The battle royal over acquisition of that old totem of empire P&O port management including six U.S. docksides is quintessential of current cross currents on U.S. policy. History is always a windstorm. Only ideologues go back and give it a nice, pat narrative, rather than presenting a slice of chaos. [The difference between a Toynbee and a Bloch, perhaps?]
Listening to President Bush ad libbing for an hour on American interests — and, more importantly, his explanation for what he thinks he is doing — dramatizes the conflicts. Critics say the President’s advisers had a political tin ear when a technocratic committee okayed the disputed deal. It would award a United Arab Emirates international company the P&O takeover. The Dubai-based firm nosed out Singapore’s state-owned company, originally bidding. And there was talk Li Ka Shing, Beijing’s favorite Hong Kong billionaire who already controls docking at the Panama Canal, would get into the fray.
Whether Bush has dug in his heels emotionally, or whether he does indeed see the issue as fundamental, may not be apparent for some time. Chances are when all the Sturm und Drang is wrung out, there will be compromise.
But the issues illustrate complexities facing American policymakers in the saddle — rather than cowboys out of power who throw lassoes right and left in an election year, hopeful to capture an issue on the hoof.
Proponents are making a number of arguments publicly. As the President said, the UAE is considered allies against terrorism. What the President and others aren’t saying, of course, is all Persian Gulf oil producers walk perilously. Their petrobillions mask a political infrastructure targeted by rising Islamic terrorism. Some, such as Bahrain, for example, an important base for U.S. fleet operations in the Persian Gulf [just joined by our latest nuclear-powered carrier, the Ronald Reagan], has a serious Suni-Shia divide reflecting this week’s bloody events in neighboring Iraq..
Dubai has been pumping itself up to be the Middle East’s Hong Kong — that’s the old Hong Kong before dumkuff Communist administration took over. A part of that role is taking in laundry from all and sundry, including misbegotten wealth of kleptocrats across Asia. One wonders how much this deal’s financing — money is fungible, i.e., it can move from one’s left pocket to the right pocket, as well as “sanitizedable” through a bank or two — is from such sources.
Like Saudi Arabia, its more prominent neighbor, Dubai’s locals, largely incapable of staffing the new economy, have been partially marginalized by foreigners, from Palestinian professionals to maidservants from the Philippines. That, too, is not new. During the Raj, when British Indian Empire sahibs ran the Gulf, Calcutta recruited young, fierce Baluch tribals from across the Gulf as mercenaries for controlling the locals. That could be why after Americans earlier on captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a [Kuwait-Pakistani] Baluch, he managed to escape. He was nabbed again in Pakistan in 2003 — and has since “disappeared” into U.S. custody. According to the 9/11 Commission, Khalid was chief architect of the World Trade Towers attack, and has played in most subsequent atrocities from beheading of the Wall St Journal reporter Daniel Pearl to bombing German tourists in an historic synagogue on Djerba in Tunisia to slaughtering young Australian tourists in a Bali bar
One does not have to be an expert in espionage tradecraft to appreciate American policymakers deal with an incredibly elaborate network of alliances, interests, and ambitions. In a different world — one without dependence on Mideast Oil and beyond the tentacles of worldwide terrorism — Washington would brush its hands and walk away with a to hell with the Arabs and their money, refusing to permit Dubai to buy American businesses. That would heed both the sincere and the demagogic who make the obvious case it was Arabs [including two Dubainicks] not Danes who committed the 9/11 massacres.
But it is equally obvious knowing what funds pass through Dubai and its banks, what its Baluch policemen and other “foreigners” know about the tribal and family relationships on which the Islamic terror networks base, is essential to prosecuting the war on terror. That may be what Bush and others mean when they say Dubai is a valuable ally. [Khalid was apparently smoked out in Pakistan because of financial transactions in Dubai.]
A footnote is despite the remarkable job-producing U.S. economy, it is done in no small part with foreign investment. With recordbreaking trade and payments deficits, Washington can ill afford to follow the EU into disinvestment policies. Nor when U.S. multinationals’ heels are being nipped by EU regulators, is it politic to create a copycat model by discriminatory practices against foreigners willing to invest here.
That’s why, in this as in so many areas, U.S. policy will continue to show … shall we say discrepancies? Hegemony and empire bring on those kind of Hegelian contradictions. In the 19th century it was “perfidious Albion”; in the 21st, perhaps “ambivalent Americus”.
Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net),
is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent
for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International.
He writes weekly for World Tribune.com and East-Asia-Intel.com.
