Leave it to the Congress to do exactly the wrong thing. Any time there's a vote as loopsided as 62-2 (the House Appropriations Committee vote to prohibit the Dubai Ports acquisition of P&O), you have to question it because unanimity or near-unanimity often means Congress is up to no good. In this case, the Beltway buffoons snubbed exactly the kind of Muslim nation we are supposed to be trying to support.

To appreciate how cockeyed America's Dubai-phobia is, you have to spend a little time here, as I did this week. The truth is, this is one of the few places in the Arab world where things have been going in the right direction -- away from terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism and toward an open, modern economy. That's why congressional opposition came as such a surprise here. People in the UAE think they're America's friends.

The ports deal was part of the UAE's embrace of things Western. Wednesday night, I traveled with the minister of higher education, Sheik Nahayan bin Mubarak, to the dusty city of Al Ain to attend a Mozart festival at which the Vienna Chamber Orchestra performed. And I visited the American University of Sharjah, created nine years ago as a beacon of liberal arts education. On a wall next to the chancellor's office is a photo of the twin towers in New York, taken by one of the students on June 8, 2001. "There are no words strong enough to express how we feel today," reads a statement signed by UAE students.

It's hard to imagine an Arab more pro-American than Sulayem. He earned a degree in economics from Temple University in 1981, and he's still a fanatic about Philadelphia cheese steaks. He described a pilgrimage last New Year's Eve from New York to Pat's King of Steaks in South Philly, only to find the place closed. Before the deal collapsed, Sulayem had a free-trader's conviction that good business judgment would prevail over political rhetoric. "We are businessmen -- we don't understand politics -- but it is a surprise to us. We have been cooperating with the U.S. We are their best friends."

Many of the UAE's political leaders, including the crown prince, Mohammed bin Zayed, had grown increasingly convinced this week that the wisest course would be to pull out. But that view was resisted until almost the end by the business leadership in Dubai, including Dubai's ruler, Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid.

Arab radicals will be gloating, admonishing the UAE leaders, "We told you so." But officials here recognize that they're in a common fight with us against al-Qaeda. And unlike some Arab nations, the UAE really is fighting -- reforming its education system to block Islamic zealots and taking public stands with the United States despite terrorist threats. They have created one of the best intelligence services in the Arab world, and their special forces will be fighting quietly alongside the United States in Afghanistan tomorrow, and the day after.

President Bush tried to do the right thing on the Dubai ports deal, but he got rolled by a runaway Congress. The collapse of the deal was a measure of Bush's political weakness -- but even more, of America's traumatized post-Sept. 11 politics. The ironic fact is that the UAE is precisely the kind of Arab ally the United States needs most now. But that clearly didn't matter to an election-year Congress, which responded to the Dubai deal with a frenzy of Muslim-bashing disguised as concern about terrorism. And we wonder why the rest of the world doesn't like us.

It has been a long time since there was such an overwhelmingly bi-partisan movement to do precisely the wrong thing. America has been damaged by craven pols and we can only hope that the ripple effects will not boomerang on us to harshly.

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