Andrew McCarthy asks the tough questions at NRO no one in the Bush administration or its defenders wants to answer about that little Dubai port deal. Bush was re-elected in large measure due to public support for the Bush doctrine, a doctrine that seems to have been abandoned the day after the election. Here’s McCarthy:
I have this simple question that no one seems to want to answer.
Thankfully, the five-alarm debacle that was the lucrative deal to permit a company wholly owned by the United Arab Emirates to manage stevedoring operations at several U.S. ports has been averted. Backstage pressure induced the UAE to withdraw, avoiding further, immense embarrassment to President Bush, who inexplicably raised the stakes of this blunder by threatening a veto “” his first, and what a bizarre cause to take that maiden voyage over.
The end has unleashed another torrent of censorious caterwauling from the “Let’s Make a Deal” Right “” an amalgam of free-trade-at-any-cost business interests and starry-eyed democracy-builders who see in every apparent moderate throughout the Islamic world a James Madison waiting to happen. This morning’s latest philippic from the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page is case-in-point.
Objection to the deal, we”re told, was a “political stampede” manufactured out of the worst kind of chauvinism “” just because it was an “Arab-owned company buying port operations.” Yes, this was a wanton “mugging of a foreign investor.” It marks the “the re-emergence of the “˜national security” protectionists.” (The “they”re delusional” quotes around national security are the Journal’s, not mine.)
So I’ll ask the same question I asked last week on NRO”s Corner. The same question a number of us have been asking for the last several weeks, with deafening silence the lone response: Does it matter that the UAE appears to be in violation of our fundamental antiterrorism law?
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…
Read it all.