At least that’s the clear implication from this report from ABC News.
March 10, 2006 ? The White House asked Dubai Ports World, a company owned by the United Arab Emirates, to give up its management stake in U.S. ports, to save President Bush from the politically difficult position of vetoing a key piece of legislation to protect America’s ports, ABC News has learned.
Not entirely surprising. Nobobdy believed that it was a voluntary decision. The only problem is that it makes our President look weak in the eyes of the world, which is something we really cannot afford in the midst of a War on Terror.
Update: There’s more on this angle of the story in David Ignatius’s column in the Washington Post.
DUBAI — Officials here heard late Thursday that Karl Rove had decided to pull the plug. President Bush’s political adviser was said to have conveyed to a top manager of Dubai Ports World in Washington that the White House couldn’t hold out any longer against congressional pressure to kill the Arab company’s plan to acquire freight terminals at six U.S. ports. The initial response of one Dubai executive was: “Who’s Karl Rove?” But in the end, political leaders here recognized that it was time to fold a losing hand.
Of course, while the Dubai government may have accepted the inevitable, that doesn’t mean there won’t be consequences to what has happened:
I suspect America will pay a steep price for Congress’s rejection of this deal. It sent a message that for all the U.S. rhetoric about free trade and partnerships with allies, America is basically hostile to Arab investment. And it shouldn’t be surprising if Arab investors respond in kind. One could blame it all on craven members of Congress, if the opinion polls didn’t show that Americans are overwhelmingly against the deal — and suspicious of Muslims in general. Those poll numbers tell us that America hasn’t gotten over Sept. 11, 2001. If anything, Iraq has deepened the country’s anxiety, introspection and foreboding.
(….)
The ports deal was part of the UAE’s embrace of things Western. Wednesday night, I traveled with the minister of higher education, Sheik Nahayan bin Mubarak, to the dusty city of Al Ain to attend a Mozart festival at which the Vienna Chamber Orchestra performed. And I visited the American University of Sharjah, created nine years ago as a beacon of liberal arts education. On a wall next to the chancellor’s office is a photo of the twin towers in New York, taken by one of the students on June 8, 2001. “There are no words strong enough to express how we feel today,” reads a statement signed by UAE students.
In other words, the opponents of the deal have handed a rhetorical victory to the radical, anti-Western elements within the Middle East. Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps the UAE won’t take this personally and the consequences for U.S. foreign policy will be minor. I don’t think I am, though.
President Bush tried to do the right thing on the Dubai ports deal, but he got rolled by a runaway Congress. The collapse of the deal was a measure of Bush’s political weakness — but even more, of America’s traumatized post-Sept. 11 politics. The ironic fact is that the UAE is precisely the kind of Arab ally the United States needs most now. But that clearly didn’t matter to an election-year Congress, which responded to the Dubai deal with a frenzy of Muslim-bashing disguised as concern about terrorism.
I really can’t say that I disagree.
And there really isn’t much more that I would add to this great editorial from The Washington Post….
THEY SPEND drunkenly, they fail at oversight and they can’t stop the administration from abusing detainees or tapping phones. But never call the members of Congress powerless: Yesterday, in the exalted name of anti-terrorism, the Senate rebelled against its Republican leadership and joined the House in a vote to prevent a company based in a moderate, friendly Arab country from making a minor investment in the United States. When it became clear that some such blocking measure would pass, Dubai Ports World threw in the towel, announcing that it would sell all of its U.S. operations, including the management operations of six U.S. ports it recently acquired, and do business elsewhere.Of course, the speed of that announcement illustrates a critical point: that this investment always was a business decision, not the early stages of a covert attack on Baltimore. Quite rightly, the company and its Dubai-based owners — who are stunned, apparently, by the unexpected reaction to what they thought was a routine business deal — didn’t want their country’s and their company’s names dragged through the mud, so they cut their losses.
Read the whole thing.
Previous Posts:
The Fallout Begins
The End of Ports Fiasco, But The Beginning Of What ?
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