Here’s what I think is going on with the Dubai Ports World deal to operate five American ports.

United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is in the Middle East right now, trying to get Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia to force the new Hamas-led government of the Palestinian authority to sign onto the “road map for peace” which would require Hamas to accept a two-state solution recognizing the legitimacy of Israel and renouncing terrorism.

Israel has cut off millions of dollars in funding to the Palestinian Authority because of the Hamas election victory, and Hamas is now approaching Arab countries asking them to replace the funding. The United States doesn’t want the alternate funding from Arab states to come through and thereby allow Hamas to destroy the peace process.

Moreover, the U.S. wants the United Arab Emirates, where we have U.S. military bases, and which has been a strategic ally of the United States since the 1970’s, to stick with us as we have a showdown with Iran over their clandestine nuclear weapons development, and since Israel is too small to mount a military operation to take out the multiple Iranian nuclear facilities, in effect the United States would have to do it for them. This would certainly involve U.S. airstrikes on Iran at the very least, and Iran is likely to retaliate by invading Iraq, causing the United States to defend Iraq from such an invasion with an influx of new American and Coalition troops and military materiel.

I do not know the timetable for Iran getting nuclear weapons, but possibly the United Arab Emirates — which has been providing intelligence to the United States — knows or can find out … and it’s likely that the Bush administration believes that any slight to the UAE could derail our strategic alliance with them, and our intelligence flow, at a time of looming crisis.

The purchase of the British company P&O, which has been operating our ports, by the Dubai Ports World company, which is wholly owned by the government of the United Arab Emirates, was approved in secret by the Bush administration, likely months ago. There is evidence that this deal has major intelligence repercussions. On January 24th, it was announced that Dave Sanborn,  a senior executive of Dubai World Ports, was nominated by President Bush to serve as Maritime Administrator, a key transportation appointment reporting directly to Norman Mineta the Secretary of Transportation and a Bush Administration Cabinet Member. Legal liability, like that which got Scooter Libby indicted, prevents me from speculating in public which agency Dave Sanborn is really working for.

But overall, its clear to me that (a) the $7 billion dollar deal to the benefit of the government of Dubai is the typical sort of baksheesh that the United States makes to foreign governments we need as strategic allies, and (b) it’s part of a long-term intelligence initiative.

This being said, I’m still very uncomfortable with any foreign-based company, particularly one from a country whose monitoring of terrorist activities was shown to have failed on 9/11 when two of their nationals were among the 9/11 hijackers, with their secret funding flowing through Dubai banks — taking over operational control of our major seaports. Regardless of our own workers doing the loading and unloading, and our own security personnel watching the operations, we don’t have the capacity to inspect more than a fraction of incoming containers, and the possibility of an Al Qaeda operative already being secretly embedded as a  DPW employee is not insignificant worry. If a mushroom cloud were to erupt over Disneyland from a nuke smuggled into the country, we would not know until it was too late whether paperwork approved by an  Al Qaeda sleeper agent working for Dubai Ports World was responsible.

My feeling is that there should have been a better way for the U.S. to make the payoff to Dubai, and provide for our intelligence needs.

But now - with this deal out in public — the Bush Administration is locked in because backing out on it would insult a strategic ally and jeopardize our intelligence flow.

Bush is a moron when it comes to PR, and apparently his advisors are no better. For them not to know that the shit was going to hit the fan when their secret deal went public — and provide a opening for Democrats like Hillary Clinton to look like Hawks — is astonishing to me.

The Republican and Democratic leadership in both houses of Congress are facing a tidal wave of popular pressure to overturn this deal — and with Congressional elections coming up in the fall, the Republicans face a turnover of both the House and the Senate to the Democrats if they fail to stop it. The political costs of this deal to the Republican Party if they cave to the White House on this issue is not only loss of both houses of Congress in 2006, but also a sure loss of the White House in 2008.

President Bush is term-limited and can’t be the Republican candidate. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says she won’t run for president, Vice President Cheney has a heart condition and a hunting accident to prevent him from running, and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld is likely too old to run, so there is little incentive for the Congressional Republicans — out for their own political survival — to side with the Bush Administration. It is likely that Congress, with both leadership and rank-and-file of both parties opposed to the deal, has the votes to override President Bush’s threatened veto.

When that happens, the Bush administration is going to have some heavy fence-mending to do with the United Arab Emirates and other Arab allies, and intelligence re-routing to accomplish.

Meanwhile, this fiasco has caused a split in the Republican Party at the worst possible time. I am extremely unhappy with President Bush and his major cabinet secretaries for their ham-handedness, their “father knows best” arrogance toward the American people, and their unwillingness to admit that there are serious risks to our national security no matter how carefully they think our bureaucracies at the State Department, the Commerce Department, the Homeland Security Department and the CIA have vetted this deal.

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J. Neil Schulman’s third novel, Escape from Heaven, was largely written in the weeks following 9/11, and he’s written a screen adaptation currently in development by his own company, Jesulu Productions. His latest nonfiction book is I Met God, just released as an audio book and being marketed to book publishers for print publication. Jesulu Productions is currently developing three additional motion pictures, and in Spring, 2006 Schulman will be producing — and for the first time directing — a fifth, Lady Magdalene’s, an action comedy based on a new screenplay he’s currently completing.