March 15, 2006

The Foreigners Are Coming! The Foreigners Are Coming!

Now that the Dubai ports deal has collapsed under the incredible weight of substance-free politics, it is worth noting a comment from former New Jersey Gov. Tom Kean, chairman of the 9/11 Commission, otherwise known (at least to its members) as The Most Important Group Of People Ever Assembled And Whose Wishes Must Be Adhered To Without Dilution.

Mr. Chairman Of The Most Important Group Etcetera, not a fan of the deal, was responding to a question from Fox News Channel’s Brit Hume about whether the deal could have somehow been tweaked to make him comfortable with it.

“There could have been a way to make me comfortable with it,” Kean said. “But there could not have been a way to make the American people comfortable with it.”

Oh? The wiser-than-thou Most Important Chairman could understand it, but not the unwashed masses, so why bother?

Making the American people comfortable with the Dubai ports deal might have been very doable had we started with a pinch of seriousness and a dash of honesty on the part of anyone in Congress, but we seem to have arrived at one of America’s regrettable but predictable flirtations with complete and utter unseriousness, also known as the Deca-Annual Fear of Foreigners.

Did critics of the deal – people like Republican Peter King of New York – really believe the deal jeopardized national security? The guess here is no way. King and his like-minded carpers understand the difference between leasing a terminal and taking over security operations. They understand the difference between selling a division of a British-owned company to a UAE-owned company and handing the nuclear codes to Ayman Al-Zawahiri.

But they’re guessing that you don’t, and they’re not about to try to explain it to you when poll numbers don’t suggest the effort will not pay off politically. And they’re not about to defend an entanglement, however routine, with the recurring bogeyman of the American saga.

Foreigners. The worst people in the world. You know these dastardly characters. They have spooked us periodically throughout recent history, always threatening to destroy or buy up America (or both) while we fell prey to their deceptive wiles.

The slanty-eyed versions were going to buy up American in the ‘80s, prompting Lee Iacocca to position himself as the modern-day McArthur – fighting off the Japs as they tried to pull off a new Pearl Harbor from Rockefeller Plaza. The brown-skinned, Spanish-speaking versions were going to pull all our jobs away via Ross Perot’s Giant Sucking Sound in the ‘90s.

Now it’s the ‘00s, and the latter group is at it again, endangering American sovereignty by streaming across the border en masse daily – apparently having had enough of all those jobs that were supposed to be sucked into Mexico, and coming here instead to do toilet-cleaning tasks that Americans won’t do. This problem will be solved once Bill O’Reilly, Tom Tancredo, Pat Buchanan and Michelle Malkin finishing rebuilding the Berlin Wall just beyond the desert regions of New Mexico and Arizona.

And not a moment too soon, because even worse foreigners have arrived on the docks of the eastern seaboard. The turban-clad kind. The ones who come from the same country as four of the 9/11 hijackers. (Of course, Tom Tancredo comes from the same state as white supremacist serial killer Richard Paul White, but that’s different.)

These dastardly invaders are going to bring America down by the sinister manner in which they intend to load and unload carts – or they were, until the political winds started blowing so hot that neither the truth nor Bill Clinton’s consulting assistance could save Dubai Ports World’s stake in the operation.

The United States of America, which has built the world’s most powerful economy, brought down dictators and generally redefined what it means to be a superpower, seems incapable of going through a decade without at least a momentary panic over a perceived threat from nations we could buy, invade or both if we ever wanted to.

And invariably, disingenuous American politicians on both sides of the aisle – people who possess the facts that cause them to know better – lead the stampede of fear.

Why did the Bush Administration “mismanage” the ports issue by failing to anticipate the uproar? Oh, I don’t know. Maybe it never occurred to them that anyone would turn a routine commercial transaction into The Fate Of The Nation In The Balance? Maybe the Bush crew needs to bring one or two xenophobic alarmists into the administration so they can better feel the pain of their most paranoid constituents.

Now Congress wants to ban all foreign companies from involvement with “crucial infrastructure.” Why stop there? Why not just ban foreign investment entirely? Who needs wealth creation? Who needs a way to pay for the armed forces? Who needs open international markets? Who needs allies in the War on Terror? (Wait, John Kerry just called. France, we need. Arab regimes that can actually arrest terrorists and get their hands on useful intelligence? Never!)

This decade’s Foreigner Alert will pass just as surely as its antecedents, and those who fell prey will feel silly about it for a while. But will they remember the lesson 10 years from now, when America’s deca-annual fit of national insecurity makes its next return engagement?

This is Column # DC24. Request permission to publish here.