Residual Forces

WaPo Editorial today (Happy Now?), sounds much like my rant yesterday.

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.

Ahem! “do business elsewhere!” (FTR: I didn’t say nor believe all of those accusations)

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. Besides, it seems that the European port operations that Dubai Ports World acquired when it bought Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Co., the British company that has run the six U.S. ports, are more profitable anyway. The result: Dubai Ports World will now run only ports where cargo is packed and sent to the United States, instead of managing ports where that same cargo is unloaded.

So, in what was playing out to be the biggest cluster#&^k by Bush, if the media and Congress were to be believed, is going to be the one that may come back to bite Congress in the electoral ass. They got what they wanted, no foreign ownership of Ports. Well, owning the entire port was never going to happen, and Congressional opposition to foreign ownership wasn’t standard operating procedure before DP World even entered the picture since the company was already foreign.

So now here we are, the United States Congress has hung a sign on all of our Port terminals that says ‘Arabs need not apply’.

It is very important that you mark the tape on this portion of US History, because this is when the World finally got to see the US implode due to political opportunism. Politics has just trumped common sense and reality. The members of Congress and political pundits of all stripes have just wound up the most xenophobic assault on a people who did little more than wanted to do business with us. (For all the accusations of racism flowing around out there, why is it so adamantly denied in this case????)
Our Congress said, and said it loud enough for the entire World to hear, that muslims are not good enough for us to do business with. ‘Arabs need not apply’

I am really quite ashamed in the way that our elected officials (of both Parties) behaved on this one. I really cannot believe that they have put their own political self-interests in front of what is good for our nation. Gaining friends across the globe, especially the Arab World, should be high on the priority list in DC, but unfortunately these bums put themselves (actually their reelections) at the top of that list.

And with the fear now of this new cold war of words about to heat up, I’d like Congress to hear this.

(HT to Rick for the email)