Ben has a fun piece on Gregg Birnbaum and JustHillary.com. (The Hillary people, he reports, have taken to calling the site "Stalker.com.")

Hillary will campaign in South Carolina.

Nancy Pelosi has a blog, appropriately titled The Gavel, which has a clip of Carolyn Maloney asking questions about funding for the Iraq War.

An $84 million approval fee requested by the Port Authority may doom efforts by Dubai Ports World to divest its US holdings, according to the WSJ political blog.

A toll-free storm damage hotline is now ready for your phone calls.

Daily Gotham has video of City Council candidate Wellington Sharpe.

Newsday has final numbers from the Craig Johnson-Maureen O'Connell race.

A Tom Suozzi staffer is leaving for a job at a Manhattan law firm.

Dee Richards hears that Assemblywoman Audrey Pheffer may run for Queens Borough President.

Bill O'Reilly antagonist Keith Oberman has a new contract with MSNBC.

And pictured above is Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion, who looks like he really enjoyed Christine Quinn's speech today.

-- Azi Paybarah

The last item on the list— This is not the Middle East—is generally uttered by knowing expats when a newbie betrays excitement about being in Dubai. When I first came here, in August 2004, I was very excited—in the way one is before bungee jumping, anticipation tinged with mortal dread. Before I left the U.S., people expressed concern that I’d be met at the airport by a thousand baying jihadis. One friend PhotoShopped a going-away card: Me, hands bound and jump-suited, kneeling before the requisite rifle-clutching head-removers.

Pat D., the custodian at my former paper, summed up the prevailing attitude: “Are you fucking nuts?”

I was met here, it turned out, by a wall of gym-sock humidity and a thousand jostling Bangladeshis. The cab ride up Sheikh Zayed Road toward the Gardens, the sprinkler-fed complex of lawns and apartments where I was to spend my first few months, was a blur of skyscrapers and billboards. There was a giant Britney Spears clutching a can of Pepsi, and behind her the sand of the Arabian Peninsula, extending endlessly into the night.

Dubai has spent the last 15 years defying its Middle Eastern geography, turning its back on the restiveness and the thirst for petrodollars that define the bulk of the region. Instead of the Arab Street, we have our shopping malls. Instead of pilgrims, we have reddened tourists, expat creative directors, itinerant laborers from the subcontinent. You can go for weeks without seeing a burqa.

Of the 1.2 million people living in Dubai, about 80 percent are foreigners. The emirate is, in many respects, not just a multicultural model for the Middle East, but for the world. Mosques and Irish pubs stand minaret to beer garden. At the malls, European girls expose their sacral tattoos alongside local women in full body armor.

Cultural conflicts play themselves out on the letters pages of the newspapers, but never on the street. Certainly, anti-Western demonstrations wouldn’t be tolerated here, but even if they were, it’s doubtful too many people would drag themselves away from their satellite TV’s to attend.

And, while no one seems to quite know why, there has never been a terrorist incident in Dubai.

This last point marks the central irony to the Dubai Ports World debacle. Dubai’s wealth and pro-Western sentiment are coddled, in the midst of a grabby and disgruntled region, by a security apparatus that extends into all branches of its quasi-governmental business enterprises—none more so than its shipping industry. America wishes it had security like D.P. World.

When the D.P. World affair kicked off, a friend back home e-mailed to ask me what people’s reactions were here. Were they outraged? Were they talking of U.S. imperialism and racism? Erm, no. People weren’t saying much of anything about it. They were too busy complaining about the traffic in Sharjah, the construction in Jumeirah, the rising rents in Karama. (Bingo!)

What Dubai lacks in political discourse, it makes up for in clamorous self-promotion. A colleague of mine got a call recently from D.P. World chairman Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, who remarked that the controversy was in some way a boon for the emirate. Sure, we’ve received some coverage for developing the world’s tallest skyscraper, our indoor ski slope, the man-made islands that can be seen from the moon. But thanks to the D.P. row, Dubai is finally the talk of the town, globally. We’ve arrived.

