A company called Dubai Ports World wants to buy a company called the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company. P&O has the contracts to manage major terminals at several East Coast ports, including the one in Baltimore, the ideal port of entry for a Capitol-bound nuclear bomb. P&O is a private Britain-based firm. Dubai Ports World is a firm owned by the United Arab Emirates, a hereditary despotic oligarchy known as the money laundering capital of the Arab world. Deals of this sort are supposed to be vetted by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, and the administration says this one was. Donald Rumsfeld, meanwhile, says the first he heard of the deal was after it became a subject of public controversy, post-approval. Rumsfeld, naturally, is supposed to be a member of the CFIUS.
The American people, with good reason, are skeptical of this plan. As the president himself put it in a delicious malapropism, "This deal wouldn't go forward if we were concerned about the security of the United States of America."
Manning the barricades in favor of Emirati control of American ports has been a legion of centrist elite opinion-makers eager to explain that you, me, Chuck Schumer, Rick Santorum, and all the rest are just a bunch of racists. Or, rather, as Tom Friedman put it, we're "borderline racist." Nick Kristof sees opposition to the deal as "quasi-racist." David Ignatius, blessed with the courage of his convictions, is willing to call us "frankly, racist."
Not really. The fuss is actually about the wisdom of putting a UAE-owned enterprise in this position. Nobody objects when Arab-Americans like Spencer Abraham, John Sununu, or John Abizaid take up sensitive positions in the American government. Nobody thinks it would be a good idea to put state-owned enterprises from non-Arab countries, like Iran or Cuba, in charge of our ports. Most of all, contrary to the hot air on the op-ed pages, nobody is suggesting anything like racial profiling, which subjects people to discrimination on the basis of their skin color or ethnic background. This is a violation of the 14th Amendment's guarantee to the equal protection of the laws, which is, in turn, a constitutional instantiation of the bedrock moral principle that a legitimate government should show equal concern for the rights and well-being of all its citizens.
Skeptics of the port deal suggest we discriminate between foreign entities based on their nation of origin, something the United States does regularly. Our border with Canada is administered differently from our border with Mexico. Visa rules distinguish between citizens of different countries. We share some intelligence with some states, and not with others. We have formal defense commitments to some countries, but not with all of them. That's foreign policy, that's National Security 101.
But deal advocates are only pretending to believe that discrimination between countries is wrong, as you can see from their other arguments. One such argument is sound. Friedman quotes Steven Flynn, saying that, "Among the many problems at American ports, who owns the management contract ranks near the very bottom." And, indeed, the Bush administration has screwed up port security in myriad ways. This is hardly a reason to give them a free pass for screwing it up in this particular way. Rather, the president's sorry record of nonchalance on the general subject is reason to doubt assurances that he's performed due diligence in this matter.
Kristof says we don't need to worry, because the UAE is "staunchly pro-American and pro-business." But is it? James Zogby did some polling in the UAE and found the United States had an 11 percent favorable rating in the country in 2002, with 85 percent taking an unfavorable view. In 2003, that ratio was 11 percent favorable to 87 percent unfavorable. Perhaps Kristof was referring to the attitudes of UAE elites who have, indeed, been collaborating with the American government in recent years.
Not long ago, however, the UAE was one of three countries extending diplomatic recognition to the Taliban. Before 9-11, one frequent visitor to Osama bin Laden's mountain hideaway was Sheik Mohammed ibn Rashid al Maktum, at the time UAE's Defense Minister. Since then, of course, things have changed. Today, he's prime minister and the Emir of Dubai. George Tenet has noted in testimony that the CIA had to pass up an opportunity to try and kill bin Laden at one point in the 1990s when he was on a hunting trip because "you might have wipe out half the royal family in the UAE in the process, which I'm sure entered into everybody's calculation in all this."
That post-9-11 pressure has caused the UAE to switch sides is surely a good thing. But America has allies, and then we have allies. Our strategic partnerships with close democratic friends -- Britain, Germany, Japan, etc. -- extend across decades and involve presidents and prime ministers from all parties in both states, transcending personal ties or whims of the day and reflecting deep alignment of values and interests. Partnerships of convenience with friendly despots dating back to the early 21st century and reflecting handshake agreements between George W. Bush and the local monarch aren't the same thing, and there's nothing racist about pointing this out.
Fortunately, in a rare outbreak of good sense, Michael Ledeen has pointed out that there are ways to restructure this deal so as to create a firewall between sensitive information and potentially unreliable foreign governments. If public pressure on the White House convinces the Bush administration to adopt this approach, some good will have been done for the nation's security. If the White House refuses to act, Congress should block this deal. It's not the worst thing Bush has done, but this is a rare case in which there has been a bad act with some realistic chance of being reversed.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
