Dubai undertow

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How's that Dubai ports deal going? You remember, the one where Dubai Ports World agreed to sell its U.S. port operations to an American company?

"It appears," huffed Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Florida Democrat, "that the divestiture announcement from DPW last week may have been nothing more than a diversion designed to deflect attention away from this outsourcing of American port security. Congressional action blocking this deal is the only true assurance we have that this deal is dead."

You go, girl. Tote that barge, lift that bale, git a little drunk an' you land in Congress. Why doesn't the House of Representatives buy the port operations with the money earmarked for prescription drugs for seniors or Hurricane Katrina "relief"? I don't expect a busy woman like Mrs. Schultz to run the new company herself -- though she could certainly put in a couple of shifts at the Port of Miami each weekend.

But how about that INS official who mailed Mohamed Atta his visa six months to the day after he died in an unusual flying accident in Lower Manhattan? How about leaving the ports to those State Department chaps who approved the September 11 killers' laughably incomplete paperwork ("Address in the United States: HOTEL, AMERICA")?

Or how about those officials at Federal Aviation Administration headquarters who on the morning of September 11 found it all a little too much and just walked out of the room?

After all, all those guys still work for the U.S. government. By golly, if we're gonna have security breaches at American ports, let's make sure they're all-American security breaches.

If I were Dubai Ports World, I'd sell the U.S. operations to Cosco, the Chinese commies who run port operations in California, just for the fun of watching congressional heads explode. Or does Washington's new fun xenophobia stop at the (Pacific) water's edge?

Congress' demand that DPW sell its U.S. operations to someone even if there's no someone to sell them to is almost a parody of the Democrats' (and naysaying Republicans') approach to national security: We may not know what we're for but we sure as hell know what we're against.

In that sense, whatever one's dissatisfactions on this third anniversary of the Iraq invasion, the Bush Doctrine remains the only game in town. It recognizes the problem has to be fixed at source, which means changing the nature of the terrorist breeding grounds. That's not sappy internationalism, but taking the game to the enemy.

Right now, in the generally squalid Arab world, you'll find four types of regimes: