Company backs off on port deal

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Bowing to ferocious opposition in Congress, a Dubai-owned company signaled surrender today in its quest to take over operations at U.S. ports.

"DP World will transfer fully the U.S. operations ... to a United States entity," the firm's top executive, H. Edward Bilkey, said in an announcement that capped weeks of controversy.

Relieved Republicans in Congress said the firm had pledged full divestiture, a decision that one senator said had been approved personally by the prime minister of the United Arab Emirates.

The announcement appeared to indicate an end to a politically tinged controversy that brought President Bush and Republicans in Congress to the brink of an election-year veto battle on a terrorism-related issue. The White House expressed satisfaction with the outcome.

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Well, that's a good thing, I suppose. Thing is, the questions I and many others had about the deal were never answered. That is, the problem with allowing a United Arab Emirates state-owned company to take over operations for several key US ports seemed foolhardy because of allegations that the Middle Eastern nation's royal family is fairly close to Osama bin Laden and that their government participated in transferring nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea, and Libya. Is that really true? I mean, never mind the port deal, these guys are officially listed as allies in the "war on terror." Are these the kind of allies we want?

I guess neither the White House nor the UAE really wanted the discussion to head in that direction.

Actually, looking back on most of the press' coverage of the deal, it appears that nobody else really wanted to talk about it either, which leads me to a mea culpa. My buddy Matt, when I first posted on the issue a couple of weeks ago, commented that he agreed with Bush when he said that the outcry over the deal was racist. I now must reverse myself and agree with my pal Matt. Which, I suppose, means that I also agree with the President. Yikes! It's pretty clear from the absolute bipartisanship and fury of the criticism that something more than honest questions about the UAE's links to terrorism were motivating opposition to the deal. As quite a few pundits have observed at this point, the White House has been fostering anti-Arab hysteria since 9/11, so the hysteria about the port deal should come as no surprise. That is, I've come to believe that most Americans opposing the deal probably didn't know the specifics of the actual criticism, the alleged links to bin Laden and nuke tech transfer. No, it seems pretty clear now that most Americans were freaking out over this because it's an Arab company. That is, the primary factor here probably is racism.

So, the deal isn't happening because of fierce public and political outrage about it. Like I said, that's good, I guess, but I don't really know one way or the other, to be honest, because nobody seemed to want to press the White House on the terrorism links. And, damn it, now I really want to know what the truth is. I'll probably never know.

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