California Conservative

Democrats are unleashing their attack against the Dubai Port deal. They think they’re winning, too. They were winning early but there’s been a steady erosion of support as more facts become known about the actual operation. Here’s what the AP’s Tom Raum has to say:

President Bush’s marquee issue, the war on terror, is being turned against him by Democrats and rebelling members of his own party in an election-year dustup over a deal that allows an Arab company to manage major U.S. ports. People in both parties are suggesting it’s another case of Bush seeming to be tone deaf to controversy, on top of government eavesdropping, Katrina recovery and Vice President Dick Cheney’s hunting accident. The storm is forcing the president to choose between losing face with the Arab world and embarking on what would be his first veto battle with the GOP-led Congress. And it has enabled Democrats to seemingly outflank him on a key GOP issue: national security.

Raum’s bias is showing again. The truth is that the only Democratic talking points that Raum left out was something about Halliburton. Of course, people don’t think that President Bush is less committed to protecting us from future terrorist attacks. And people have noticed how we haven’t been attacked since 9/11. And they’ve noticed that people are getting arrested as a result of stepped up FBI and CIA activity.

Raum’s analysis is indicative of the day-at-a-time perspective that the Beltway live in. The Beltway theory is that what happened yesterday or last week or last month isn’t factored in by the voters. Raum’s theory only holds up if we forget all the Bush decisions and policies that have protected us from future terrorist attacks.

In a related story, the AP’s Ted Bridis is reporting on how Democrats are showing their ignorance in hearings on the Dubai Port deal.

Brushing aside Bush’s assurances, Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the panel’s ranking Democrat, said the UAE backed the Taliban and allowed financial support for al-Qaida. Levin also charged that the UAE has an “uneven history” as “one of only a handful of countries in the world to recognize the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.” He added that millions of dollars in al-Qaida funds went through UAE financial institutions. Levin at one point noted that a special commission that investigated the terror attacks against the United States on Sept. 11, 2000 concluded that “there’s a persistent counterterrorism problem represented by the United Arab Emirates.”

“Just raise your hand if anybody (at the witness table) talked to the 9-11 commission,” commanded Levin. There was no response among the handful of administration representatives.

Sen. Levin is right in identifying the UAE as having recognized the Taliban as the official government of Afghanistan and as having had some banking rules that allowed al Qaida to fund terrorists. That was all PRE 9/11.

• Since 9/11, they’ve been staunch allies in the GWOT.
• Since 9/11, they’ve tightened up their banking laws.
• Since 9/11, the Dubai port is the port most often used to restock our Navy’s ships.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, (D-NY), also was critical, calling the approval process “a failure of judgment” because officials “did not alert the president, the secretary of the treasury and the secretary of defense” that several of our critical ports would be turned over to foreign country.

Notice that nobody is saying that we should scrap the deal.
Notice that Democrats are sounding hawkish while backing away from their initial reactions.

In the end, I suspect that something will get worked out so that the deal gets done and Congress will save face to the extent that that’s possible.

Cross-post at LetFreedomRing

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 23rd, 2006 at 10:53 am and is filed under Author: Gary Gross, Hillary, Homeland Security, Liberals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.