Alongside the blatant political jockeying behind the U.S. rejection of the D.P. World deal—no, we’re tougher on terrorism; no, we are—there could also be a little metropolis envy at work. The Guardian recently pointed out that Dubai, “the fastest-growing city on earth,” was shaping up to be the millennial equivalent of 19th-century London and 20th-century New York: “Not the modern centre of the Arab world but, more than that, the Arab centre of the modern world.”

The Arab center of the modern world? No way, Hosnay. The U.S. reflexively views any up-and-comer—any challenger—with resentment. In the 1980’s, Americans shared fevered visions of Tokyo businessmen overrunning Detroit and, from there, Capitol Hill. Now it’s a bunch of Arabs stepping from shipping port to national monument to media conglomerate, taking over the whole damn show. Sept. 11 has provided a convenient backdrop for such protectionism. Never again!

Mostly, though, the rejection of the deal is founded on ignorance, a failure to grasp what Dubai is, what it hopes with all its heart to become. Dubai is like a child in its craving for attention and affirmation from the West. It courts outsiders with fantasies of an Oz-oasis. You can make money quickly here. You can spend it even faster. You can sit and sip cosmopolitans on the beach while a thrumming, futuristic metropolis rises at your back. There is a hotel beneath the sea in the making. A condo complex shaped like a chess set. There are Free Zones—Media City and Internet City—miniature principalities where the usual rules don’t apply.

This is not the Middle East.

Much of the world has bought into this fantasy. Tourism now accounts for almost 20 percent of Dubai’s $30 billion G.D.P.—compared to less than 5 percent for oil revenue. Last year, five million visitors came here, and that figure is expected to rise to 15 million by 2010. The economy is growing almost 20 percent per annum, much of that growth fueled by the constant influx of immigrants. It’s an economic miracle, a multi-cultural marvel—and Americans haven’t really played a role in it.

The U.S. does have a presence in Dubai—economically, diplomatically and militarily. But in terms of people, in terms of flip-flops-on-the-ground, America is out of the picture. Sit in the Agency, the swank wine bar at Emirates Towers, and you could easily imagine yourself to be in London. Visit the Deira souq and you could be in Mumbai. Dubai Media City often feels a lot like Beirut. You could never, though, imagine this place to be New York. There aren’t enough Americans.

But perhaps bin Sulayem had it right. Maybe Americans will now look more closely at Dubai, to see it as the terrorism-free, blue-sky haven it is. I, for one, can vouch for the place. The local Arabs may be standoffish, but they want us here—certainly, they’re not about to start chopping people’s heads off. I do worry, though, about the help.

Of the many expats in Dubai, the vast majority are from the subcontinent—the overworked and underpaid construction workers, the builders of this miracle who will never get to share in its bounty. These people are joined by the Filipino ashtray-emptiers, the Egyptian cab drivers, the Moroccan floor sweepers. Dubai is an extremely stratified city, not so much a melting pot as a layer cake. And you get a sense that those who occupy the bottom layer harbor a seething, potentially violent resentment toward the rest of us. Shortly after I arrived here, driving by a construction site, I was watched by a group of workers, squatting by the side of the road, sipping water in the terrible heat. One of them, a gaunt young man with bushy black eyebrows, looked at me with a mixture of shame and bitterness—a truly dangerous combination. That night, I e-mailed a friend of mine back home. “I’m no longer worried about being kidnapped by terrorists,” I wrote. “I’m worried about being force-fed my BMW.”

The last item on the list—This is not the Middle East—is generally uttered by knowing expats when a newbie betrays excitement about being in Dubai. When I first came here, in August 2004, I was very excited—in the way one is before bungee jumping, anticipation tinged with mortal dread. Before I left the U.S., people expressed concern that I’d be met at the airport by a thousand baying jihadis. One friend PhotoShopped a going-away card: Me, hands bound and jump-suited, kneeling before the requisite rifle-clutching head-removers.

Pat D., the custodian at my former paper, summed up the prevailing attitude: “Are you fucking nuts?”

