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Is it this weeks "Miers Moment" or is it just a "Mindless Kerfuffle"

Last week it was Shotgun Dick Cheney and his Texas Six Shooters.

This week, its the "Who's running the ports?" controversy. Pour in equal parts verdant racism, add a little simple every day pig ignorance about complex business issues, and what do you get? Hours of talk radio blathering on about how the President wants to make "Supporters of terrorists responsible for securing our ports".

I've been thinking about it all day. At first, I was pretty surprised that such a seemingly dumb thing could have been allowed to happen by so many smart people. But as the day went on, I began to think that there was a lot about this that did not seem to hold very much water.

So, after a day of thinking about it, here is my "list of greivances" with the current "Bush is a bumbler" meme surrounding the support of the UAE buying the british company P&O. A company that has a port facilities management line of business in its portfolio.

1. The UAE is a supporter of terrorists.

Ok. let's say that this is true. Are we prepared to blockade and invade and overthrow the UAE for the crime of having citizens that helped terrorists in the past? Before you answer, remember that the UAE supported and supports wholeheartedly the invasion of Iraq. Dubai in the UAE is the biggest port facility in the Arab gulf that is supporting the US Navy. Ok, so we lose Dubai and the UAE as a friendly staging ground in a decidedly unfriendly part of the world. Fine, go ahead, lose Dubai so you can remain pure in thought. One port is as good as another, we can always get more Arab allies to take their place, right?

So let's now also extend the judgement of "supporters of terrorists" to a few other countries. Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Djibouti, Egypt all have less than spectacular records with regards to terror suppression, a cynic like me might even consider calling these countries "supporters of terror". Wow, thats great!,if we treat each of them like we did the evil faction of the UAE, that means, well, let's see... let me get my slide rule out, oh 25% of our oil supply stops tommorrow. But hey, atleast we can be sure that the only people we work with in the world are as clean as the church pews on Sunday morning. We will rest comfortably on that as our fleet sits idle in port, and our aircraft sit on the ramps of the worlds air bases, due to a lack of fuel.

So, let's walk away from this crap about how the UAE is a supporter of terrorists and not worthy of business, shall we? Are there people and factions in the UAE that don't like us and dont have our best interests in mind? Sure, thats true, but its also true of Mexico, Canada, Venezuela, Germany, Spain and so on. You dont have to go to the UAE to find supporters of terrorists, in fact, you need only go as far as Lodi, California or Cleveland, Ohio to find supporters of terror.

The UAE is allied with the United States. This comes at great risk to the people of the UAE. They have problems with terror, they live in an area of great instability and tumult, but despite all the risk, they have invited the heathen infidel into their country with open arms.

Those "heathen infidels" by the way, are us.

Oh, and we since we sold the UAE our top of the line fighters, the F-16, something we wont even do for Venezuela or Spain, we might as well stop this fiction that the government and people of the UAE are not a very,very good friend indeed. If they are good enough to sell a major weapons system and train their Military Officers here in the United States, then they can be said to be on the "good guy" list.

2. We are handing over port security to "those people".

No, we are not. We are handing over port facilities to a company that is owned by foreign nationals. We are simply changing one set of foreign nationals for another. More correctly, we are simply changing the holding company that owns the company doing Port Facility Mangement, its doubtful that any employee of P&O would ever see any change in their day to day work except the bank that their paycheck comes from every other week.

So we must ask ourselves, is this new or unusual? Hardly. What's more the case, almost every ship in every port in the United States is crewed by foreign nationals. Those oil tankers, the LNG tankers, the big containers ships out there in SF Bay and New York Harbor are all crewed by people who didnt go to your high school. The seaman of the "Merchant Marine" that we think of as peopled by rough "Humphrey Bogart Dashiell Hammett type guys" is today a business handled largely by people of the third world. People who come from places like, oh let's say, Indonesia and the Philippines for example, places that are far more likely to involve the daily interractions of terrorists than that produced within the strip malls of port of Dubai.

Port facilties by the way, are almost always either owned or controlled by those who own the ships that dock at the port, and here's where we pick up another clue.

