How the Seaports Deal Is Caught Between Instinct and Intellect

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Marlin Fitzwater, the curmudgeonly and wise press secretary to George Herbert Walker Bush and before that, Ronald Reagan, liked to say there are two kinds of truth: the kind you read in a book — and the kind any fool can see.

Marlin's proverb comes to mind because that's pretty much the dividing line in the Dubai Ports controversy this week: between intellect and instinct, between those who say they can explain this deal and those who say there is no explaining it.

On the one hand, the deal's backers say, it doesn't matter who owns the ports because the workers are all American and the government-run security measures remain the same. All sorts of terminals all over the US are run by foreign entities; this deal would be no different, they argue. And if we back out of this one, they add, we send a dreadful signal to foreign investors, on whom we increasingly depend.

All true. But this is one of those stories where reason may not matter. The seaports deal once again reminds us of the profound impact that 9/11 had on the country. It is easy to forget how deeply the attacks shook the nation's confidence and scrambled the assumptions Americans had about their place in the world. Since then, Washington — and by that I mean the actions of both parties — has done little at home or abroad to re-instill that confidence. Americans have seen a budget surplus disappear and two wars launched, all while they have had to withstand longer lines at airports and higher prices for gasoline. All these changes, great and small, have masked the fact that 9/11 has changed Americans' instincts, too. And so even if it can be rationally defended, a deal that would not have raised an eyebrow six years ago is simply unimaginable to many people today.

President Bush normally takes the absolutist position in the war on terror — on Gitmo, on wiretaps, on enemy combatants — and lets everyone else complain that he is too hard over, too much at war. But here the roles are reversed: the president is dug in on the deal and the public, at least as represented by the Congress, is taking the absolutist, no surrender, position.

Given that, the best the Administration can hope for here is delay, and some artful revisions to the deal that give everyone enough cover to crawl back down out of their trees. Dubai's lobbyists are fingering amendments to the deal calling for additional proposals for greater background checks of managers and workers, as well as beefed-up security at the terminals if the deal is allowed to go through. That might be one way to salvage this operation. But it may already be too late for that band-aid, no matter how reasonable it may be.