Since Sept. 11, whenever the Bush team has found itself in political trouble, it has played the national security card against Democrats. It has worked so well that Karl Rove, in a recent speech to the Republican National Committee, made it a campaign theme for 2006.

He said America today faces "a ruthless enemy" and therefore needs "a commander in chief and a Congress who understand the nature of the threat and the gravity of the moment America finds itself in. President Bush and the Republican Party do. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for many Democrats."

Rove added: "Republicans have a post-9/11 worldview, and many Democrats have a pre-9/11 worldview. That doesn't make them unpatriotic — not at all. But it does make them wrong — deeply and profoundly and consistently wrong."

I particularly like the line "that doesn't make them unpatriotic," when that was exactly the political slur Rove was trying to implant.

So I understand why Democrats were eager to turn the soft-on-terrorism card back on Bush when it was revealed that P&O, the navigation company based in London — which has been managing the ports of New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami and Philadelphia — had been bought by Dubai Ports World, a company owned by the Dubai monarchy in the United Arab Emirates, an Arab Gulf state, and that the Bush team had approved the Dubai takeover of the U.S. port operations.

I also understand why many Republicans are now running away from the administration. They know that if they don't distance themselves from Bush, some Democrats are going to play this very evocative, very visual "giving away our ports to the Arabs" card against them in the coming elections.

Yes, you reap what you sow.

But while I have zero sympathy for the political mess in which the president now finds himself, I will not join this feeding frenzy. On the pure merits of this case, the president is right. The port deal should go ahead. Congress should focus on the NSA wiretapping. Not this.

As a country, we must not go down this road of global ethnic profiling, looking for Arabs under our beds the way we once looked for commies. If we do, if America, the world's beacon of pluralism and tolerance, goes down that road, we will take the rest of the world with us.

We will sow the wind and we will reap the whirlwind.

If there were a real security issue here, I'd join the critics. But the security argument is bogus and, I would add, borderline racist. Many U.S. ports are run today by foreign companies, but the U.S. Coast Guard still controls all aspects of port security, entry and exits; the U.S. Customs Service is still in charge of inspecting the containers; and U.S. longshore- men still handle the cargos.