I was met here, it turned out, by a wall of gym-sock humidity and a thousand jostling Bangladeshis. The cab ride up Sheikh Zayed Road toward the Gardens, the sprinkler-fed complex of lawns and apartments where I was to spend my first few months, was a blur of skyscrapers and billboards. There was a giant Britney Spears clutching a can of Pepsi, and behind her the sand of the Arabian Peninsula, extending endlessly into the night.

Dubai has spent the last 15 years defying its Middle Eastern geography, turning its back on the restiveness and the thirst for petrodollars that define the bulk of the region. Instead of the Arab Street, we have our shopping malls. Instead of pilgrims, we have reddened tourists, expat creative directors, itinerant laborers from the subcontinent. You can go for weeks without seeing a burqa.

Of the 1.2 million people living in Dubai, about 80 percent are foreigners. The emirate is, in many respects, not just a multicultural model for the Middle East, but for the world. Mosques and Irish pubs stand minaret to beer garden. At the malls, European girls expose their sacral tattoos alongside local women in full body armor.

Cultural conflicts play themselves out on the letters pages of the newspapers, but never on the street. Certainly, anti-Western demonstrations wouldn’t be tolerated here, but even if they were, it’s doubtful too many people would drag themselves away from their satellite TV’s to attend.

And, while no one seems to quite know why, there has never been a terrorist incident in Dubai.

This last point marks the central irony to the Dubai Ports World debacle. Dubai’s wealth and pro-Western sentiment are coddled, in the midst of a grabby and disgruntled region, by a security apparatus that extends into all branches of its quasi-governmental business enterprises—none more so than its shipping industry. America wishes it had security like D.P. World.

When the D.P. World affair kicked off, a friend back home e-mailed to ask me what people’s reactions were here. Were they outraged? Were they talking of U.S. imperialism and racism? Erm, no. People weren’t saying much of anything about it. They were too busy complaining about the traffic in Sharjah, the construction in Jumeirah, the rising rents in Karama. (Bingo!)

What Dubai lacks in political discourse, it makes up for in clamorous self-promotion. A colleague of mine got a call recently from D.P. World chairman Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, who remarked that the controversy was in some way a boon for the emirate. Sure, we’ve received some coverage for developing the world’s tallest skyscraper, our indoor ski slope, the man-made islands that can be seen from the moon. But thanks to the D.P. row, Dubai is finally the talk of the town, globally. We’ve arrived.

Alongside the blatant political jockeying behind the U.S. rejection of the D.P. World deal—no, we’re tougher on terrorism; no, we are—there could also be a little metropolis envy at work. The Guardian recently pointed out that Dubai, “the fastest-growing city on earth,” was shaping up to be the millennial equivalent of 19th-century London and 20th-century New York: “Not the modern centre of the Arab world but, more than that, the Arab centre of the modern world.”

The Arab center of the modern world? No way, Hosnay. The U.S. reflexively views any up-and-comer—any challenger—with resentment. In the 1980’s, Americans shared fevered visions of Tokyo businessmen overrunning Detroit and, from there, Capitol Hill. Now it’s a bunch of Arabs stepping from shipping port to national monument to media conglomerate, taking over the whole damn show. Sept. 11 has provided a convenient backdrop for such protectionism. Never again!

Mostly, though, the rejection of the deal is founded on ignorance, a failure to grasp what Dubai is, what it hopes with all its heart to become. Dubai is like a child in its craving for attention and affirmation from the West. It courts outsiders with fantasies of an Oz-oasis. You can make money quickly here. You can spend it even faster. You can sit and sip cosmopolitans on the beach while a thrumming, futuristic metropolis rises at your back. There is a hotel beneath the sea in the making. A condo complex shaped like a chess set. There are Free Zones—Media City and Internet City—miniature principalities where the usual rules don’t apply.

This is not the Middle East.

Much of the world has bought into this fantasy. Tourism now accounts for almost 20 percent of Dubai’s $30 billion G.D.P.—compared to less than 5 percent for oil revenue. Last year, five million visitors came here, and that figure is expected to rise to 15 million by 2010. The economy is growing almost 20 percent per annum, much of that growth fueled by the constant influx of immigrants. It’s an economic miracle, a multi-cultural marvel—and Americans haven’t really played a role in it.

