Dubai Caves and adopts Ledeen Option?

The Hill has a report filed before the Dubai compromise that the UAE could retaliate, not openly, but by buying Airbuses instead of Boeings for their excellent Emirates Airline, and by ratcheting down cooperation with the US military and with intelligence agencies in the Middle East.

This whole seamy episode has exposed an Ugly America populated by Ugly Americans. Fareed Zakaria was in India when the brouhaha erupted and said the Indian street was unanimous in that it was sheer race hatred on the part of the American public. For Chrissakes, the Chinese Red Army runs the Panama Canal and the PRC owns the port facilities in LA as well as Singapore elsewhere on the West Coast. But they do not have skins as brown as A-rabs, and the relentless media representations of rioting violent Muslims in the Levant and Iraq make the public think "They're all the same."

The political sluggishness displayed by an obviously exhausted Bush White House reveals the rapid entropy this Administration is experiencing. Protectionist xenophobic Americans carried the day, given that the security problems could have been worked out. And the Islamophobes will now regard high dudgeon as a tool to elicit support for extremist positions. Hell, even the Israelis wanted this deal to go through.

But to see the USA start to adopt the protectionist stance now all the rage in France and Spain against foreign acquisitions [read ft.com free all this week] is a retrograde move with manifold implications, almost all of them bad. Clinton and Carter backed GWB on this, as well presumably as Bush 41.

Sadly, the Ledeen solution should have been adopted long ago [hat tip to Mickey Kaus]. Namely what skullduggery king Michael Ledeen recommended Feb 19th:

There is a clean way to handle things such as the port operations, and it still astonishes me that it wasn't done properly. It's been done thusly for many years, actually many decades:

1. Create an American company to handle the matter (if foreigners wish to buy in, or even buy it, that's ok);
2. Wall off the foreign investors/owners. They are silent partners. They have no say in the actual operation;
3. Create a "classified Board" composed of people with security clearances and experience in sensitive matters;
4. Appoint a CEO and other top executives with experience and clearances.

We do this all the time with, say, foreigners who want to buy companies that manufacture parts for weapons sytems, etc. It seems the obvious solution here. Dubai would get prestige and whatever profits are generated. Americans run the thing and guarantee, so far as is possible, security. Looks like a win/win solution. For that matter, we should have done the same sort of thing with the British owners, and we should do the same thing with the Chinese and others who now have access to all kinds of potentially dangerous information thanks to their buy-ins.

For once I agree with Ledeen, whose spotty record in US foreign policy has more negatives than pluses.