After years of beating Democrats over the head on issues of Security, the Republicans are getting a taste of their own bludgeoning. As of this writing, the purchase of operations at six major US ports has been officially killed. The government of Dubai has said that they will turn over all US Port operations included in the purchase of P&O Ports to a "United States entity." Ironically, I don't necessarily agree with it.
As I said before, I think the sinking of this deal is not a good idea. It doesn't make sense economically, and security really isn't the issue. But, as we all know, perception doesn't often equate with reality. Democrats have found an issue they can hammer the Republicans on. Sure, getting the measure killed in committee by an overwhelming margin blunts the impact a bit, but the baseline sentiment, that the current Administration has gone off the reservation on their core issue, remains. The Republicans should brace themselves. I don't blame the Democrats and Republicans should have seen this coming.
Before anyone accuses the Democrats, however, of getting a bit whacky, as the New York Times and Boston Globe the other day apparently did, the junior senators from New York and New Jersey introduced a bill - S.2334 - to ban all companies owned by foreign governments from controlling port operations in the United States. This is a sensible measure, and would not affect operations at most ports in the country, some 80% of which are controlled by foreign entities.
As mentioned in a previous post, however, whoever controls the ports does not control security at said ports. This still rests with the Department of Homeland Security, which currently is able to inspect only one in every twenty shipping containers, and which often relies on the inspection at the other end to ferret out suspicious cargo. For the obvious reasons of manpower and budget, priority is given to those that originate in suspect locales, as well as any that raise a red flag for one reason or another. Your average container originating in, say, London or Tokyo, is not going to be inspected. So to say that ownership of terminal operations by Dubai Ports World would undercut security is not terribly accurate. If the bad guys wanted smuggle something in, they could easily do so in any number of overseas ports, using any number of shipping companies.
No, perception doesn't often equate with reality.
11 March 2006
07 March 2006
Tempest in a Seaport
This may come as a shock to you, but politicians are opportunists. I'll give you a moment to pick yourself up off the floor.
This revelation has been demonstrated with amazing clarity by members of both political parties in the matter of DPW, as in Dubai Ports World (not the Department of Public Works), the firm that purchased P&O, the British company that currently operates terminals at six major ports, including Newark, New York, and Miami. Lawmakers of both stripes were getting run over in the rush to the microphone to decry this deal.
Of course, that's an easy thing to do if you are a Democrat. It takes no imagination to see that this would be an issue you could grab and run with all the way to November's mid-term elections, using it as political cover in debates on national security.
Republicans, however, seem bent on using this as a different kind of cover, mostly to shield themselves from the political vegetables being hurled by a disaffected electorate at them while on the stage. Even House speaker Dennis Hastert and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist came out and said, "hold on there a moment, George." Who would have thought that Frist, Hastert, and Hillary Clinton would be on the same side in an issue?
Well, Hastert and Clinton, anyway. Less than a week after he got up there and expressed righteous indignation that the Bush administration was turning over control of these ports (and lesser operations at sixteen other facilities) to a foreign company - who did he think the owners of P&O were before, I'd like to know - Frist said he felt "more comfortable with the deal" after the Administration agreed to a 45-day review. This guy makes better waffles than John Kerry.
But now for the other shoe: opposing this deal may actually be a bad thing. I'll wait another moment while you recover from that revelation.
Don't get me wrong. I think that this whole fiasco is littered with wrong turns and faux pas. On the face of it, it's a horrible public relations nightmare: operations at major ports will be in the hands of a company owned by the United Arab Emirates, where two of the 19 attackers on September 11th were from, and where money connected to the 9/11 attacks was laundered through. At the very least someone in the current Administration should have had the brains to recognize that this required a public relations campaign well in advance of any sale.
But wait, it gets better. Instead of the standard 45-day review of sales of this nature by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which is required when any of the 12 members express national security concerns - in this case, raised at least by the US Coast Guard, part of the Department of Homeland Security - it only gets a 30-day look-see.
Finally, Scott McClellan admits that the President was not aware of the transaction until after the brouhaha hit the papers. This is an Administration that is becoming increasingly tone-deaf politically.
This does not obscure the fact that sinking this deal would pose a bigger problem than allowing it to proceed. For one thing, it sends the absolutely wrong message to the moderates of the Arab world that we will cave to political pressure (but the French already knew that). If there is ever a section of the world we need friends, its the Middle East.
It would also discourage other nations from investing in the United States if such investment were to meet with a xenophobic attitude. What most people fail to realize is that some 90 ports nationwide are run in whole or in part by foreign companies. That is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg when you consider other foreign investment in the United States.
Finally, people are apparently misled into believing that this sale would immediately undercut national security by allowing DPW to control what is brought into the United States. This is patently ludicrous. In essence this deal would put DPW into the role of logistics management - in other words, responsible for efficiently moving the goods and products into and out of the ports - and not arbiter of what comes in and what doesn't. Security is still the purview of Homeland Security, and the real scandal is how poorly it is doing that job. If the terrorists wanted to move a dirty bomb or some other horrific weapon into the United States, they would have done it by now. DPW in charge doesn't give them an in, just a smoother ride around where it goes.
