Dubai Ports Deal: A Pitchfork Moment

“This Dubai port deal has unleashed a kind of collective mania we haven’t seen in decades ... a xenophobic tsunami,” wails a keening David Brooks, “a nativist, isolationist mass hysteria is ... here.”

The New York Times columnist obviously regards the nation’s splenetic response to news that control of our East Coast ports had been sold to Arab sheiks as wildly irrational. In witness whereof he quotes Philip Damas of Drewry Shipping Consultants, “The location of a company in the age of globalism is irrelevant.”

Why is it irrelevant, in a war against Arab and Islamic terrorists, to question the transfer of control of our East Coast ports from Britain to the United Arab Emirates?

Our cosmopolitan Mr. Brooks lives in another country. He has left the America of blood and soil, shaken the dust from his sandals, to enter the Davos world of the Global Economy where nationality does not matter and where fundamentalists and flag-wavers of all faiths are the real enemies of progress toward the wonderful future these globalists have in store for us.

“God must love Hamas and Moktada Al-Sadr,” snorts Brooks, “He has given them the America First brigades of Capitol Hill.”

To Brooks there is little distinction between Islamic mobs burning Danish consulates and America First patriots protesting some insider’s deal to surrender control of American ports to Arab sheiks.

But the reflexive recoil to this transaction between transnationals is a manifestation of national mental health. The American people have not yet been over-educated into the higher stupidity. Common sense still trumps ideology here. Globalism has not yet triumphed over patriotism. Rather than take risks with national security, Americans will accept a pinch of racial profiling.

Like alley cats, Americans yet retain an IFF, Identify-Friend-or-Foe radar that instinctively alerts them to keep a warier eye on some folks than on others.

But in rejecting a deal transferring control of our ports to Arabs, are Americans not engaging in discrimination? Are they not engaging in ethnic prejudice?

Of course they are. But not all discrimination is irrational, nor is all prejudice wrong. To discriminate is but to choose. We all discriminate in our choice of friends and associates. Prejudice means prejudgment. And a prejudgment in favor of Brits in matters touching on national security is rooted in history.

In the 20th century (if not the 19th), the Brits have been with us in almost every fight. It was not Brits who struck us on 9/11, who rejoiced in the death of 3,000 Americans, who daily threaten us from the mosques of East and West, who behead our aid workers, bomb our soldiers and call for “Death to America!” in a thousand demonstrations across the Middle East. And while not all Muslims are terrorists, almost all terrorists appear to be Muslim.

As Mother Church has a “preferential option” for the poor, there is nothing wrong with America’s preferential option for the cousins.

The folks from Dubai may detest the 9/11 murderers as much as we do, for those killers shamed their faith, disgraced their people, and bred a distrust and fear of Arabs and Muslims that had never before existed here.

Yet, just as sky marshals seat themselves behind young Arab males, not grannies taking the tots to Disney World, so, Americans, in deciding who operates their ports, naturally prefer ourselves, or old friends.

Why take an unnecessary risk? Just to get an A for global maturity on our next report card from the WTO?

The real question this deal raises is what happened to the political antenna at the White House? Did it fall off the roof about the time President Bush named Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court?

Anyone in touch with Middle America, especially after 9/11 and endless warnings of imminent attacks on U.S. soil, would know this country is acutely sensitive to terror threats. Surely, before approving this deal with Dubai Ports World, someone should have asked:

“How do you think Bubba will react when he’s told sheiks will take over the port of Baltimore where, in Tom Clancy’s ‘Sum of All Fears,’ Arab terrorists smuggle in an a-bomb and detonate it?”

Apparently, no one bothered to ask, or the question was brushed off in the interests of hastily greasing the deal.

Now this episode is going to end badly. Bush, who has denied advance knowledge of the deal, is being ripped by liberals for living in a pre-9/11 world and being out of touch with his government.

As for our remaining friends in the Middle East, they have been given another reason to regard Americans as fickle friends who, down deep. Don’t like Arabs.