The U.S. does have a presence in Dubai—economically, diplomatically and militarily. But in terms of people, in terms of flip-flops-on-the-ground, America is out of the picture. Sit in the Agency, the swank wine bar at Emirates Towers, and you could easily imagine yourself to be in London. Visit the Deira souq and you could be in Mumbai. Dubai Media City often feels a lot like Beirut. You could never, though, imagine this place to be New York. There aren’t enough Americans.

But perhaps bin Sulayem had it right. Maybe Americans will now look more closely at Dubai, to see it as the terrorism-free, blue-sky haven it is. I, for one, can vouch for the place. The local Arabs may be standoffish, but they want us here—certainly, they’re not about to start chopping people’s heads off. I do worry, though, about the help.

Of the many expats in Dubai, the vast majority are from the subcontinent—the overworked and underpaid construction workers, the builders of this miracle who will never get to share in its bounty. These people are joined by the Filipino ashtray-emptiers, the Egyptian cab drivers, the Moroccan floor sweepers. Dubai is an extremely stratified city, not so much a melting pot as a layer cake. And you get a sense that those who occupy the bottom layer harbor a seething, potentially violent resentment toward the rest of us. Shortly after I arrived here, driving by a construction site, I was watched by a group of workers, squatting by the side of the road, sipping water in the terrible heat. One of them, a gaunt young man with bushy black eyebrows, looked at me with a mixture of shame and bitterness—a truly dangerous combination. That night, I e-mailed a friend of mine back home. “I’m no longer worried about being kidnapped by terrorists,” I wrote. “I’m worried about being force-fed my BMW.”

“Next thing, he’s going to force President Bush to sign an executive order banning A.T.M. fees,” one member of the crowd joked.

The joke was that what had begun, inauspiciously, at a slushy, ill-attended, classic Chuck Schumer press conference one month earlier had turned into President Bush’s most serious political defeat. New York’s senior Senator was the first politician to criticize the sale of the operator of several American ports to a company owned by the government of Dubai. Just over a week later, Mr. Schumer and his unlikely allies in conservative talk radio had stampeded the Republican Congressional leadership into open opposition to the President.

“It was utterly amazing—who would believe it?” Mr. Schumer said as the deal appeared in its death throes by mid-March. “I did always think, if it achieved a certain level of visibility, that we could stop it. I thought it would be maybe at the jet-plane level, and it ended up being an intergalactic missile.”

Mr. Schumer’s campaign against the Dubai deal was a Sunday press conference gone nuclear, a political explosion fueled by the tabloid-honed, bread-and-butter Brooklyn populism that has driven Mr. Schumer’s remarkable success with the New York and, increasingly, the national media. The ingredients were familiar: a suspicion of Arab governments; an immediate grasp of an issue’s visceral appeal (Terrorists! Ports!); and a wonky intimacy with the arcana of a relatively obscure policy area, maritime security.

The Senator’s position came under fire from many quarters, with some critics suggesting that opposition to the deal was driven by xenophobia or anti-Arab racism. Mr. Schumer heatedly disputes that view.

“Let’s say skinheads had bought a company to take over our port,” he said. “I think the outcry would have been the same.”

Now the question is whether this was merely a spectacular, one-time takedown of the President by a New York Senator, or some kind of broader model for a Democratic Party that, pollsters say, many voters don’t trust with security. The driving force behind much of the Bush administration’s national-security policy has been an alliance between hawkish coastal intellectuals and patriotic inland conservatives. For a moment, Mr. Schumer and his Democratic allies tapped into the power of the national conservative movement. Critics called him a demagogue, but Mr. Schumer, for one, thinks the Dubai fight offers a model of sorts.

“This gives Democrats a window that opens on other security issues,” Mr. Schumer said.

