Like Jonah Goldberg, writing in the LATimes, nothing makes me quite so nervous as bipartisan consensus. I assume it means that everybody is missing something. Goldberg notes that both parties have swung around like weather vanes in a cyclone.
For five years, Republicans have chanted "trust the president" on national security. They even won elections on the issue. For nearly five years, Democrats have said President Bush should use more carrots and fewer sticks in his diplomacy in the Muslim world. They argued that we need to reward our allies with trade and trust (except when we actually did it in places such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia). Liberals lectured that equating "Muslim" or "Arab" and "terrorist" is not only bigoted but counterproductive, in that it will feed the "root causes" of terrorism.
But suddenly, virtually all leading Republicans and Democrats — with the laudable exception of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) — now argue that Bush can't be trusted on national security, that our Arab ally the UAE should go suck eggs and that racial profiling of foreign firms is just fine. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) now even thinks Halliburton should run the ports. And Jimmy Carter is backing the White House. At this rate, Barbra Streisand will soon be holding benefit concerts for Pennsylvania's conservative Sen. Rick Santorum.
Both parties have suddenly discovered that the U.S. is part of a global economy, and that foreigners with strange names are actually doing business on the sacred soil of the homeland. Its not that the critics don't have a point. James Pinkerton in Newsday, has this:
Let's begin by noting that the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates are different countries, with different histories. . . . [I]n the past century the U.S. and U.K. were shoulder to shoulder in two hot wars and one cold war. Few Americans can forget the oratory of Winston Churchill, who rallied English speakers against Nazism. . . .
Now to the United Arab Emirates. First and most obviously, it's Arab. That's not a statement of racism; that's an observation about ethnicity and the culture that comes with it. Virtually all UAE-ers are Arab Muslims, and many probably watch Al-Jazeera TV, which serves up a steady diet of anti-American "newsaganda." That's the reality of multiculturalism on a planetary scale: People in different countries are different, see things differently, react to things differently. That's why consumers in the UAE eagerly joined in the boycott of Danish goods in the wake of the Muhammad cartoon controversy; The Associated Press reports that Denmark's exports to the UAE are down 95 percent.
I'll see one Jim and raise another, James Glassman writing at Tech Central Station:
Dubai -- I don't have to tell you -- is an Arab nation. Yes, two of the 9/11 hijackers were citizens of the UAE, but, then again, as Ivan Eland of the Independent Institute notes, Richard Reid, the attempted "shoe bomber," was a British citizen, and Jose Padilla, among others, is an American citizen (as was Timothy McVeigh). The UAE has been a staunch ally in the war on terror, training security forces in Iraq and helping to cut off the flow of money to al Qaeda.
Isn't this precisely what the United States preaches? Don't we want places like Dubai to fight terror and to grow, to invest, to buy, to trade, to adopt Western commercial practices, to expose themselves to the rest of the world and thus become tolerant and moderate?
Like Tevye, in Fiddler on the Roof, I think everyone is right. There are obvious reasons to be nervous about an Arab firm controling some of America's ports. But killing the deal now, simply because the firm is Arab, beards a valuable ally and sends the message that Arab countries can't really be our friends.
Congress should hold hearings-that's its job. But the questions are complicated. Congress might require that only American owned firms control the ports. But defining ownership will not be easy. Today's multinationals are mongrels, and you would want to know if a U.S. based firm is not merely contracting work out to foreign controlled enterprises. Riskier still would be a rule that only firms from trustworthy nations should be allowed to move containers. That would seem to be Pinkerton's position. But how English does the firm have to be? Will we count investors from the UAE, or southeast Asia, as signs of cultural impurity? It also makes me nervous that the "America-only" rule would certainly be, among other things, a form of protectionism for union workers. Glassman is right about one thing. We don't want to discourage world trade, which is the goose that lays a ton of golden eggs daily.
The real issue is not who moves containers, but who controls security. That would continue to be the Department of Homeland Security. The real question is how comprehensive that control is. Clark Kent Ervin, former Inspector General of Homeland Security, comes out of the phone booth to raise doubts, in the New York Times:
It is true that at the ports run by the Dubai company, Customs officers would continue to do any inspection of cargo containers and the Coast Guard would remain "in charge" of port security. But, again, very few cargo inspections are conducted. And the Coast Guard merely sets standards that ports are to follow and reviews their security plans. Meeting those standards each day is the job of the port operators: they are responsible for hiring security officers, guarding the cargo and overseeing its unloading.
The problem here has nothing to do with ownership of the towers that direct cargo on and off ships. It is a matter of how thoroughly we can or ought to control shipping into the U.S. A city like Washington D.C. employs thousands of people to inspect the bags of people entering public buildings. Thousands are employed screening passengers boarding airplanes. Maybe Homeland Security should employ thousands more than they do now to inspect cargo at our ports. But that is an awesome task, and I am not sure that the ports can ever be adequately inspected.
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