We don't own ships anymore. The Chinese own ships. The Koreans own ships. The Japanese own ships, the Swedes own ships. We don't own ships, we just rent them. Every time you are going down the freeway and you see a blue shipping container with the name "COSCO" on its side, that my friend is a container from a Communist country, shipped here on a Communist ship, crewed by a third world crew, unloaded by foreign nationals, and now driven on the roads of America by a good old American teamster.

The grand old shipping companies of the past now make a great deal of money running the ports themselves as the ports have been greatly modernized via containerization. This modernization effectively removed the crime ridden and gangster filled ranks of the longshoreman from our ports.

But Port Security is and remains a Coast Guard and a Customs function. This is the Department of Homeland Security. Who owns the company running port facility changes nothing in the ways of Port Security. Whether its COSCO or Hapag-Lloyd or P&O , be it British or UAE owned, it changes nothing.

3. Them sneaky little Arab debbils will be putting them thar WMD's right here in the good old USA.

Sure. This is a big argument for invading, overthrowing and removing creeps like Saddam Hussein. Its a big argument for being active and fully persecuting the war on terror. But its not an argument against the UAE owning "P&O" instead of the British.

If you want to start to lose sleep, start thinking of the ways that you could sneak WMD's into the United States. I do this all the time, it always scares the hell out of me. Remember, all you need to do is conceal an object about the size and weight of your average double door refrigerator.

You try it, and come back in 15 minutes with your list of smuggling methods. Now tell me, how many of them involve spending BILLIONS of dollars buying a port facility manangement company, just so you can sneak Ali and Jabril into a port with their big refrigerator sized handmade atomic bomb?

You want to sneak a bomb into the US, make a big container ship into a bomb and compromise the crew. It's cheaper, and more likely to succeed. (please see: The Halifax Explosion for reference.)

Make an aircraft into a bomb and fly it into the country( If I remember correctly, I think this has already been demonstrated in Manhattan).

Go and buy lots and lots of fertilizer and diesel oil from all over the US and set the fertilizer bomb off in a rented Uhaul truck. (again, been there, done that, bought the T-shirt, didnt need P&O to be owned by the UAE to do it. All that was needed was a redneck hick with time on his hands and a penchant to kill kids in a day care in Oklahoma City. )

My point is, you dont need to spend a billion dollars leaving your fingerprints all over the scene of the crime by buying P&O from the British so that you can get your agents into the port so you can do nefarious terror crimes against the host country. All you have to do is get to the Human Resources department for any existing port facility and have your men hired. You can save the billion or so dollars you were going to spend buying P&O and spend it elsewhere, like perhaps actually making or stealing an atomic bomb!

I'm not arguing that Port Security is not important, or that it doesnt need more funding and care, I'm simply arguing that the arguments of P&O being owned by UAE presents a bigger security risk to the US rather than the British ownership of P&O, border the dark twin swamps of the irrational and institutionally racist mind.

In summary, I cannot find a better argument that befits my current state of mind on the subject than this statement on National Reviews " The Corner"

I've had the pleasure of working in the transportation industry in Dubai for almost 5 years in the late 90's. I am currently based on the US West Coast. Given my choice of depending on Dubai World Ports or the ILWU (the longshoremen's union that has the entire West Coast transportation system held hostage to its demands) to provide better port security, my money's on Dubai.

What security measures are in place now at these East Coast ports, regarding the hiring of people for sensitive positions, that are going to be REMOVED by the folks at Dubai Ports World? Do they even have any SAY over those measures? Somehow, I would think that the US would retain rights to approving employees at certain positions after security checks on their background.

Besides, if the UAE were intent on getting something nasty into the US, I think they would just put it on one of the Airbus 340's that fly directly from Dubai to NY twice a day. Pop a nuke at 35,000 feet, and you get the added bonus of an EMP that would make the East Coast power outage of a few years back look like a nothing more than a tripped fuze.

I think that, once again, we have all let our collective imagination run away with us. There are too many real things to worry about to spend time inventing new things to be afraid of. Just take a look at your list of "ways to smuggle WMD's" for example.

Posted @ February 21, 2006 09:14 PM | Current Affairs

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