Our Ports & Mass Hysteria

Since I really didn’t have much knowledge about this whole port thing (it seems as if EVERYONE is now a expert on port operations…./sarcasm) I wanted to take some time and check it out. What did I find out? Freakin hysteria.

Calm the eff down people.

From the facts I have been able to ascertain, Dubai Ports World (DP World) has made a $6.8 billion bid to buy out P&O, a British company that operates ports along the East coast.

There was one other company trying to buy this company and that was PSA International from Singapore.

Currently there are 3 companies that operate large ports like those in the news, DP World, PSA International and Maersk, a Danish company.

There are NO American companies that operate ports on this scale.

All of America?s ports are currently operated by foreign countries.

Now, lets take a look at the lineup inside the company.

• COO: Mr. Edward Bilkey, US Navy (ret), graduate of Yale and Harvard
• General Counsel: Mr. George Dalton, a graduate of Fordham
• Senior VP Operations: Mr. Joost Kruijning, a native of the Netherlands
• Mr. Matt Leech, graduate of Georgetown
• Senior VP Commercial: Mr. Michael Moore, a man who started in trucking in the US
• CFO: Mr. Vijay Sharma, a native of India.

I’m not too sure but they don’t seem to be a group of fanatical Islamists ready to bring destruction to the US.

But what we do know is that Dubai is an ally. They have allowed us to place our Coast Guard at their ports in the United Arab Emirates so that we could monitor security of ships before they even headed for our shores.

The ports will still be owned by the state in which is resides. The US Coast Guard will still run security at ALL ports. The employees at ALL of these ports will still be the same Americans who are now employed, the very same ones that have to have federal background checks, by law.

The thing that gets me is that a foreign country has been in control of our ports for quite some time, that company being British. Now the UAE is buying that company and now people have a problem with it. I just don’t get it. Any long time readers know damn well that I am pretty wary of anything coming from the Middle East but this sideshow is ludicrous.

Do you really think that all the crap Bush has gone through to protect this country that he would now just throw it out the window? Do any of you realize the same people who were complaining about the NSA wiretaps are now complaining about this? These same people who won’t let us profile Middle Eastern males are now all in favor of rejecting this deal for the ONLY reason being they are Arabs.

Meanwhile the nutty left is smiling at the hysteria because they smell blood in the water.

Cancelling this deal would likely mean the end to basing rights of our troops in UAE, losing an ally in the region in our War on Terror. We have had troops there since Desert Storm and those bases are quite important to us if and when we need to do something about Iran or any other hot spot in the region.

Spook86 makes a great point:

Overturning the port deal could also create other problems in the Persian Gulf. Cancellation of the contract would be viewed as an insult to the UAE and its leadership; regional critics would accuse the U.S. of hypocrisy–anxious to utilize UAE bases and sell its defense hardware to the Dubai, but unwilling to let a UAE company manage operations in U.S. ports. Such criticism, in turn, would cause other Gulf allies to question Washington’s long-term committment to the region, and make it more difficult for the U.S. to sustain basing rights in such countries as Qatar and Bahrain. In fact, the loss of basing in the UAE would probably force the U.S. to approach Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain to take in more U.S. personnel, a potentially tough sell in the wake of a cancelled port deal between the Dubai and Washington. U.S. basing in Qatar is viewed as extremely critical, since the Gulf nation is home to a multi-billion dollar Air Operations Center, that is used to direct combat operations in the region.

The UAE opened up ALL their financial records to us after 9/11 so we could track the money and they allow our military there. This isn’t Pakistan or Yemen, this is an important ally that we should not be throwing away in a dangerous group hysteria.

Cancelling this deal makes no sense since it will do NOTHING to our port operations. The same people who are working there now will be working there later.

People are asking “what if the UAE puts some al-qaeda agents onto our ports?”

Fair question. My answer would be that the British have quite a problem with fanatic jihadists at the moment, have had it for some time. What is the guarantee that none of these bad guys would get here via Britian?

Either we trust our Coast Guard and our Federal background checks or we should just pack it all in. Do you think that once they own this company that all of a sudden the Coast Guard is going to unclassify information for them?

The only thing that is going to change here people is the pink slip.

Get a grip.

UPDATE

This is some funny stuff from The Corner:

Here’s a list of acquisitions of Western assets by Middle Eastern countries.

