WASHINGTON ? For years now, the Republican leaders in Congress have been the Pips to George W. Bush?s Gladys Knight. He invades Iraq on shaky premises that ultimately fall apart, and they sing ?woo-woo? in perfect harmony.

He subjects terror suspects to arbitrary, indefinite detention and interrogation by techniques most people would call torture, and the congressional leadership twirls in graceful unison.

He smothers the country with an unprecedented blanket of electronic surveillance, and from Capitol Hill comes a sweet refrain: ?You?re the best thing, you?re the best thing, you?re the best thing that ever happened to me.?

But this week the Pips grabbed the microphone and elbowed their way to centre stage. Poor Gladys ? I mean, George. But ultimately, the debacle was his own doing.

No, Bush didn?t do anything wrong in backing the infamous Dubai ports deal ? the spark that ignited the congressional insurrection. Without boring everyone with the arcane details of a fairly routine business transaction, I could see no substantive reason for Congress to be so adamant in its defiance of the president. But this wasn?t about substance. It was about politics, and it was about an anti-Arab bias that Bush and his administration should have worked harder to quell.

Let?s be honest: The real issue wasn?t whether a company owned by foreigners, or even one owned by a foreign government, should be allowed to run operations at US ports. It was about whether an Arab-owned company should be put in such a sensitive position.

The GOP leadership in Congress, which bluntly told the president on Thursday that the deal was dead, was just responding to constituents who have absorbed the idea that Arab equals terrorist. That notion, racist and wrong, was extremely inconvenient for the president this week. In the not-so-distant past, however, it was useful.

Bush declared his ?global war on terrorism? and then shifted its focus from Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden to Iraq and a wider crusade to reform the Arab states of the Middle East. The president never encouraged anti-Arab xenophobia, but neither did he make clear just who the enemy was. He sent our troops to conquer and occupy an Arab country, and they came under deadly fire not just from the forces loyal to the despot who used to rule the place, but also from insurgents who were supposed to greet our soldiers as liberators.

The administration at first minimised the insurgency and never clearly articulated just who these people were and why they were so intent on blowing up US convoys with roadside bombs. Bush just said they were ?terrorists? who, for reasons he never specified, ?hate our freedoms?. Americans could see that these freedom-hating terrorists, like the men who crashed jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, were Arabs. Many people then made the short leap to the conclusion that Arabs were the enemy.

That sentiment, I?m convinced, has made it easier for the administration to take measures that otherwise would have been resisted by the public and its elected representatives. As long as the people being deprived of liberty, privacy or due process are Arabs, the president can get away with secret prisons and domestic surveillance. After all, as he keeps reminding us, we are at war.

So he shouldn?t be surprised that putting a state-owned company based in the United Arab Emirates in charge of major US ports would provoke an outcry. The president should have done more to communicate to Americans what he knows full well ? that it?s unconscionable and un-American to lump all Arabs into the category of enemy ? but either he couldn?t or he wouldn?t, so he didn?t.

When the deal came to light, Democrats were able, for a change, to position themselves to the right of the GOP on a national security ?issue?, even though most of them probably know there was no real issue here. Those American ports, which Dubai Ports World has now agreed to put under the control of an American firm, would have been no more insecure than under the British firm that had been running them for years.

Were the Democrats, then, guilty of cynical demagoguery? Yes, but Republicans have done the same thing to Democrats so many times that turnabout was expected. Sadly, that?s the way Washington works these days.

With the president?s approval rating below 40 percent and the midterm election eight months away, Republicans in Congress may not have wanted to defy the White House but simply couldn?t allow themselves to be outflanked on security, which is their best issue. They were in a squeeze, and they had no choice but to revolt. Hey, it?s hard out here for a Pip.