I do love that horrible argument about the British running the ports from Bush, or that equally crappy argument about longshoremen from Rush. Good God, what the hell is going through their minds?
I'm sure at some level they are trying to be fair and point out two things that have some impact (why the British and not the Emirs, the actual operations folks on the ground will change very little), but fundamentally they both miss the point: it shouldn't be foreigners that are running American ports, whether they are our allies or not. To my knowledge, we don't depend on the UAE to run our air traffic system in six airports. We don't have the UAE run our airport security in six airports. We don't have the UAE unloading baggage in six international airports. Why should the UAE be running our port operations--even a portion of them? And if we DO at any point have the equivalent of the UAE working in our airports, WHY? Wasn't the uproar over hiring foreign airport screeners enough to stop this !@#$@!?