SHIPS AHOY: I live about 10 miles from one of the seaports whose operation might be taken over by a foreign corporation owned by an Arab government, i.e. the United Arab Emirates. I would like to be on the open-minded side of the fence about this. Foreigners own and operate all kinds of businesses here in our country, and the UAE has been generally cooperative with the US over the past decade or so. The US government didn’t find any ties between the corporation that would run our ports and terrorists or anti-American factions. They are probably just mariners and traders, something that the Middle East has been good at for perhaps two thousand years. So why stop them? Why give in to all the knee-jerk anti-Arabism that our politicians are now displaying?

Well, I do see a legitimate reason to halt this transaction, or at least to tie some protective conditions onto it. The Arab / Islamic nations are not the most politically stable places in the world. Iran was once as much of an ally to the United States as the UAE is. Our relations with the Palestinians have recently taken a turn for the worse. So, Middle Eastern governments can change and change quite quickly and unpredictably. What if there is an uprising in the UAE (perhaps tied to the projected populist assault on the Saudi monarchy sometime in the future), and a fundamentalist, anti-western government takes over? Would we want the current Iranian government running our ports? Before we let this deal go through, our government needs to establish its right to seize these port operations in the event of a radical governmental change in the UAE.

Another irony: President Bush often cites and celebrates the “march of democracy” in the Middle East. What if they held a fair election in the UAE? Or Saudi Arabia or Egypt, for that matter? An anti-western / pro-al Qaeda faction could take power via democracy. The people of Iran recently had a choice between pro-western and anti-western candidates, and chose anti-western / pro-fundamentalists. The Shiites in Iraq also seem to favor their own Islamists. If we are going to push democracy in the Middle East, maybe we need to hedge our bets by not letting the management of our seaports be tied to popular opinion on “the Arab street”. Because we still have a long way to go before that “street” sees us and our culture in a better light. Giving the sheiks in the UAE free reign to run our container ports would not do much to shine such a better lite.