Dan

Calabrese

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March 1, 2006

Port Imbroglio: Mouths in Drive, Brains in Park

Throughout our storied history, no topic has captured the fancy of Americans far and wide like the intricacies of commercial port operations.

So when apparatchiks within the Bush Administration put together a secret deal to turn over America’s port security to allies of Osama Bin Laden, it was the expertise of the American people on commercial port operations – with heroic leadership by our representative commercial port operations experts in Congress – that saved the day.

In our current era of The War on W, it’s hard to keep up with the scandal-of-the-week pace of the news. But if a supposed outrage has unraveled faster than the Dubai Ports World imbroglio, it’s hard to think of it. The story moved in a manner similar to a 24 episode, except that this is Washington, so it took a week.

Let’s re-set the storyline from the first day.  Bush Outsourcing Port Security to the Terrorist-Aligned United Arab Emirates!

Oh. That sounds bad. Surely Bush apologists can’t find a way to defend this. Democrats and Republicans alike rise up in Congress, including Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, citing Bush’s poor poll numbers, er, national security concerns, to stop the deal.

Storyline Day Two: What? The Deal Isn’t For the Murderous UAE Brutes to Run Security?

Oh. Small detail. Dubai Ports World, which is owned by the government of the UAE, is merely buying the British-owned company that has run these six East Coast ports for some time now, and all they run is commercial operations. Loading and unloading containers. Stuff like that. The Coast Guard has always run security, and will still do so. Congressional hyperventilators respond: “Oh, yeah, well, we knew that.”

Meanwhile, Bush isn’t backing down. In fact, Bush says that if Congress tries to pass legislation stopping the deal to let terrorists run port security, he will veto it.

Veto it? Bush doesn’t veto anything. Bush wouldn’t veto a bill selling the Earth to Jupiter. What’s going on here?

Storyline Day Three: Former CIA Official Reveals UAE Had Ties to Bin Laden!

Supposedly Bin Laden was a VIP guest of the UAE at some point in 1998, or so says a former CIA official who wrote a book – and everyone knows that anything someone from the CIA ever said was accurate. Just ask any Democrat.

But even if this occurred, the behavior of the UAE post-9/11 is a different story entirely. They were one of the first nations to sign up for the Bush Administration’s Container Security Initiative, which means they have been helping us inspect containers for four years now. They have also given us a wealth of intelligence to help us stop terrorist attacks. They have also allowed us to use their military bases to initiate anti-terror operations.

Yes, four of the 9/11 hijackers came from the UAE. We’ve heard about that a lot the past week. And yes, throughout its history the UAE has not exactly had its hands 100 percent clean on the matter of terrorism. And yes, the UAE still refuses to recognize Israel. That is regrettable, but if we held every potential ally in the War on Terror to that standard, we would have Egypt and Turkey on our side – and 24 hostile regimes trying to find ways to ship crates of anthrax through Baltimore.

A funny thing happened when President Bush said, “You are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” No small number of nations figured out that there were heretofore unappreciated consequences to being somewhat “with the terrorists.” And their stance changed.

Storyline Day Four: Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo Says Fer’ners Shouldn’t Run Our Ports!

In fairness to the xenophobic Tancredo, who doesn’t think foreigners should do anything but leave, he has lots of company. One problem, however. Hardly any American companies are even in this business anymore, mainly because of the high cost of union-affiliated labor, which might explain why the ports were overrun by Teamster pickets on Day Five. Speaking of which . . .

Storyline Day Five: It was a secret deal!

Ah yes. When all else fails, fall back on the trope of the secretive Bush Administration. They were so secretive about this that they issued a press release about it in November 2005. But there wasn’t time for outrage about it then, because we were all busy with warrantless wiretapping, or “torture,” or something. It’s so hard to keep track these days.

At any rate, irresponsible Democrats and cowardly Republicans, having been caught with their mouths in drive and their brains in park, are now reduced to demanding a 45-day review (or “investigation” as Charles Schumer likes to call it) so they can save face and make it look like their complaints were about something.

But the more the story unravels, the more some folks fail to get the message. On the morning of Day Six, one the local yokels who delivers radio news in my town led a story as follows: “Well, the president of the United States has a serious credibility problem on the issue of letting the United Arab Emirates run our port security. It seems there’s hardly anyone who doesn’t think this is bad for the U.S.”

Huh. Well, some storylines are amazingly resilient, even after they unravel inside of a week. In an increasingly unserious nation, it seems some people are willing to believe just about anything, while a dwindling few try to win a decidedly serious battle on their behalf.

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