THERE’S AN IRONY the size of a cargo container buried just below the surface of the whole shouting match over a state-run company of the United Arab Emirates taking over shipping operations at six U.S. ports.

That irony was clarified by Thomas L. Friedman’s latest book, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century, which I finally managed to finish recently (“A masterpiece of suspense” — Petroleum Digest).

It is this: This outcry against the investment by an Arab company in U.S. ports comes as the United States needs desperately for the Arab world to catch up with the rest of the planet — in business as well as in education and democratic government. In a world connected by trade and instant shipment of data, the Arab-led states are almost all being left further behind.

Oil is the only major driver in their economies. While their gross domestic products have risen with the price of oil, their productivity has not budged. In a world where business networks are linked around the globe, Muslim nations mostly get bypassed.

Arab universities are not up to international par, Mr. Friedman’s book notes, and its research is far behind the West in number of patents granted. Arab peoples know they are being left behind in a world driven by information and innovation, and it’s a source of anger — which sometimes can be rechanneled into terrorism.

Now the state-run company from the United Arab Emirates is being rejected by U.S. politicians in the most public way imaginable — and after the deal was approved by our government. We want to encourage freedom and entrepreneurship in the Muslim world, but this episode is sending just the opposite message: We don’t trust you.

There are reasons not to trust U.S. port security: Too few packages are screened, and we don’t do a good enough job tracking which containers come from countries that pose the biggest risk of harboring terrorism. But that has little to do with who owns the port companies. In this globalized economy, most of the shipping companies that operate in U.S. ports are owned overseas.

If this deal goes through, the same workers will be manning these U.S. ports, following the same rules, as when these facilities were run by a British company. Most of the hiring is supervised by U.S. unions, anyway. I’m not overly worried that the longshoremen will be infiltrated by al-Qaida.

It’s fine to hold the new owners’ hiring rules up to more scrutiny, even if it’s just to calm down members of Congress. But if we really want to improve our port security, we’ll need to spend more time and effort beefing up the Customs Service and the Coast Guard. That would be the responsible thing to do.

Instead, there’s a dispute about ownership based in the UAE. It is an ally that allows U.S. military forces to use its facilities, and one of the most friendly nations for Western business in the Middle East. It’s not surprising that many in the Arab world consider this flap driven by discrimination. “We don’t like the tone of this,” Abdul Khaleq Abdulla, a political scientist at Emirates University, said. “Many of us see a hint of racism there, disguised as security concern.”

This is the latest in a series of incidents when fears helped prevent business purchases by foreign bidders:

• An $18.5 billion bid by a state-run Chinese company for American energy giant Unocal never had a chance. The opposition was instant and enormous.

• India-based Mittal Steel is facing strong opposition in France to its $22 billion bid to buy Arcelor. It’s not just Americans who can dig in their heels to ward off foreign investment.

There is a special undercurrent to the loud opposition to this deal: post-9/11 mistrust of anything Arab, and of our own government. The 9/11 attacks, shattering our sense of invulnerability at home, were such a psychological blow that we’re not sure of any allies in the Arab world — and we don’t trust our government, after its 9/11 failures, to tell friend from foe.

The fears being expressed are not going unnoticed in the Arab-Muslim world. “This is a major long-term investment,” Mustafa Alani, a security analyst with the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center, told The Associated Press. “If it’s going to be undermined for unjustified reasons, that will tell Arab investors and governments to keep away from the United States.”

I fear that America is failing a test here. Our policy has been to reach out to Muslims worldwide and tell them that Western-style openness and freedom offer them a way forward, rather than fanaticism’s retreat into the past. But when they read comments from some politicians that this deal cannot go through, no-way and no-how, they can only think that we don’t mean for them to accept our invitation.

If President Bush, having taken such a public stand, is forced to back down on this, it will resonate in the Arab-Muslim world as so many other things have: a ringing rejection.

Write to Mr. Fitts at mfitts@thestate.com.