saudi Arabia. Yet somehow it's bizarro world and, relatively speaking, the criminal is rewarded and the bystander shot. If this were all about security and trust then surely Congress and the media can make more out of NSCSA than DPW. Until then I think my opinion is the soundest--craven politics and ignorance.
Thanks for the Katrina mention. Maybe you'd be kind enough to debunk the Popular Mechanics paper. Damned if it's just me but I've yet to find one Katrina groupie willing to take a stab.
Possibly. But it'd damn sure make us hypocrites if at the same time we denied it for the USSR company we allowed it for a company owned by Portugal.
Look, you can dream up analogous hypotheticals all day but why not address the only one that matters--DPW and HSCSA. How about this one. What if HSCSA had come forward and offered to buy the port berths from DPW? Problem solved? If yes then you've just impugned your motives. If no then you've just impugned your honesty. Take your pick. You cannot say one is intolerable and the other acceptable and remain consistent.
We didn't have a grand strategy to defeat the USSR by opening markets. USSR wouldn't permit that strategy and unlike the UAE, the USSR was a de facto enemy state.
Bush's Middle East strategy is to kill al-Qaeda and democratize the rest. Trade and economic liberalization are key components of the democratization process.
If Congress disagrees with the Bush policy, then I would love to hear some alternatives.
What does OBL want from the West? He wants us to leave the Middle East alone. I am sure he doesn't want trade deals and economic liberalization that increases the ties with the decadent West.
Frontinus [#7,#8],
Thanks for providing the URL for NSCSA. On reading their description of their activities, it appears that they are a shipping company. They own several very large crude oil tankers, and they sail between the Indian Ocean and the east coast of North America. There's no evidence that they run any of our port operations. It doesn't look like a comparable case to DPW at all.
If the media had been asleep at the switch, and missed a clear comparable case already in place, then they deserve criticism for incompetence, though not necessarily for racism. A charge of racism would require an error in the other direction.
In this case, though it's worth looking at, I think it's a false alarm.
PD Shaw [#9],
My argument is not that the sale to DPW is bad. It's that the Bush administration handled the decision about as badly as it could have, due to reflexive secrecy, rather than trusting the People to understand and debate the issues. I believe that after an open debate, the People would support our government in a reasoned decision, either way. They didn't get the chance. And they haven't been getting that chance for the last five years. After a while, they get pretty ticked off.
OBL does not want the West to leave the Middle East alone. What he wants is for the West to attack the Middle East (perhaps in response to some outrageous act of terrorism) in a way that will unite the Muslim world in a jihad against the West and everything it stands for. He's not particularly worried about Muslim casualties, as long as our attack mobilizes the people of the Middle East behind him and against us.
That's the key dynamic that is often missed. We can't win by appeasing him, and we can't win by attacking viciously. The only way to win is through the hearts and minds of the people.
Oh, right, we did attack, and we turned Iraq into chaos.
Guess we made OBL pretty happy about that.
And they have a presence at all of those ports. Baltimore, Houston
They also own chemical transports in addition to the crude and LNG carriers. The threat doesn't start only as cargo is lifted from the ship.
Who said racism? I think I said it was anti-whatever, politics, and ignorance. If it were racism then I'd expect the detractors to be consistent if nothing else.
But again, what if NSCSA had come forward with an offer to buyout the DPW deal? Or just to stear away from the racism hullabaloo substitute COSCO if that helps.
Just for the record, I don't find either DPW or NSCSA particularly troubling. Atleast until our port practices actually make risking a broad conspiracy worthwhile compared to just dumb luck. Maybe if we ever search some double-digit percentage of containers but until then you just won't get me to fear foreign, corporate complicity in some al-Qaeda smuggling job.