The sale of the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Co. to Dubai Ports World was nearly complete in January, when a lobbyist for a small Florida shipping company launched a long-shot bid to derail the deal. The Florida company was concerned about the sale for business reasons unrelated to security. The lobbyist, Joe Muldoon III, put together a white paper arguing that the deal could compromise U.S. security, then started working the halls of Congress.

Mr. Schumer was an obvious choice for Mr. Muldoon. The Senator has been demanding more money for port security for years, and the deal would affect Mr. Schumer’s home territory.

In late January, Mr. Muldoon gave a Schumer aide, Josh Vlasto, a copy of his white paper.

“I have to say, I didn’t even ask them to go public on this,” Mr. Muldoon said, adding that he still hasn’t actually spoken to Mr. Schumer.

There really was no need to ask.

On Friday, Feb. 10, Mr. Schumer’s office received a call from Ted Bridis, an Associated Press reporter in Washington who had also gotten word of the deal. Referring apparently to Mr. Muldoon’s white paper, the Senator struck a cautious, critical note.

The story ran on Saturday and was little noticed. Mr. Schumer scheduled a press conference the next day to advance his complaints on a day—Sunday—that the New York press had long ago ceded to his demands for everything from improved cellular-telephone service to fair milk prices. But that day, New York was hit by a record-breaking blizzard, and the weather story turned it into a rare weekend without a Schumer press conference. Finally, on Monday afternoon, Mr. Schumer trekked to the passenger-ship terminal on Manhattan’s far West Side. With the Hudson River as a backdrop and slush underfoot, he hammered the port deal to a pair of tabloid reporters and a few local television cameras. It had all the makings of a fast-fading tabloid story, like the Sunday press release that Mr. Schumer had put out a couple of weeks earlier: “In Wake of National Body Part Transplant Scandal, Schumer to Unveil Critical Legislation.”

Mr. Muldoon, in the meantime, held his breath, fearing that Mr. Schumer’s stance would turn the issue into a partisan fight, allowing Congressional Republicans to hold firm.

Odd Allies

But Mr. Schumer had allies outside the halls of Congress. The radio host Michael Savage, the third-most-popular talker in the nation, had seen the A.P. story on a conservative news site.

“I oppose everything he stands for specifically,” Mr. Savage said of Mr. Schumer. “To me, he appears to be on the socialist wing of the Democratic Party—tax the rich, reward the lazy. I’m on the opposite side.” But he put Mr. Schumer on his radio show on Feb. 17. “We agreed on this issue,” Mr. Savage said.

While Mr. Savage—who was fired from the cable television network MSNBC for telling a gay caller to “get AIDS and die”—had found a new friend, Mr. Schumer was generating skepticism on a typically friendlier corner of the dial, National Public Radio. There, reporter Adam Davidson echoed the skepticism of experts on port security like the former Coast Guard commander Stephen Flynn.

Mr. Davidson noted that he had not been able to find a single port-security expert who agreed that the Dubai takeover of some terminals in several U.S. ports was a genuine concern. Mr. Schumer’s office, Mr. Davidson said, “gave me the names of two experts who they said agree with them that Dubai Ports World is a real security threat. I called both those experts, and both of them said, ‘No, there’s no security threat here.’”

“We thought they shared our belief that there were serious security concerns,” Mr. Schumer’s spokeswoman, Ms. Heller, said.

Mr. Schumer, meanwhile, pressed the Senate to vote on the issue immediately, before the White House could tamp down the furor, by introducing legislation to block the deal as an amendment to an unrelated bill on March 8. The next day, Dubai Ports World appeared to give up the fight, releasing a statement that agreed to turn the U.S. ports over to a “U.S. entity.” The exact form of the transfer remains contentious.

And somewhere in the process, the steamroller had flattened even Mr. Schumer’s considerable ability to stay in front of a story. National coverage of it has focused on the intramural Republican battle, which is what finally doomed the deal. Even CNN’s timeline of the story notes political involvement beginning on Feb. 15, when Mr. Schumer led a bipartisan group of Senators in opposition to the deal. But the only New York Senator that the timeline credits is Hillary Clinton.

“Oh, that sort of thing doesn’t bother me,” Mr. Schumer said.

