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| Think at your own risk. |
| Tuesday, February 21, 2006 |
| Pimp my ports |
It has happened again. George W. Bush has united left and right, Democrats and Republicans, in this country against one of his decisions. The first time it happened was with the choice of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court, a job for which she was about as qualified as Bush's twin daughters. Now, it's the decision of a federal board overseen by the Treasury Department, to OK a deal that would effectively outsource the operation of six major U.S. seaports: New York, New Jersey, Philly, Miami, Baltimore and New Orleans, to a state-owned company in the United Arab Emirates.
Not that there's anything inherently wrong with people from the United Arab Emirates, but can you imagine how Tony Blair would look if, say, his government authorized all London tube operations to be outsourced to the government of Pakistan, or how Spaniards might feel if suddenly their train operations were in the hands of Morocco? This master stroke is the textbook example of what happens when bad atmospherics meets even worse public policy.
Now granted, for the last five years, the ports have been run by Peninsular Ports and Oriental, a British outfit. But Peninsular is being bought not by a private firm -- but by a company (Dubai Ports World) owned and operated by the government of one of just three countries to recognize the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan before 9/11 -- the other two also being FOB's (friends of Bush): Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. How politically tone deaf -- and homeland security unconscious (or at this point is it literally unconscious) -- do you have to be to allow such a thing to happen on your watch??? The risks to U.S. security are simply too great, even if you could fix the P.R. -- which you can't...
So today was the day the Bushies got shellacked across the ideological board. Jack Cafferty on CNN's "Situation Room" on Monday declared that the "lunatics have taken over the assylum." Lou Dobbs' panel of conservatives -- Bill Schneider, Ed Rollins and a reporter from the New York Daily News, couldn't scare up a word of support for the administration, instead collectively declaring the Bush presidency dead in the water on the one issue they still had going for them: security. In fact, Bush lost the Dobbs crowd a long time ago on the biggest sleeper issue in American politics today: border security. And he has risked being thrown completely off the conservative island if he doesn't beat that ten-day window to intervene with the Committee on Foreign Investment, which ultimately answers to the White House, and scuttle this deal.
(Sidebar: Someone please let Karl know that having the prez cozy up to Vicente Fox for a "border security deal" isn't a good P.R. move at this point, either...)
Prediction: Karl Rove will sit Bush down and explain to him that when Michael Chertoff is out defending the policy by saying we need to balance critical security with the need to have a robust global trading environment, it's time to pull the plug. I give Bush until Friday to reverse this decision. As Cafferty put it:
Since 9/11, the priority number one has been to protect this country from another terrorist attack. President Bush rode our fear of that very thing to a second term in office. The War in Iraq is advertised as part of the War on Terror. A half a trillion dollars and 2300 dead Americans soldiers, so that we can quote “fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here”. But what about over here? That's the rant. And now the headlines.
Two GOP governors have joined Democratic mayors in Baltimore and Philly and Democratic and GOP lawmakers on the Hill (including Evan Bayh, Hillary Clinton, Charles Schumer, Lindsay Graham and Peter King, to show you how eclectic this bunch is) in opposing the UAE port deal... In fact, Maryland Gov. Bob Ehrlich is seeking legal maneuvers to kill it entirely.
Chuck Schumer says he'd even prefer Halliburton to run the ports over the UAE company...
By the way this deal would also allow theh UAE to control shipments of military equipment to the United States Army...
Also via Michelle Malkin, Frank Gaffney details the Army stevedoring and other bad news:
Since a column raising an alarm about CFIUS' decision appeared in this space last week, three new factors have come to light that compound the strategic folly of the UAE deal:
# First, in addition to the six affected ports mentioned above, two others would also have part of their operations managed by DP World -- on behalf of none other than the U.S. Army. Under a newly extended contract, the owner of P and O will manage the movement of heavy armor, helicopters and other military materiel through the Texas seaports of Beaumont and Corpus Christie. How much would our enemies like to be able to sabotage such shipments?
# Second, while advocates of the stealthy CFIUS decision-making process point to the involvement of the Defense Department in its DP World decision, it is unclear at what level this bizarre proposition was reviewed in the Pentagon. Many top jobs remain unfilled by presidential appointees. Past experience suggests the job may have fallen to lower-level career bureaucrats who give priority to maintaining good relations with their foreign "clients," like the UAE.
# Then, there is the matter of financing the DP World takeover of Peninsula and Oriental. The UAE evidently intends to raise nearly all of the $6.8 billion price for P and O on international capital markets. It must be asked: Who will the foreign investors be, and might they have malign intentions towards the U.S.? If American sources of capital are being sought, will the possible danger this transaction may create for this country be properly disclosed? For that matter, will the underwriters, Barclays and Deutchebank, reveal to prospective funders the real risk that the deal will ultimately fall through? ...
...Call it a Harriet Meirs moment. Politics being the art of the possible, it is time to recognize that the Dubai Ports World deal is neither strategically sensible nor politically doable. It is time to pull the plug, and to reform the secretive interagency CFIUS process that allowed this fiasco in the first place. BTW it seems Ms. Malkin's blog is now being blocked in the UAE. Yep, sounds like just the kind of country we want to be doing port business with...
...just as we should be just itching to turn six -- actually eight -- of our major ports over to a country believed to be a major transfer point for nuclear material peddled by notorious Pakistani proliferator A.Q. Khan -- the "father" of the near-east bomb. Nice.
Cafferty is right. Lunatics, welcome to as
ylum management.
For more news you can use: The Port Security, Maritime Security, and Homeland Security Blog
Oh, and slightly off topic, but a chance to catch up with Riehl, guess who owns a big, healthy chunk of Fox News???
Previous:
Tags: Outsourcing, War on terror, Bush, Middle East, UAE, Ports |
posted by JReid @ 12:45 AM   |
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