Ports in a storm

Dallas Morning News | Mark Davis:

“National unity has been hard to find since just after 9/11, but it's back. President Bush, long maligned for dividing America, has truly brought together young and old, red states and blue states, men and women. This rare moment of unity is the visceral reaction to an idea so stunningly unwise that political opponents are stumbling over one another to reach the same cameras and microphones to say the same thing – stop the ports takeover now.”

Ed Cognoski responds:

President Bush's decision is stunningly unwise -- as far as domestic politics are concerned. No question. It's on a scale comparable to his politically tone deaf decision to nominate Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. But is it so unwise in terms of national security? In terms of global politics? There, the answer is much less certain.

The reaction by the President's detractors furnishes evidence of what many Muslims have suspected all along. That America's war on terror is really a war on Islam. That many Americans believe that an ally of America in its war on terror should be discriminated against solely because it is Islamic. Up to now, Americans have not minded, have not even noticed, that their shipping industry -- ports, ships, containers -- has been owned and operated by foreigners for years, maybe decades. The only difference in this case is that it is an Islamic country that America is doing business with.

President Bush's decision is stunningly unwise, not on its merits, but because it gives pundits like Mark Davis reason to rant and rave. What's being said in American newspapers, on talk radio and by cable television spinmeisters, is used as evidence by radical Muslims (who, of course, do exist) to convince their fellow Muslims that they have no friend in America. It supports the arguments made by our enemies.

Like the war in Iraq itself, which only succeeded in spawning new terrorists, this latest move by President Bush, designed perhaps to cement a friendly relationship with a strategic ally in the Persian Gulf, ends up only further antagonizing the relationship between America and the Islamic world. The record of blunders of Bush foreign policy has one more citation on its long list of failures.