A fellow noder, identity witheld, recently sent me a private message:

"pardon me-- honest question-- as a reasonable conservative thinker....how could the bush white house had thought a massive sale of american ports to an ARAB group would not have gone this poorly??"

So many thoughts, on different tangents, not all of which intersect...

1. I suppose I'm flattered to be thought of as a "reasonable conservative thinker." My perception of the overall political makeup of E2 is that not all here would even acknowledge the existence of such a creature. I'll not detail or defend my own politcal outlook here - suffice it to say that I'd be considered right of center by most. If you care, there's a more or less rambling screed I wrote a couple of years ago on my home node. If you're of the opinion that conservative = Christian fundamentalist wacko, feel free to skip reading the rest of this, go look up my 30 some-odd other writeups, and downvote them serially - and I salute your compassionate, reason-based approach to the issues!

2. The "space" inhabited by these issues has 3 more or less orthogonal axes: shrewd tactical politics, wise long-range policy, and the right thing to do. It may not be possible to maximize all three on any given issue. On the tactical political axis, the Dubai port deal looks like a boner of the first order. When you motivate some of your most important Congressional allies to join with the Chuck Schumers and Hillary Clintons in opposition to you, you may have received a danger signal.

3. As such, this episode, along with the Dick Cheney hunting incident, starts to look like the sort of thing that seems to bedevil all presidential second terms. Iran-Contra. Monica Lewinsky. Even going back to Watergate - which, though the actual breakin occurred during the re-election campaign, mostly played out in the first year of Nixon's second term. Can this unfortunate combination of complacency and arrogance be avoided by ANY administration? I have no clue. The Bush white house had succeeded in so much of its earlier political maneuvering, at least as measured by the degree to which their enemies have seemed to be confounded.

4. One of the stranger trial balloons I heard being floated, from White House spokespersons, was that the White House itself was unaware of this deal before the details were finalized. This seems plausible to me, as large segments of the executive branch (i.e., the state department, factions within the C.I.A.) are known to be less than 100% on-board with the president's program. Which, if you're of a mind to be critical of this deal, would tend to be exculpatory for the Bush team. Or, if you are inclined towards conspiracies, it could even be interpreted as an attempt by dissident bureaucrats at sabotage of the Bush administration. Except that the president himself seems now to be defending the idea as if it were his very own. Something is very curious about this aspect of the episode.

5. I think it's important to try to be as accurate as possible when talking about these things. So, regarding the Dubai Port deal: It actually is NOT the "massive sale of American Ports to an Arab group." The central issue is the sale of the rights to run cargo operations at six U.S. Ports - New York, Newark, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Miami, and New Orleans, from the current holder, a British based corporation, to a company called Dubai Ports World, owned by the United Arab Emirates. According to media reports, this transaction was initially opposed by the Department of Homeland Security, and was allowed to proceed only on assurance that port operations supervised by DPW would be conducted in compliance with security regulations. Furthermore, actual WORK at the ports would still be performed by American longshoremen, in accordance with their existing labor agreements...a bulk substitution of Arab labor for American labor is NOT part of the plan.

6. This does not seem to reassure everybody, this writer included. I find it more than a little curious, however, that so much of the furor, based solely on the fact that DPW is an "Arab" company, seems to be coming from quarters that oppose security measures based on profiling, yea, verily, unto death. To me, this seems quite cut and dried - opposition to this purchase by DPW on the basis that it's an Arab-owned company is nothing else than profiling, pure and simple.

7. So, is profiling a reasonable response to the threats that face us? I confess to having some sympathy for this opinion. A number of the writers I read and respect have concluded that, before this era is over, we're going to lose at least one U.S. city to some sort of WMD, most likely a nuke, and we'd better start thinking about what we do then. The measures we've put in place post 9-11 are pathetically inadequate to amount to real protection - we don't have a system of security, we have a system of bothering people in order to foster a false sense of security. And we probably CAN'T implement security measures that would really protect us without becoming the police state that moveon.org says has already been put in place by BushCheneyHaliburton. (And, please, if you seriously think the U.S. is already a police state, I'm sorry, but you have no idea what you're talking about. Stop reading now and commence serial downvoting!) But, to the question of profiling: would it improve the situation? Would it make it harder, if not impossible, for our enemies to pull of an attack, say, with a smuggled warhead, on an American city? Is the potential improvement of the security situation worth the abuses that may occur under such measures? Considering the stakes, it is not my personal opinion that you can answer with a flat "no".

8. So much of the criticism of "Globalization" from the political left centers on the behavior of big multinational corporations: they operate outside of national boundaries, and hence, goes the criticism, of the restraint of national laws. If we grant this, though, wouldn't it work both ways? As a multinational entity, can't it be said that Dubai Ports World may have an origin, but not a nationality? In which case, what's the big deal?

9. I'm given to understand that DPW already has significant port operations in the U.S. Which, if true, would seem to reduce the scope for the kind of demagoguery we've seen.

10. Yeah, I know, I know, If the U.S. would stop trying to be the world's policeman, or the world's bully, maybe then these people wouldn't hate us, and we therefore wouldn't have to worry about them nuking us. Maybe if we stopped acting like a big, drunk ol' cowboy, and started listening to them, we could deal with them by other means than waging war. Sorry, I don't think it'll fly. If we implemented this policy today, it wouldn't make them quit hating us. We're still infidels, for a start. And, I would humbly submit, a people who will riot, kill, burn embassies, and utter so many blood-curdling threats over cartoons is not one that can always be reasoned with.

11. All right, let's grant, for the moment, and for the sake of argument, that our military response to 9-11 was inappropriate. We still have a problem with people who want to kill us in great numbers. A non-military response to this threat will necessarily involve diplomacy - we'll need, through diplomacy, to somehow obtain cooperation from various states in the Gulf region. These states are going to want some sort of consideration for this cooperation, in return. This is my understanding of the DPW situation, at the moment - The UAE has by many accounts provided a great deal of intelligence, and other support, for our war on Al Qaeda, and they rather think they've earned some consideration. This is the raw ingredient of diplomacy. Is it wrong?

Do you start to see what I was on about in #2, above?