Financial Times Editorial - Bush badly needs a port in this storm

Bush badly needs a port in this storm
Published: February 25 2006 02:00 | Last updated: February 25 2006 02:00. Copyright by the Financial Times

The storm over the purchase of US port facilities by a Dubai government-owned operator has temporarily abated. Dubai Ports World, which acquired the terminal operations by buying UK-based P&O, has postponed taking control of the facilities while the Bush administration tries to convince Congress it has not opened a breach in US defences against terrorism.

It is the FT's view that this needless uproar is more about protectionist politicians posturing and Arab-phobia than about security. But it is also, undeniably, evidence of how George W. Bush has lost his political touch. Some Republicans seeking re-election this year regard association with the president as about as welcome as a hunting invitation from Dick Cheney.

That revolt started last autumn. The administration's bungled response to the Hurricane Katrina emergency, along with the fiasco over Mr Bush's failure to get Harriet Miers, a close aide with no track record as a judge, on to the Supreme Court, suddenly threw into high relief policy failures from Iraq to Social Security reform.

Some of Mr Bush's cheerleaders now openly wonder what it was they saw in him. Reaganite conservatives see him as an impostor who smuggled Big Government back into the White House.

Whatever the intrinsic merits of the Dubai Ports case, moreover, the president has been hoist on the petard of his own overblown anti-terror rhetoric. This White House has so impugned the integrity and patriotism of anyone dissenting from its view of the "global war on terror" that sooner or later it was going to be GWOT-ed itself. The pity of it is that the administration is right to defend the ports deal.

As it deployed officials to mollify Congress this week, the Bush team also felt the backlash from its high-handed treatment of the legislature and its expansive view of executive power. It is not yet clear, furthermore, whether its reasonable exposition will make the ports controversy better or worse.

Gordon England, for example, former navy secretary and now deputy defence secretary, pointed out that the United Arab Emirates (of which Dubai is part) last year made its ports available to 56 US warships and 590 military sealift command ships. This hitherto closely held information underlines the strategic value of the US relationship with the UAE. But will it lead the bipartisan coalition blustering about the Dubai Ports takeover ("outsourcing our coastline") to fold its case in the interests of security? Or will it produce further outbursts of jingoistic indignation about the subcontracting of US defence to dodgy Arab allies?

Longer term, the Dubai Ports furore raises fears that the misadventures of the Bush years are leading towards isolationism and protectionism - trends far from restricted to the right. Embedded in there somewhere is a strain of xenophobia that cannot become a guiding element of US foreign policy.