Osama, Saddam and the Ports
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times
Friday 24 February 2006
The storm of protest over the planned takeover of
some U.S. port operations by Dubai Ports World doesn't
make sense viewed in isolation. The Bush
administration clearly made no serious effort to
ensure that the deal didn't endanger national
security. But that's nothing new - the administration
has spent the past four and a half years refusing to
do anything serious about protecting the nation's
ports.
So why did this latest case of sloppiness and
indifference finally catch the public's attention?
Because this time the administration has become a
victim of its own campaign of fearmongering and
insinuation.
Let's go back to the beginning. At 2:40 p.m. on
Sept. 11, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld gave military
commanders their marching orders. "Judge whether good
enough hit S. H. [Saddam Hussein] @ same time - not
only UBL [Osama bin Laden]," read an aide's
handwritten notes about his instructions. The notes
were recently released after a Freedom of Information
Act request. "Hard to get a good case," the notes
acknowledge. Nonetheless, they say: "Sweep it all up.
Things related and not."
So it literally began on Day 1. When terrorists
attacked the United States, the Bush administration
immediately looked for ways it could exploit the
atrocity to pursue unrelated goals - especially, but
not exclusively, a war with Iraq.
But to exploit the atrocity, President Bush had to
do two things. First, he had to create a climate of
fear: Al Qaeda, a real but limited threat,
metamorphosed into a vast, imaginary axis of evil
threatening America. Second, he had to blur the
distinctions between nasty people who actually
attacked us and nasty people who didn't.
The administration successfully linked Iraq and
9/11 in public perceptions through a campaign of
constant insinuation and occasional outright lies. In
the process, it also created a state of mind in which
all Arabs were lumped together in the camp of
evildoers. Osama, Saddam - what's the difference?
Now comes the port deal. Mr. Bush assures us that
"people don't need to worry about security." But after
all those declarations that we're engaged in a global
war on terrorism, after all the terror alerts declared
whenever the national political debate seemed to be
shifting to questions of cronyism, corruption and
incompetence, the administration can't suddenly change
its theme song to "Don't Worry, Be Happy."
The administration also tells us not to worry
about having Arabs control port operations. "I want
those who are questioning it," Mr. Bush said, "to step
up and explain why all of a sudden a Middle Eastern
company is held to a different standard than a Great
British company."
He was being evasive, of course. This isn't just a
Middle Eastern company; it's a company controlled by
the monarchy in Dubai, which is part of the
authoritarian United Arab Emirates, one of only three
countries that recognized the Taliban as the
legitimate ruler of Afghanistan.
But more to the point, after years of
systematically suggesting that Arabs who didn't attack
us are the same as Arabs who did, the administration
can't suddenly turn around and say, "But these are
good Arabs."
Finally, the ports affair plays in a subliminal
way into the public's awareness - vague but widespread
- that Mr. Bush, the self-proclaimed deliverer of
democracy to the Middle East, and his family have
close personal and financial ties to Middle Eastern
rulers. Mr. Bush was photographed holding hands with
Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia (now King
Abdullah), not the emir of Dubai. But an
administration that has spent years ridiculing people
who try to make such distinctions isn't going to have
an easy time explaining the difference.
Mr. Bush shouldn't really be losing his
credibility as a terrorism fighter over the ports
deal, which, after careful examination (which hasn't
happened yet), may turn out to be O.K. Instead, Mr.
Bush should have lost his credibility long ago over
his diversion of U.S. resources away from the pursuit
of Al Qaeda and into an unnecessary war in Iraq, his
bungling of that war, and his adoption of a wrongful
imprisonment and torture policy that has blackened
America's reputation.
But there is, nonetheless, a kind of rough justice
in Mr. Bush's current predicament. After 9/11, the
American people granted him a degree of trust rarely,
if ever, bestowed on our leaders. He abused that
trust, and now he is facing a storm of skepticism
about his actions - a storm that sweeps up everything,
things related and not. |
