Sunday, Feb. 26, 2006 | 8:21 a.m.
Once again, the government has come to the rescue of President George W. Bush.
No, not our government, silly, the government of the United Arab Emirates. They are the folks who own or control the Dubai Ports World company that has been cleared by the Bush administration to exercise effective control over the operations of somewhere between six and 21 United States seaports, depending upon how you count.
If ever there were an issue since 9/11 that would galvanize the people of the United States against an action by our president, his latest decision to turn over our ports to the U.A.E. is the one. It is not, by the way, a Republican or Democrat issue. It is not, by the way, a conservative, religious, liberal or secular issue. It is, happily, an all-American issue, which means that almost all of America is dead-set against what President Bush wants to do.
And since he picked this strangest of moments in his historic tenure in the White House to throw down the veto gauntlet to the U.S. Congress - giving himself little or no running room - it appeared only a miraculous intervention could have saved him from his tone-deaf self.
Enter his friends in the United Arab Emirates. You know who those folks are. They, according to President Bush, are our allies in the war against terror.
But, before 9/11 - and who really knows what's the case today - they contributed their banking expertise and at least two of their people to Osama bin Laden's direct hit on New York's World Trade Center and our country's Pentagon. So, have they cleaned up their murderous, conspiratorial ways so much that President Bush should approve their stepping up to and into some of our largest and most vulnerable ports? You know, the ports that are vulnerable to chemical, biological and nuclear weapons being smuggled in through all those thousands of containers nobody ever checks. President Bush calls them weapons of mass destruction.
The president says they have. He says they are our friends now. He wants to do business with them. I say, if all that is true, then have at it. It is a good thing that we do all kinds of business with those who used to hate us because once they have their billions of dollars invested in our country, they will be less likely to order the kind of attacks that could cripple us and hurt their economic well-being.
But, as we all know, our president has been wrong before. And, even though he is "comfortable" with the process that cleared the U.A.E.-owned company to buy its way into the middle of our most vulnerable underbelly, there are millions upon millions of Americans who don't quite have that comfort level.
And since we are the ones who have been discomforted by the war on terrorism - it is our kids who are being killed and maimed, our library cards that are being scrutinized by people we do not know and cannot see, our phone calls that are being intercepted without the benefit of constitutional guarantees and our rights to be free that are being curtailed in the name of homeland security - it is only proper that we should be the people who are made "comfortable" with President Bush's decision.
And, so far, we are not. And even if the White House manages to "inform" enough members of Congress to see it the White House's way, that probably won't be good enough. Well over 90 percent of Americans just don't get this deal. And it isn't because we don't understand it, because we do. What we don't get is why the president seems so out of the loop on this one - why he wants to do what regular Americans know instinctively is the wrong thing, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, to do. And how could he have allowed this to happen in the first place?
In the end, President Bush wants to do business with the U.A.E., and he usually gets his way. So I have a suggestion. Keep those folks away from our seaports, our airports and anything else that could cripple or kill the United States of America. But if they seriously want to own something here, let them prove their friendship by selling them something that needs help - the special kind of help that they are in a unique position to give.
Sell them General Motors. That is a company that needs money - and the U.A.E. has many extra billions of oil money they really don't need - and it needs people willing to build the kind of cars that will not keep us dependent on Middle East oil. There's a test of friendship, don't you think?
In five years the United Arab Emirates can prove their great friendship by doing this small service for us. In return, if they do a great job, we can sell them something else. Maybe not our port operations and maybe not control of the nation's airports either. Something a bit less important.
We can sell them ... Crawford, Texas. With apologies to the good people who live there.
Brian Greenspun is editor of the Las Vegas Sun.
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