Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Hard Port Cornography

Dubai is not the problem. 

Dubai is a gleaming modern city, an avatar of what the Arab world could be if it wanted to.  It’s the Venice of the Mid-East, a harbor capital founded on principles of profit and commerce, not prophecy and containment.  It wants to be our ally because that’s where the money is.  I suppose they’re as well-suited to run a port or six as anyone, including Britain, which hasn’t really ruled the waves for a century.  Dubai is our soldiers’ R&R destination, the site of a major tennis tournament.... The Amazing Race even filmed a segment there.  It’s more of a team player than many of our European allies. 

Given the facts, I don’t think we’d expect any worse from them than from anyone else.  Okay, so they supported the Taliban and two of the hijackers used them as a base of operations.  Maybe better relations with us would have chilled those indiscretions, and let’s face it, the last time before 2001 that our national shrines were hit by foreign operatives, it was the British burning down Washington DC.  They eventually came around.  I really don’t think the problem was Dubai.

The problem that’s hanging like an albatross around the President’s neck is what I call the “foie gras syndrome.” That’s the way they get that delectable gooseliver paste.  The best fois gras is the result of cramming so much corn down a goose’s gullet that its liver becomes grotesquely swollen.  Of course, the bird suffers by this treatment and is eventually so unhealthy that its slaughter is an almost humane end to its discomfiture.  But we do it because we love that rich, pungent pate.

When I hear, revelation by revelation, about this Dubai ports deal, I’m beginning to feel rather like a pate goose.  I suppose it started back in 2000.  I didn’t want George W. Bush as my president, and neither did a majority of Americans who voted - but the Supreme Court ruled that disputed ballots should not be recounted, and thus a minority-elected president was foisted upon me.  His tenure since then has been distinguished by two primary qualities: a condescending and paternalistic manner of pronouncing policy in short, declarative sentences that lack the sophistication and subtlety demanded by the subjects he addresses, and by a greater level of manipulative secrecy than any president we’ve ever had. 

I’m not just talking about twisted pre-war intelligence, though that’s a good place to start: what about environmental policy, fiscal policy, or torture?  The litany of US policies that this administration has cobbled together out of sows’ ears and half-baked analysis is enough to turn my stomach - and, increasingly, I’m not alone in my nausea.  What was once solid support for the Chief Executive, in DC and across the nation, is crumbling like so much of our infrastructure.  We didn’t need a botched response to a national disaster to bring it into unmistakable focus, but now it’s impossible to ignore: our government is crippled by a fatal combination of self-confidence and incompetence.

What’s worse, it’s petrified that we’ll discover this obvious fact.  Rather, they try to distract us with a steady diet of hot-button quick fixes, and pat reassurances that they know what they’re doing.  That’s what got W elected in the first place: his cool, calm confidence that he could handle the problems we couldn’t deal with ourselves.  He knew what we wanted, and he knew how to get it for us.  Now it seems we’ve given the keys to the national minivan to a man who’s too full of himself to ask for directions, and too distracted to read the road-signs.  He’s getting us loster, faster, than we’d ever imagined.  And the worst part is, he’s still telling us he knows exactly where he is and what he’s doing, even as it becomes increasingly obvious to all of us back here that we’re going to run out of gas or off the road before any of us get where we need to go.

All we want is to be kept in the loop.  If the Coast Guard says the DPW takeover of ports could cause security problems, that assessment should have been divulged, considered publicly, and addressed or dismissed as the facts warranted.  If the administration wanted to avoid the controversy about this deal in which it’s now mired, it should have operated more transparently and less clandestinely.  It seems no one in the White House (with the exception of the President himself, who was apparently kept in the dark like the rest of us) anticipated an uproar over this proposal, just as they didn’t anticipate resistance in Iraq or disapproval over social security reform or a category five hurricane hitting New Orleans.  What we want is input, advice, the opportunity to make up our own minds.  What we’re getting is corn, and plenty of it, jammed down our throats.  And though the fois gras may be tasty, we geese will never get to enjoy it.