opinion

I suppose it goes with the job of representing New York that someone in Hillary Clinton's position would assume an anti-Arab pose and rail against the sale of some major US port facilities to a company based in the United Arab Emirates. Arab bashing in American politics is something I have always found deplorable, even when there has been good reason to be wary of or hostile to certain Arab governments or political factions. There is no good reason for a new epoch of crusades and jihads between the Arab countries and the larger Muslim world on the one hand and the West on the other. To the extent that Islamic fanatics urge this, the way to deal with them is to isolate them, which you can't do if you gratuitously treat all Arab countries and all Muslims as if they were enemies.

Hillary made her gaffe much worse when she resurrected Moonie and Bircher rhetoric about China controlling the Panama Canal. First, it simply isn't true. Second, I recall when her husband's administration helped China downgrade the Universal Congress on the Panama Canal because Taiwan's president was invited to attend, so I have some real problems with complaints from her side of the Senate aisle about Chinese influence in Panama.

But all of this is really a smokescreen of convenience, using a noxious opportunity emanating from a broken political engine. I could say a broken engine of Democratic politics, but the Republicans, though ascendant, are themselves broken down in a similar way. Maybe it would be better to say that the smoke billows from a broken economic engine, one that can be observed in the ships plying the Panama Canal.

Coming from Asian ports en route to the US East, Gulf and Great Lakes coasts, the container ships ride low in the water. Coming back they tend to ride much higher. The Americans are importing a lot more than they export.

What's happened is that under successive administrations in Washington the cult of "free trade" has held sway, to the point that the United States has exported a large part of its industrial production. The US balance of trade is way out of whack --- much worse than the statistics based on multinational corporations' bookkeeping about their global maneuvers make it look.

The US government depends on foreigners to finance its deficits. It would be devastated if China, Japan or Saudi Arabia decided to sell their US Treasury bonds, or even took the more modest step of declining to buy more of them. The United Arab Emirates and its corporate and individual citizens own a lot of US dollars and bonds, and it is a rationally prudent thing for them to want to use some of this wealth to buy part of such American industrial plant that still exists.

The foundation of American military might is its industrial strength. Part of the debacle in Iraq has been the inability to properly equip US forces in a timely manner, and this in turn is a symptom of the industrial and financial decline of the United States.

Yes, there are other fundamentally wrong things about the Iraq War, some of which are no longer taboo for discussion by American politicians. But most of the issues that really matter to the United States are carefully avoided by most politicians of both of that country's major parties.

Brave is the officeholder who notes the obvious, that the US Armed Forces have been broken by George W. Bush's "War on Terror." It's a case that can be shown whether you want to look at it in terms of morale, in terms of budgets, in terms of recruitment and training, in terms of discipline, in terms of an officer corps cowed by political fanatics or at the bottom lines of the US forces' inability to defeat their enemies in Iraq or the worldwide increase in the jihadis' ranks since the onset of the "preventive war."

Given the rise of antiwar sentiment, it's a case that a small but growing band of members of Congress will quietly make these days.

Even more infrequently do we hear anyone in such a position talk about the hollowing of the US economy in realistic terms.

That foreigners are buying off those industrial assets that haven't been exported has been the occasion for Democrats to bash the Arabs and make dubious claims about how a port management company from Dubai would make us vulnerable to Al Qaeda. This argument avoids the heart of the problem. It's a slur likely to drive more Arabs away from a friendly disposition toward the United States, a setback for the necessary strategy of isolating Osama bin Laden within the Islamic world. It's an unacceptable substitute for clear new thinking about the economic direction that the United States has been taking for some time, and for fresh ideas about the American role in the world economy.

It's lame talk, but something that we in Panama can't afford to ignore. We are, after all, being called upon to subordinate our national economy to that of the United States via a free trade agreement.

Also in this section:
Leis, Ships bearing deadly cargo
Sirias, Don't want an argument with this Panamanian
Human Rights Watch, Approve the new UN Human Rights Council
González Rodríguez and Lauria, A terrorized press on the US-Mexican border
Birns & Lettieri, Chávez likely to trounce Rice
Reporters Without Borders, Free imprisoned Cuban journalist Fabio Prieto Llorente
Sun & Rodriguez, The Bermudan premier's flawed independence drive
Lettieri, US tries to stem Latin America's "Pink Tide"
Bernal, Campesinos against Richard Fifer's gold mine
Jackson, Hillary's gaffe and America's real problem