Bush to United Arab Emirates: You’ve Got A Friend

WASHINGTON (AP) – President Bush was unaware of the pending sale of shipping operations at six major U.S. seaports to a state-owned business in the United Arab Emirates until the deal already had been approved by his administration, the White House said Wednesday.

Defending the deal anew, the administration also said that it should have briefed Congress sooner about the transaction, which has triggered a major political backlash among both Republicans and Democrats.

Bush on Tuesday brushed aside objections by leaders in the Senate and House that the $6.8 billion sale could raise risks of terrorism at American ports. In a forceful defense of his administration’s earlier approval of the deal, he pledged to veto any bill Congress might approve to block the agreement.

We are in an eternal war against terrorism. I mean, how can we ever declare victory in such a war? As long as one guy takes up arms against the powers that be there’s going to be terrorism. It’s like the war on drugs. If one kid fires up a joint in the back of his Monte Carlo in the high school parking lot then the war is still on. So shall it be with terrorists. We invaded two countries to prove that we’re serious about taking on these scumbags. Afghanistan invasion: Good. No one one in the world doubts that Al Qaida was using that country for its base of operation. So the U.S. commits about 10,000 troops to chasing down Osama bin Laden and his gang. Then we invaded Iraq: BAD. We committed 200,000 troops to disarming a country that didn’t have the arms in the first place because we were lied to.

Now El Presidente wants to turn a great deal of control of six major U.S. ports over to a company controlled by the United Arab Emirates, a country with known ties to Osama bin Laden, and was only one of three nations in the entire world to officially recognize the Taliban as Afghanistan’s lawful government when it was in power. Hell, he wasn’t even aware of the deal until after it was approved. Neither was the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld. Why was this deal approved then? I’ll give you one guess: Money. I have to give Bush credit for being 100% consistent in one aspect of his governance: Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, in the U.S. is up for sale.