Here are a few example…The UAE is Chrysler’s third largest shareholder. … Also, a Dubai based private Equity firm owns Madame Tussauds. Can you hide a dirty bomb in a wax statue? Has anyone checked the Hillary Clinton statue that was just shipped to NYC from London!

This from Jonah Goldberg:

All this in response to a largely paper transaction (longshoremen will keep their jobs, the coast guard will still handle security, etc etc) between a British-owned and Arab-owned firm. In fact, it doesn’t seem overwhelmingly obvious to me that Jihadis would have a much harder time infiltrating a British firm than an Arab one. But mostly, I’m skeptical that this is the security disaster everyone claims because domestic national security is one of the few areas where I really do trust this White House to err on the side of safety. For five years, liberals have been saying that Bush is an obsessed madman when it comes to the terror threat. And for five years conservatives have been saying, trust him. Suddenly, all of that goes out the window.

UPDATE II

Some interesting facts in this article that I bet not too many people are aware of:

The White House appeared stunned by the uprising, over a transaction that they considered routine ? especially since China’s biggest state-owned shipper runs major ports in the United States, as do a host of other foreign companies. Mr. Bush’s aides defended their decision, saying the company, Dubai Ports World, which is owned by the United Arab Emirates, would have no control over security issues….

But [the] firestorm of opposition to the deal drew a similarly intense expression of befuddlement by shipping industry and port experts.

The shipping business, they said, went global more than a decade ago and across the United States, foreign-based companies already control more than 30 percent of the port terminals.

That inventory includes APL Limited, which is controlled by the government of Singapore, and which operates terminals in Los Angeles, Oakland, Seattle, and Dutch Harbor, Alaska. Globally, 24 of the top 25 ship terminal operators are foreign-based, meaning most of the containers sent to the United States leave terminals around the world that are operated by foreign government or foreign-based companies.

“This kind of reaction is totally illogical,” said Philip Damas, research director at Drewry Shipping Consultants of London. “The location of the headquarters of a company in the age of globalism is irrelevant.”

Big Lizards has this to say:

Singapore, of course, is also a country with a large and radicalized Moslem population that is infiltrated — inundated is the better word — by international terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda and their affilliate, Jemaah Islamiah; yet no one is up in arms about APL operating American ports. What is the difference?

The danger to the shrillest voices opposing this deal (especially the Democrats) is that they never objected when other dicey foreign countries operated the ports… but when an Arab country, even a friendly one that has been a huge help to us in the war, wants to do the same thing, the Democrats become hysterical. It smacks of racism — the idea that it doesn’t matter what an Arab thinks or even how hard he has fought on our side in the war against jihadism… his ethnicity alone makes him suspect. After flinging such charges at Republicans for so many decades, Democrats are very edgy about such accusations sticking to them.

Then, as usual, Dafydd has a solution:

Neither side has noticed that there is a fairly obvious compromise staring us in the face, which Big Lizards believes would resolve the very real security concerns without losing the equally real security benefits from this deal.

Both the actual national-security risk and also the political danger come, not from the ownership of the company, but rather from the day to day management — the actual control of operations. The emirate wants the profits that accrue from ownership; rational Americans want to see control of the port, even the cargo areas, in friendly hands, preferably American.

This suggests a workable compromise: an American company should be chartered — American owned and American managed — that is a wholly owned but independently operated subsidiary of Dubai Ports… call it American Port Services, Inc., or somesuch name that makes clear the nationality; and then let all the actual management of the ports be handled by the American APS, not by Dubai Ports.

This will add a middle corporate layer, so Dubai Ports won’t make quite as much of a profit as they would running the ports directly; but on the other hand, it’s still better than no profit at all. And Americans can be assured that rather than shifting from British control to UAE control, we will in fact have shifted from British to American control of port operations.

This resolves both the security and the political problems

As Bill and Ted would say….Excellent!

Kathryn Jean Lopez:

I 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.

Other’s Blogging:

• The Strata-Sphere
• The Jawa Report
• Hyscience
• The Counterterrorism Blog
• Blogs For Bush
• Debbie Schlussel
• The Irate Nation
• GayPatriot
• QuickRob
• A Certain Slant Of Light
• Penraker
• Alpine Summit

These same people who won?t let us profile Middle Eastern males are now all in favor of rejecting this deal for the ONLY reason being they are Arabs.

Curt

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