President Bush “has refused to indulge anti-Arab sentiment over the Dubai ports deal,” and that has left Washington Post op-ed columnist Richard Cohen, by his own admission, utterly baffled.1/ Cohen says it is “obvious” that a “xenophobic element” has “propelled the squabble” over the Dubai ports deal and is “what sustains it.” Cohen credits the president with the same insight:
“Bush put his finger on it right away. ‘What I find interesting is that it’s okay for a British company to manage some ports, but not okay for a company from a country that is a valuable ally in the war on terror. . . . The UAE has been a valuable partner in fighting the war on terror.’ It is a long way from a terrorist haven.”
While he can spot the president’s integrity, Cohen has no idea what its source is. He cannot process the president’s position – even though he says it comes as “no surprise,” in light of W’s long track record of failing to act like a “bigot.” In Cohen’s world, the
“politic thing for a president with a dismal approval rating . . . would have been to join with the critics, get ahead of the anti-Arab wave and announce that he, too, was concerned about the deal, which was the fault . . . of pointy-headed bureaucrats, Democrats and the occasional atheist.”
Cohen takes just two feeble stabs in the dark in an attempt to explain why the president would swim against the tide of the world: (1) it’s genetic (“he just naturally recoils from prejudice”), and (2) he was exposed to the right social conditioning (he is the “son of a president who got to know many Arabs”).
1/ See Richard Cohen, Bush, Speaking Up Against Bigotry, WASH. POST, Feb. 28, 2006, at A15 <http://www. washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/27/AR2006022701041.html> (visited March 9, 2006) (referring to the impending acquisition of British company P&O by Dubai Ports World, a United Arab Emirates company, that would result in Dubai’s operating 6 U.S. ports).
