What is Richard Cohen smoking?

He’s obviously smoking something:

There are times when George Bush sorely disappoints. Just when you might expect him to issue a malapropian explanation, pander to his base or simply not have a clue about what he is talking about, he does something so right, so honest and, yes, so commendable, that -- as Arthur Miller put it in "Death of a Salesman" -- "attention must be paid." Pay attention to how he has refused to indulge anti-Arab sentiment over the Dubai ports deal.

Would that anyone could say the same about many of the deal's critics. Whatever their concerns may be, whatever their fears, they would not have had them, expressed them or seen them in print had the middle name of the United Arab Emirates been something else. After all, no one goes nuts over Germany, the country where some of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists lived and attended school.

To overlook the xenophobic element in this controversy is to overlook the obvious. It is what propelled the squabble and what sustains it. 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," he said last week. "The UAE has been a valuable partner in fighting the war on terror." It is a long way from a terrorist haven.

Cohen fundamentally misses several important points here. First of all, if irrational anti-Arab sentiment is fueling concerns over this deal, the Bush administration is the group of miscreants who ought to be accepting the lion’s share of the blame for it. Certainly anti-Arab sentiments existed in the US before 9/11, but since that day, the Bush administration has done everything in their power to stoke the flames of that particular ugliness, from “You’re with us or against us” to conflating the secular dictator Saddam at every turn with the religious fundamentalist leader Osama. Who was it that repeatedly invoked the strawman of the “brown-skinned people” who “some say” don’t want democracy? It was George Bush, that’s who. He’s the one who let this horse out of the gate, and he doesn’t deserve a modicum of credit for trying to close it after the horse he freed has trampled and shit all over the neighbor’s pasture.

Secondly, Germany and the UAE are not the same—and it’s not only because of the color of the skin of their peoples. “Some of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists lived and attended school” in America, too, for god’s sake. But the UAE was one of only three countries which recognized as legitimate and had diplomatic ties to Afghanistan’s Taliban regime before 9/11. They severed ties with them two weeks after 9/11, even though they had been asked about ties to bin Laden years earlier. While those issues may or may not be reason for concern about the UAE’s relationship with America’s port security, they are clearly enough to create a discernible difference between Germany and the UAE—and to prompt concerns about higher scrutiny.

And let’s not forget that this deal was made with secret and atypical provisions and with a company who has ties to administration members. This administration has given us every reason to not trust them and take them at their word, especially when they operate in secret. Legitimate questions can be raised about the way the deal was made, irrespective of with whom the deal was made. The Bush administration’s history of secrecy and cronyism is enough on its own to raise eyebrows about this deal, without the race of the other half of the deal-maker factoring in at all.

I’ll let Drum make one last point:

[I]t's not exactly insane to be a little more cautious in turning over port operations to a company owned by the United Arab Emirates than to one owned by, say, the German government. Get a grip.

As for why George Bush has defended the deal, one hardly has to resort to paeans to his open-minded humanity to figure this out. I don't think Bush is a bigot, but the reason he stuck to his guns on the port deal is because his first instinct is always to stick to his guns. When Bush is attacked, he attacks back, whether he knows anything about the issue at hand or not. Anyone who hasn't figured that out after five years of Bush watching really does need to go back to school, and not just for a refresher in elementary arithmetic.

Indeed.