Last week, Dubai threatened the United States with economic
retaliation if Congress blocked its takeover of U.S. ports.
According to The Hill:
http://www.thehill.com/thehill/export/TheHill/News/Frontpage/030906/news1.html
Retaliation from the emirate could come against lucrative deals with
aircraft maker Boeing and by curtailing the docking of hundreds of
American ships, including U.S. Navy ships, each year at its port in
the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the source added.
It seems that George W. Bush thinks it's a good idea to do business
with people who threaten you if they don't get the deal they want.
But unfortunately for Our Great Leader, his political capital has all
been spent - Congress decided to block the deal anyway (or at least,
they would have if it hadn't collapsed at the last minute).
http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/398782p-337888c.html
Okay, two things about this deal.
First, George W. Bush has been going around saying that if we don't
sell our port operations to Dubai, we'll risk offending the Arab world
- and let's face it, we wouldn't want to do that.
Shock & Awe, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and the shrugging off of
30,000 dead Iraqis - hey, we were just playing.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/12/12/bush.iraq/index.html
But look out - not selling our port operations to Dubai might really
make them mad.
Second, George W. Bush called the United Arab Emirates "a valued and
strategic partner" last week.
That's odd - here's what ***** Cheney had to say about the U.A.E. in
2000:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2006/03/10/cheney-cited-uaesaddam-r_n_17102.html
Q:
If Iraq's President Saddam Hussein were found to be developing weapons
of mass destruction, Governor Bush has said he would "take him out."
Would you agree with such a deadly policy?
*****:
We might have no other choice.
We'll have to see if that happens.
The thing about Iraq, of course, was at the end of the war we had
pretty well decimated their military.
We had put them back in a box, so to speak.
We had a strong international coalition raid against them, effective
economic sanctions and a very robust inspection regime that was in
place.
So that the inspection regime under U.N. auspices was able to do a
good job of stripping out the capacity to build weapons of mass
destruction - the work that he'd been doing that had not been
destroyed during the war on biological, chemical agents as well as a
nuclear program.
Unfortunately, now we find ourselves in a situation where that's
started to fray on us, where the coalition now no longer is tied
tightly together.
Recently the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, two Gulf states, have
reopened diplomatic relations with Baghdad.
The Russians and the French now are flying commercial airliners back
into Baghdad and sort of thumbing their nose, if you will, at the
international sanctions regime.
And of course the U.N. inspectors have been kicked out.
And there's been absolutely no response.
That's right.
Just five years ago, ***** Cheney was citing the U.A.E.'s diplomatic
relations with Baghdad as a reason for invading Iraq, yet now they're
our best friends.
Uh, when they're not threatening us with economic sanctions, that is.
From The Democratic Underground
http://www.democraticunderground.com/
Harry
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