Any old port in a storm

I haven't had much to say here about the Dubai Ports world deal, and whether or not it was a good deal for the US. My usual practice here is if I can't add something that isn't being said a thousand other places, I'll probably let it go.

I do think both sides ignored some valid points on the opposite side. I think proponents of the deal are too quick to ignore the fact the UAE is not completely spotless when it comes to contact with terrorists. Andy McCarthy summed it up well:

I've gotten some reader feedback from yesterday's piece expressing some surprise that there hasn't been any response on the Corner, particularly from supporters of the port deal, to the question I essentially posed yesterday. I am not that surprised myself, since people are obviously busy with their own things, and my point was more along the lines of "if we confirm over the next 45 days that it is true the UAE supports Hamas financially ...," rather than to say with certainty that the financial support that has been reported actually happened, something I am not in a position to confirm.

But I will put the question to the house: Do people disagree with the proposition that if it turns out the UAE is in violation of American anti-terror law since 9/11, then the UAE should be disqualified from managing commerical operations at our port terminals? I would have assumed this to be incontestable. But I was wrong making an assumption last week about how important the UAE's hostility to Israel was to proponents of the deal, so this is worth asking.

He had a column today on that point.

We’re told there’s a Bush Doctrine. That our national security is singularly dependent on communicating to the world — a world full of shady regimes and deadly terror networks — a simple, elegant message: If you are with the terrorists, you are not with us. If you are with the terrorists, we are going to treat you as a hostile. Period. Full stop. End of story.

The UAE was with the terrorists, big-time, before 9/11. The port-deal proponents — finding it most inconvenient to dwell on that very recent history — ignored it, preferring to libel patriotic opposition as benighted nativism, or to insist that the suicide hijackings against us were a road-to-Damascus moment for the Emirati sheikhs. It was the epiphany that put them on the right side of the Bush Doctrine’s line in the sand.

Oops. It looks like the UAE continued to underwrite terrorists long after that. Even to this day. The regime remains a booster of Hamas, an organization pledged to the destruction of Israel by violent jihad. An organization that has been designated as a foreign terrorist organization under American law since we began officially stigmatizing such entities in the mid-1990s.

It’s very simple. Hamas is an organization that an American would be sent to jail for supporting no matter how much that support might be good for the economy. It is an organization that an American business would be put out of business for supporting.

I do think proponents are way out of line to suggest that opposition to the deal is motivated by racism.

It is not unreasonable to wonder if a country in the Middle East is the wisest choice to have managing port operations in this day and age.

On the other hand, some opponents of the deal are flat wrong to suggest the UAE company would be taking over security at American ports.

And so, with silly comments on both sides, it's hard to sort out the diamonds from the chaff.

What prompted me to write this and weigh in on the deal is a phone call I got earlier today. I got a call from a pollster who said they were calling delegates here in the 6th District. (I just attended our caucus last Tuesday. Didn't take long for my name to be distributed around!)

The first question was this: "Do you support the US giving control of its ports to a foreign country?" I said I was undecided, because I thought the question was flat wrong in its assumption. This deal was not going to "give control" of US ports to a foreign country. A foreign-owned company was going to operate the cranes and whatnot at some ports. And there weren't exactly hordes of other American companies busting down doors to take the contract.

So, I hope Republicans somewhere don't put too much stock in the answers to that question, because it was the wrong question to be asking.