Consider the example of disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who diligently greased his fellow Republicans. The Indian tribes represented by Mr. Abramoff greatly increased the proportion of their political donations to Republicans, while diminishing their donations to Democrats. But many in the media regurgitated the Republican spin that implicated both parties equally.

The controversy over Dubai’s attempt to purchase control of American ports is provoking a similar response. Quickly and mindlessly, the Bush administration approved the takeover by Dubai Ports World, a state-owned company. By pushing the Dubai deal—with a veto threat against any Congressional interference—Mr. Bush has drawn fresh attention to his family’s Middle East entanglements. (Remember his handholding with that Saudi prince?) The Carlyle Group boasts deep financial connections to the United Arab Emirates as well as the Bush family. The President’s father and brother Neil have both benefited directly from the largesse of Emirate rulers.

As Dubya’s public approval plunged toward Nixonian levels and shudders of fear wracked the Republican Party, a snarling counterattack was predictable. Just as inevitable was that the target would be the Clintons.

The sideshow began after the Financial Times reported, with more than a touch of exaggeration, that Dubai Ports World executives had received advice from the former President. What should have remained a minor story swiftly blossomed into headlines—and a concerted effort to damage his wife, Hillary Clinton, the junior Senator from New York and possible Presidential candidate.

Indignant critics have denounced the Clintons, although for what isn’t quite clear. Representative Duncan Hunter, the California Republican now embroiled in the defense-lobbying scandal that brought down his friend Randy (Duke) Cunningham, wrongly accused Bill Clinton of endorsing the Dubai deal. “President Clinton now is on record,” said Mr. Hunter on ABC’s This Week program, “as advising the emir [of Dubai] on how to make this deal go through.”

Similar charges have erupted from a columnist at The Nation magazine on the left and from commentators for Fox News and NewsMax on the right—all accusing the Senator and the former President of sneaky perfidy.

It is true that the former President’s friendship with the Emirate rulers has proved rewarding in the most concrete ways. Like many others around the world, including major corporations, universities, charities and media outlets, they have paid him handsomely over the past several years to deliver speeches, and they contributed to the cost of constructing his library in Little Rock, Ark. Mr. Clinton serves on the board of an investment company that is involved in business deals with Dubai’s rulers.

To the full extent demanded by Senate rules—which ought to require more information—those foreign sources of family income are disclosed on Mrs. Clinton’s personal financial reports. But there is no logical inference that financial emoluments have bought political influence.

On the evening of Feb. 17, while Mr. Clinton was traveling in India, he received a call from two Dubai Ports World executives. According to his spokesman, he listened as they explained their troubles with Washington. He responded by advising them to submit to more thorough federal investigation and to guarantee that, should they eventually prevail, they will greatly enhance security in the U.S. ports they oversee.

Almost simultaneously with that brief conversation on the other side of the world, Senator Clinton was preparing to introduce legislation that would bar any company owned by a foreign government from owning American port facilities. She announced her plan the same day. Passage of her bill, co-sponsored by New Jersey Democrat Robert Menendez, would instantly and permanently kill the Dubai deal.

So despite her husband’s friendship with Dubai, Senator Clinton acted against the interests of the emirate’s rulers. She could easily have deferred to her senior colleague, Senator Charles Schumer, who has also denounced the Dubai ports deal and introduced restrictive legislation.

As for the former President, he is not an advisor to Dubai Ports World and has publicly endorsed his wife’s legislation. “Whether it passes or not,” said the statement released by his office, “he believes this purchase should not be approved unless the security of our ports can be dramatically improved.”

Had either of them endorsed the Dubai deal, the outcry over the former President’s connections with the United Arab Emirates would be justified. Instead, she has moved to block the deal, and he has supported her bill—and yet their critics are still inflamed.

To understand this curious situation, it helps to know that what the Clintons actually say or do never matters. They’re always wrong.

Yet in this case, the bipartisan opposition may be not only populist but prudent.

