[Do not dub me shapka broham]

You don't seem to be grasping my point.

The schills for this agreement keep telling us that we should trust the UAE, and that the UAE is different from all of the other Islamic dictatorships, simply because they allow so much foreign investment, and have an affinity for some quasi-capitalist practices.

Whether or not a country is capitalist is not relevant in my opinion, if it has none of the other characteristics of a genuinely democratic, stable, pluralistic free nation.

The UAE was just condemned by the U.S. State Dept., and has the same scale of freedom-perhaps not quite as bad-as Saudi Arabia.

That's not what I would consider an "ally."

[Cold Heat]

The UAE was just condemned by the U.S. State Dept

That dispute was due to some trafficking in young boys as camel jockeys and the UAE has since addressed the problem to our satisfaction and the issue has since been been dropped.

But it has been presented as a current problem on this forum and elsewhere to affect the port facility sale by the democrats.

Really stupid....

[.cnI redruM]

OK, I'll fess up. I intentionally and mendaciously missed your point because the proper intellectual answer to it is one of life's more unpleasant realities.

The US has always had problematic allies. Sometimes we have to play nicely with people that any rational moralist would describe as ethical @$$-holes. People way worse and more despicable than the current oligarchy honchoing the G's over in UAE.

This is not a good practice, but it is a necessary one. We gave financial aid to Augusto Pinochet. Unfortunately, this wasn't financial aid to send him to an ethics class. It was financial to prop a despicable dictatorship that was one step less vile and inimical than the one Che Guevara would have built in its place.

The world's a crappy place. One in which we need strategically located allies. I wouldn't call the current president of Pakistan a shining example of The Boy Scout Oath. I also wouldn't want to try and run a ground campaign against The Taliban in Afghanistan with his air space in hostile instead of friendly hands.