Who sank the Dubai Port deal? Blame its supporters.

It’s almost enough to make you feel sorry for the Bush administration. The merits of the Dubai port deal may very well have been on the administration’s side, at least in a general sort of way. Our increasing trade imbalance does require us to countenance, even welcome, direct foreign investment in our economy, even in some of the most critical elements of our infrastructure, like ports. Dubai Ports World, the government-owned company that bought the leases when it took over a British company, operates other American ports, without, so far as we know, serving as a point of vulnerability for infiltration or terrorist activity. Almost every economic and journalistic right-thinker not only found the deal unexceptionable, but attributed the opposition to it to political opportunism, nativism, or outright racism.

So why was Congressional opposition to the deal strong enough to force Dubai Ports World to pull out of the deal? Why did 70% of the public oppose the deal? Why did any percent of the public care enough to oppose it? Why have any number of seemingly more egregious issues–detainee torture, warrantless surveillance, extraordinary rendition–erupted, failed to gain public traction, and subsided, while the Dubai port deal drew bipartisan opposition in Congress and a huge majority in public?

Look for the answer not in the arguments being advanced by the opponents of the deal, but in the arguments being made in favor of the deal by its supporters.

Start with what the deal’s supporters weren’t saying. The arguments were general: the need for foreign investment, Dubai’s support for the US’s war on terrorism, the number of port terminals already managed by foreign-owned companies. Almost none related to the specific merits of the deal. Did Dubai Ports World’s suitability for managing the east coast terminals inhere solely in the fact that it bought them from the British company that used to manage them? Was this company a good choice to manage these terminals in these ports?

The burden of proof would have seemed to be on the deal’s opponents to demonstrate why the deal shouldn’t go through. And usually it would be. But in the sixth year of George W. Bush’s administration, the nature of the argument over the port deal is redolent of previous arguments the administration has made, arguments to which there turned out to be considerably less than met the eye.

There’s the artfully-worded assertion. Remember the reference to yellowcake uranium in the state of the union speech, the sentence that seemed to say that Iraq had been in the market for yellowcake? In fact, what the president said was not that Iraq had been shopping for uranium, but that “the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” There was no explicit claim that the US believed what the British government “had learned,” just that the British government had learned it.

Here, the Bush administration, in the person of Deputy Treasury Secretary Robert Kimmitt, told a Senate committee that the administration was “not aware of a single national security concern raised recently that was not part of the CFIUS staff review.” Security concerns, said Kimmitt, “were raised, they were resolved. We moved on.” It seemed definitive enough.

But note the passive voice. Concerns “were raised,” “were resolved.” Raised by whom, resolved by whom? The Washington Post reported that the concerns–that the company’s assets could be used for terrorist operations–were raised by the Coast Guard. And “raised recently”? Were there concerns raised other than recently that were not part of the staff review? And these concerns were “resolved”? Not disproved or discredited but resolved? Does this mean there was something to these concerns, and that Dubai Dubai Ports World made changes that “resolved” them? A year or two before, quibbles like these—“flyspecking,” lawyers used to call it—would have seemed like desperate attempts to discredit a routine transaction and the administration that championed it. Now they seemed like simple arms-length due diligence.

Like the government’s vague reassurances, the arguments advanced by non-official supporters of the deal were soothing on the surface, but downright alarming just beneath. “I put this near the bottom of my list of my concerns — who owns the terminal,” said Stephen Flynn, a retired Coast Guard commander who became a go-to talking head on the deal, on PBS’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.

It is somewhat unsettling, however, even for a supporter of organized labor, to learn that one of the reasons for Flynn’s equanimity is that actual cargo handling is performed, not by the “few senior managers who report from the [foreign lessee’s] home office,”—you know, the executives who actually run the company–but by union longshoremen, “pretty red-blooded Americans…and basically anything that happens in that terminal is in the union’s hands largely.”*

Was there any circumstance under which Flynn might be troubled? Well, yes, there was. “If you have an insider who basically, penetrates, has access to the information base and has some access to some of the controls, [people] should be wary.” An insider, with access to the information base and some controls? Like, maybe, the company running the terminal?

Supporters were also fond of saying that the risk of mischief arising out of the terminals’ management was dwarfed by the risks we run as a result of our perfunctory attention to the dangers of dirty bombs or other substances being concealed in cargo containers. It was a baffling argument. Was it that if we were so careless about the big risks, why even worry about smaller risks? Shouldn’t it have cut in the opposite direction—that with effective inspection not on the horizon, we should be even more vigilant in the few areas that were under our control?

Supporters also liked to cite Dubai’s solidarity with the U.S. in the war on terror. How could we swallow British management of ports and strain at turning the ports over to Dubai? Surely only blind prejudice could explain this otherwise inexplicable preference for a friend of two centuries’ standing over an ally of a little less than five years.

Less than five years ago, that is to say, our shoulder-to-shoulder ally Dubai was one of just three countries that recognized the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. But then the events of September, 2001 struck the scales from Dubai’s eyes, revealing their erstwhile friends for the hitherto unrecognized malefactors they were. Or was it the events of November of 2001, when the Taliban regime was pulverized and the US became the region’s new big dog?

Of course the explanation for the shift in Dubai’s loyalties is much simpler. Dubai was not the Taliban’s friend before 9/11 and it is not our friend today, no matter how much of our economy we let them own. Nations, as Lord Palmerston said, have neither permanent friends or enemies. Nations have permanent interests. When it was in Dubai’s interest to recognize the Taliban they did. When it ceased being in their interest they ceased their recognition.

That should have been our argument too, complete with supporting evidence. The deal’s chief–indeed, as it turned out, almost its only–advocates, the Bush administration, not only didn’t adduce the evidence, they barely made the argument. And the jury hearing the case, the public and the members of Congress they elect–or don’t–rendered the honored old Scottish verdict: Not Proved.

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* And to think that all this time the Bush administration has been thinking that union members at the Homeland Security Department are a threat to national security.

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