Certainly, there are valid reasons to question the White House decision to allow the purchase of the British company that now operates several major U.S. ports by Dubai Ports World, a firm owned by the United Arab Emirates. While the President and his family may adore the Emirates—as they do most of the oil-producing dictatorships in the Persian Gulf—that peculiar Bush preference doesn’t necessarily reflect broader American interests.

Questions about the U.S. approval of Dubai Ports World should begin with the fact that it is not a private business but a government-owned enterprise. The “free-market” fanatics of the Bush administration and the conservative movement should explain exactly why they believe a corporation owned by a foreign state is an acceptable business partner, when they so vigorously oppose public ownership of any economic entity within the United States. Even the Cato Institute, that bastion of libertarian thought, is urging the approval of the Dubai deal.

Imagine the ideological fury among conservatives if our own federal government proposed to take over the operation of American ports (which might not be such an awful idea, considering the risk we now confront from nuclear or other threats that could be shipped into our cities by terrorists). They would scream about “socialism” and unfair competition with private enterprise. After all, they resisted the establishment of the Transportation Security Administration after 9/11 because of their knee-jerk preference for private security firms.

Yet the tribal rulers of the U.A.E. evidently should be encouraged to profit from government enterprise, while the free people of the United States cannot.

The sheiks who run the Emirates permit no such foreign incursion in their own national enterprises. Although they give lip service to open trade—and encourage foreign participation in their designated free-trade zones—they strictly regulate foreign investment in key sectors. According to the State Department and the U.S. Trade Representative, foreign investment in the U.A.E. is heavily restricted. Americans cannot own land there. No business can operate there without majority U.A.E. ownership.

Those rules reflect the harsh and undemocratic nature of the Emirates, whose government is rooted in Wahhabi Islam. The blessings of liberty as enunciated by the Bush doctrine have made little impression there—a country where labor unions are banned, free speech and association are unknown, and violations of human rights are common.

The State Department’s most recent report on human trafficking in 2005 denounced the U.A.E. for its failure to act against that evil practice. Busloads of workers are herded into the country annually under conditions resembling indenture, and planeloads of women are flown in for sexual exploitation. Even children are not exempt from the medieval labor market, with thousands of boys illegally imported to serve as “child camel jockeys”—which sounds like a stupid joke but is emphatically unfunny, as hundreds of them are maltreated and injured every year.

The ruling Emirate families make every important decision secretly and without accountability—in conditions that preclude transparency while encouraging corruption and intrigue. But the Bush administration insists that despite all those flaws, the Emirates are now our staunch allies in the war on terror.

Not so many years ago, those same ruling families were deeply involved in financing terrorism, dating back to their investment in the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. Emirate leaders formerly maintained intimate ties with the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Indeed, a missile strike intended for Osama bin Laden had to be called off in 1999 because certain Emirate royals were present at his hunting camp in Afghanistan. Later, the 9/11 conspirators—who included at least two U.A.E. citizens—operated through safe houses and bank accounts located in Dubai, according to the 9/11 Commission report.

As President Bush pointed out in 2004, the U.A.E. also provided a convenient cover for A.Q. Khan, the Pakistani physicist who operated an Islamist nuclear-weapons ring that threatened global security. Undisturbed by the usually meddlesome government, Mr. Khan’s deputy ran a computer firm in Dubai for years as a front for the ring.

Now, that unfortunate history notwithstanding, the Secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security promise that the Dubai deal will not jeopardize our safety. Bland assurances from Donald Rumsfeld and Michael Chertoff mean little, given their own poor records and stupid decisions. The United States has no obligation to trust its ports to the Emirate sheiks—and every obligation to place public safety above oligarchic profit.

"A straw poll yesterday of the New York congressional delegation shows unanimous opposition to letting Dubai Ports World operate in New York Harbor, at least pending an investigation." Crowley, Serrano, Owens, and Velazquez did not respond to the paper's inquiry.

Also opposing the deal: 69% of respondents to a Crain's New York Business online poll.

And what national security story would be complete without an 9/11 refence? Today's comes from
Carolyn Maloney who said the port deal is a sign of "pre 9/11 mentality."

--Azi Paybarah