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March 10, 2006
DPW and P&O: Gerard Baker Edition
Please, folks, can we get this right. In the P&O Dubai Ports World’s nonsense, no ownership of ports are being transferred. It’s leases on certain operations within the port.
And up on Capitol Hill the loudest noise of all came from Republican members of Congress rushing to distance themselves from President Bush. They ignored Mr Bush’s pleas not to reject the transfer of half a dozen US ports to a company owned by the Dubai Government and in the process sent warning that they have passed the point where loyalty to the President was compatible with their own electoral success.
Gerard, you’re a naughty boy.
Update. The Guardian reveals the obvious solution.
The Arab-owned company Dubai Ports World agreed yesterday to sell off its United States operations after its proposed takeover of the running of six American ports led to a Republican revolt against the White House.The proposal by the United Arab Emirates state-owned company was announced in the Senate by John Warner, a senior Republican senator who had been leading congressional negotiations to try to avert a political crisis.
More from Daniel Drezner:
Whatever
you think of the ports deal, this has been a major foreign policy
f$%#-up. The UAE is the closest thing we have to a reliable, stable,
Westernized ally on the Arabian peninsula, and both official Washington
and the American public just pissed on their leg.
...
I
can't blame Congressmen too much for acting like short-sighted glory
hogs driven by electoral considerations -- that's their job. So I'll
join the crowd and blame Bush.
March 10, 2006 in Media | Permalink
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Comments
Tim,
A bit of a schoolboy error from wor Gerry, seeing as he used to be the FT's Washington Bureau Chief, but the piece is otherwise largely sound.
The 'conservative crack-up' he describes is not, of course, a new idea by any manner of means. The phrase was first used by Emmett Tyrrell as the title of a book in 1992, when Pat Buchanan (Whom God Preserve) ran against Bush I.
Then of course, Bubba got in and the House went Republican in '94. Crack-up temporarily postponed.
Jim Antle used the same phrase for the title of an article in 'The American Conservative' in 2003.
Baker refers to the recent recantation of neoconservatism by Francis Fukuyama's. FF's 'After Neoconservatism' seems to have caught the punditocracy on the hop - it shouldn't have. He published a piece at last a year ago describing Charles Krauthammer as being out of touch with reality.
Melanie Phillips published an absolute gorgeous neo denunciation of Fukuyama on her blog yesterday - it was like reading the David Frum of yore.
Bruce Bartlett has been criticising Bush about both the war and economic policy since at least April 2004 - nothing new there.
What has very probably, and finally, got into the Republicans' heads is that firstly, they backed half-baked Trotskyite policies of 'global benevolent hegemony' and global democratic revolution to the hilt, and they can't detach themselves from them; they've spent money like water for six years and Bush hasn't stopped them; their constituents are bitching about it; and they have midterms coming up in November.
Not for nothing was it announced that withdrawal plans were announced last week.
It is also forseeable, and possibly likely,that Dick Cheney will be 'retired' before then. He is too close to the neos; Scooter Libby was his Chief of Staff; and the smell of the dreaded Halliburton still hangs about him. He is too hot - so he may have to trot, to be replaced by the fragrant Condoleeza with either John Bolton or Zalmay Khalilzad moving to State.
Interesting point made by Larry Kudlow yesterday - Halliburton would be just about the only US company cacapable of managing the ports.
Of course, the sense of crack-up is not contained to the US neos. For example, last week one Gerard Baker was doing a fair impression of crack up on his 'Times' blog, not once but twice.
Posted by: Martin | Mar 10, 2006 11:14:57 AM
