Sen. Clinton's sudden interest in port management

Andrew McCarthy is consistently one of the most astute writers on national security and law enforcement, and today's column at NRO is no exception. In it, he notes with interest that Hillary Clinton -- seeing an opportunity to emphasize her supposed "centrist" tendencies -- has suddenly taken an interest in the security of the nation's shipping ports.

This is ironic because it assumes, in McCarthy's words, that Sen. Clinton has to hope for a case of collective national amnesia in order to make her case.

In 1992, Bill Clinton made the growing threat of China a campaign issue, but upon winning the election, turned a blind eye to the Chinese "threat" -- and oh, by the way, China now controls several West Coast port operations.

Here's how McCarthy ties the Chinese issue into the United Arab Emirates:

Of course, in the Clinton years, when anyone had the temerity to suggest that maybe it wasn’t such a hot idea to give away the store to thuggish, democracy-crushing Communists, we were told such troglodyte notions were insentient to the alchemy of “constructive engagement.” This was the very “why make friends when you can let them buy you?” philosophy that led these super-competent, obsessed-with-national-security Clintonistas to sell $8 billion worth of F-16s, anti-aircraft and anti-ship missiles, other advanced weapons, and sundry munitions to — guess who? — The United Arab Emirates.

That happened in early 2000. For those keeping score, that’s less than two years after al Qaeda blew up our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. It is one year after the Clinton administration had Osama bin Laden targeted at a camp in Afghanistan … but called the strike off because the al Qaeda chief was in the company of high UAE officials, including an Emirati prince. A few months later, while the Clinton folks were getting the UAE its new military hardware, the regime’s friends at al Qaeda were blowing up the U.S.S. Cole.

So why do I have this crazy feeling that, in a new Clinton era, we’d be apt to find a lot more “engagement” than exclusion of the UAE (not to mention other dubious “partners”) at our ports? In any event, now that Senator Clinton is all over this port thing, it’ll be interesting to hear how she plans to tackle those dread Chinese foreigners managing California’s coastline — not to mention her explanation of why the administration in which she figured so prominently thought it was okay to sell lots of stuff that goes boom to a country apparently not even fit to run a port terminal.

As McCarthy notes later in the column, this does not mean the port deal is a good idea. After all, the UAE :

• Has been a hub for international narcotics trafficking and money laundering;
• Operates under Sharia law, which makes it an imprisonable offense for a Muslim woman to marry a non-Muslim man, or to urge Muslims to convert to other faiths;
• Believes in the idea of eliminating Israel from the map, and "may well be funding" terrorism in Gaza and the West Bank;
• Was a key supporter of the Taliban government in Afghanistan.
• Has been a "transfer-station for nuclear components" sold by the A.Q. Kahn network to Iran, North Korea and Libya.

All this makes the Clinton administration decision to sell weapons to the UAE look even more foolish. Beyond that, McCarthy is right on two major points: Sen. Clinton was a key player in the executive branch from 1992-2000, and the history of national security under that executive branch leaves Sen. Clinton's current position on the ports issue looking like political posturing for a presidential run.