Unquestionably, this will result in a victory for those who wish to sever America’s friendships in the Arab world. But it is Bush and his unthinking globalists, not the American Firsters whom Brooks cannot abide who engineered this latest debacle.

Why is it irrelevant, in a war against Arab and Islamic terrorists, to question the transfer of control of our East Coast ports from Britain to the United Arab Emirates?

Mainly because of the grosteque ignornace displayed in this sort of statement? "Control of our Ports" is firmly in the hands of local Govt Port Authorites. We are transfering control to NO ONE. The thing that has been so eye opening in all this is the grotesque ignorance and knee jerk hysteria on some much of the Junk Media who merely repeated the lies of a Democrat Senate Election Comittee Press Release instead of finding out FACT one about what the UAE Company would being doing, and all ready DOES DO, in US Ports.

For those ready to think instead of just blindly stamped in the direction the Democrat Election Year Propaganda demands of you, read this for the facts.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1584887/posts

The "Port" of Public Opinion The Patriot Post ^ | February 24, 2006 | Federalist - Patriot Post

Posted on 02/24/2006 10:28:57 AM PST by knightshadow

The port of public opinion...

Protests about the planned transfer of management for several U.S. seaports to a state-owned company in the United Arab Emirates are fraught with almost as much confusion as fervor -- which explains why the current division within the political parties is almost as stark as the one between them. When Karl Rove, Jimmy Carter and The Los Angeles Times line up on one side of an issue, while Senators Bill Frist, Chuck Schumer and The New York Times line up on the other, something is seriously amiss.

Of course, the first casualty of political conquest is the truth, which is not to say that both sides don't feel genuine concern. In an effort to elucidate the issue, let us first distinguish between fact and fiction.

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a multi-agency panel that evaluates foreign financial interests in the U.S. with national-security implications, has approved the transfer of management of some port terminals (not the sale of these ports) in New York, Newark, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Miami, New Orleans and Houston. The transfer is from a British owned company, Peninsula and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, to Dubai Ports World, which is headquartered in the UAE. What this means, essentially, is that American managers and longshoremen will now get their checks cut by DPW instead of P&O. In other words, DPW will become one of many operators in these ports.

This does not put DPW in a position to act as an agent for al-Qa'ida, delivering weapons of mass destruction to their terror-cell operatives in the U.S., as has been suggested by some print and Internet tabloids. Direct responsibility for port security is shared by the Coast Guard, Customs and Border Protection, and state and local port authorities. Here it should also be noted that port-management priorities are wholly subordinate to port-security priorities. Of course, port-security operations, particularly those pertaining to interdiction of WMD, are augmented by the entire asset base of the U.S. military, its intelligence community and its law enforcement agencies.

Despite the rancor, the U.S. does not outsource the protection of our critical national-security infrastructure.

Approval of the DPW proposal underwent three months of interagency review. According to Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, "This review definitely was not cursory and it definitely was not casual. Rather, it was in depth and comprehensive." This is the same review that management companies based in China, Denmark, Japan, Singapore and Taiwan underwent before being authorized to manage terminals in the port of Los Angeles. We might add, China now manages some terminals on both ends of the Panama Canal.

Foreign investment in the U.S., including port management, is nothing new.

As for the assertion that President George Bush should have known about the proposal, Frances Townsend, his senior advisor for Homeland Security, counters, "Rarely do these [reviews] wind up on the president's desk and that's only after there has been an investigation and there is some disagreement. This didn't get there because none of the agencies who reviewed it had any objection."

The public remonstration in this case is the result of a volatile combination of legitimate sentiments: a fundamental distrust of Islamic countries combined with a concern about the potential for terrorist exploitation of our busy shipping ports.

The distrust is warranted, particularly in the wake of 9/11. Not only were two of the hijackers from the UAE, but 11 of the Saudi hijackers traveled to the U.S. from Dubai, and $250,000 used to bankroll the 9/11 attacks was wired through Dubai banks. There were ties between Islamist emirs in the UAE and Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, and the UAE recognized the Taliban government.

On the latter point, however, our intel sources indicate those ties enabled the CIA to confirm the location of bin Laden twice in 1999, but the Clinton administration declined to eliminate him. Bill Clinton has floated several excuses for why he did not act on this intelligence -- which all sank.

Further, Pakistani nuclear proliferator Abdul Qadeer Khan testified that a UAE company assisted him with the transfer of nuclear technology to Iran. However, as we noted two years ago, our sources indicate that Khan was either a CIA operative or a dupe and that the UAE cooperated fully with surveillance of Khan's contacts in Dubai.

Thus, if we want to punish the UAE because it has airports and banks, or because it has cooperated with CIA clandestine counter-proliferation efforts, so be it. There is, however, no suggestion of evidence that the UAE government had any knowledge, much less complicity, with the al-Qa'ida cell responsible for the 9/11 attacks, or any other attack on U.S. interests or personnel. On the contrary, there is considerable evidence that the UAE, along with Kuwait and now Iraq, is a critical ally in the region.

Indeed, since 9/11 the UAE government has provided significant intelligence and staging support in the war against Jihadistan. They have actively participated in the pursuit of al-Qa'ida terrorists. In 2002, for example, UAE officials arrested and turned over to U.S. officials Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who conspired in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and masterminded the attack on the USS Cole in 2000. In 2004, UAE officials arrested Qari Saifullah Akhtar, who trained thousands of al-Qa'ida operatives around the world. He was returned to U.S. interrogators in Pakistan.

As for Dubai Ports World, it already provides support for U.S. Navy ships in Jebel Ali and Fujairah, which accommodates more U.S. Navy ships than any other international port. DPW is also the primary support contractor for U.S. Air Force assets at Al Dhafra Air Base.

Rising above the din, the real issue is this: America's seaports constitute one of many big holes in our border security, regardless of who manages the terminals. Despite the port security that exists both stateside and in the ports of origin, there is no guarantee that WMD won't be smuggled into the U.S. in one of the thousands of cargo containers that land on our shores each and every day.

As we have noted before, when al-Qa'ida has mated the right nuclear core with the right weapons hardware (something they may have already succeeded in doing), getting that weapon into the U.S. will not be that difficult, regardless of who is managing and securing entry points. The harsh reality is that there simply is no way to secure U.S. borders, with even a modest degree of confidence, against importation of nuclear WMD hardware the size of a footlocker, and a fissile core the size of an orange.

This reality accounts for the Bush Doctrine of Pre-emption -- take the fight to the enemy and endeavor to wage war on their turf, not ours. It is a reality for which pre-emption is our only option -- our only chance of preventing a catastrophic attack on our nation.

This is certainly not to suggest that we adopt the French border-security model -- one in which we throw up our hands and run away. Indeed, we need to be vigilant about territorial security. However, allowing a UAE company to manage some port terminals does not constitute a surrender from such vigilance.

For the public, there may be some psychological solace in the assertion that preventing DPW from managing port terminals is tantamount to securing our destiny -- but it is a false sense of security.

The public confusion, media hysterics and, consequently, opportunistic political posturing and demagoguery have all but completely obscured the facts pertaining to our relationship with the UAE and its shipping conglomerate, DPW. The Democrats have used this issue to leapfrog to the right of Republicans on national security, and some Republicans responded quickly by adopting the same line on DPW. Unfortunately, both are doing so at the peril of our national security.

Not only has President Bush declared, "The UAE has been a valuable partner in fighting the war on terror," but has even threatened to veto any legislation to undo this deal. As he has yet to use his veto for any legislation (to our utter dismay, given some great opportunities), threatening a veto in this case can only mean that the consequences of derailing our relationship with the UAE constitute a grave threat to our national security.

Most likely, a compromise on UAE/DPW between the White House and Republican congressional leaders was brokered prior to public objections from Sen. Frist and House Speaker Dennis Hastert. If that compromise is anything other than a "technical delay" in approving this transaction, we believe U.S. national security will suffer the consequences.

Feel safer now?

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.