This revelation has been demonstrated with amazing clarity by members of both political parties in the matter of DPW, as in Dubai Ports World (not the Department of Public Works), the firm that purchased P&O, the British company that currently operates terminals at six major ports, including Newark, New York, and Miami. Lawmakers of both stripes were getting run over in the rush to the microphone to decry this deal.
Of course, that's an easy thing to do if you are a Democrat. It takes no imagination to see that this would be an issue you could grab and run with all the way to November's mid-term elections, using it as political cover in debates on national security.
Republicans, however, seem bent on using this as a different kind of cover, mostly to shield themselves from the political vegetables being hurled by a disaffected electorate at them while on the stage. Even House speaker Dennis Hastert and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist came out and said, "hold on there a moment, George." Who would have thought that Frist, Hastert, and Hillary Clinton would be on the same side in an issue?
Well, Hastert and Clinton, anyway. Less than a week after he got up there and expressed righteous indignation that the Bush administration was turning over control of these ports (and lesser operations at sixteen other facilities) to a foreign company - who did he think the owners of P&O were before, I'd like to know - Frist said he felt "more comfortable with the deal" after the Administration agreed to a 45-day review. This guy makes better waffles than John Kerry.
But now for the other shoe: opposing this deal may actually be a bad thing. I'll wait another moment while you recover from that revelation.
Don't get me wrong. I think that this whole fiasco is littered with wrong turns and faux pas. On the face of it, it's a horrible public relations nightmare: operations at major ports will be in the hands of a company owned by the United Arab Emirates, where two of the 19 attackers on September 11th were from, and where money connected to the 9/11 attacks was laundered through. At the very least someone in the current Administration should have had the brains to recognize that this required a public relations campaign well in advance of any sale.
But wait, it gets better. Instead of the standard 45-day review of sales of this nature by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which is required when any of the 12 members express national security concerns - in this case, raised at least by the US Coast Guard, part of the Department of Homeland Security - it only gets a 30-day look-see.
Finally, Scott McClellan admits that the President was not aware of the transaction until after the brouhaha hit the papers. This is an Administration that is becoming increasingly tone-deaf politically.
This does not obscure the fact that sinking this deal would pose a bigger problem than allowing it to proceed. For one thing, it sends the absolutely wrong message to the moderates of the Arab world that we will cave to political pressure (but the French already knew that). If there is ever a section of the world we need friends, its the Middle East.
It would also discourage other nations from investing in the United States if such investment were to meet with a xenophobic attitude. What most people fail to realize is that some 90 ports nationwide are run in whole or in part by foreign companies. That is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg when you consider other foreign investment in the United States.
Finally, people are apparently misled into believing that this sale would immediately undercut national security by allowing DPW to control what is brought into the United States. This is patently ludicrous. In essence this deal would put DPW into the role of logistics management - in other words, responsible for efficiently moving the goods and products into and out of the ports - and not arbiter of what comes in and what doesn't. Security is still the purview of Homeland Security, and the real scandal is how poorly it is doing that job. If the terrorists wanted to move a dirty bomb or some other horrific weapon into the United States, they would have done it by now. DPW in charge doesn't give them an in, just a smoother ride around where it goes.
No. If the terrorists are coming they are already here. Inspection of only one in twenty containers by the Department of Homeland Security is seeing to that.
06 March 2006
FEMA
FEMA. A four-letter acronym, not a four letter word, at least not to me.
Recently there have been numerous calls for some sort of change at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, ranging from moving it around within the Department of Homeland Security, taking it out of Homeland Security, or disbanding it entirely then rebuilding it, as Senator Lieberman of Connecticut has proposed. It is obvious that a change is necessary, but disbanding it would be a mistake, and thinking that one could rebuild it before the upcoming hurricane season a bigger one. Rebuild it, restructure it, rework it, yes. Disband, then do those things? Stupid.
FEMA must deal with more than just hurricanes (the key letters here being "E" and "M"), and rushing the job in order to meet some semi-arbitrary calendar date is an invitation for further disaster. The government is incapable of breaking anything down and reconstructing it without the requisite commissions, panels and blue-ribbon task forces, not to mention the fact that the Democrats would be in no mood to accomodate anything that this President would want, no matter how worthy.
What are the possible solutions? Here are a couple:
-- Move FEMA out of the Department of Homeland Security: DHS is a majority law-enforcement bureacracy. FEMA responds to disasters and tries to preserve life. Not diametric opposites, but not complimentary, either.
-- Remove all political appointees without Emergency Management experience: FEMA, under the Bush administration, has become a dumping ground for people who deserve a reward for something they did for the President. Every president does the same thing, but FEMA is not the place to do it. They don't stand for such things at the Pentagon, and FEMA shouldn't either.The appointment of R. David Paulison is a good start.
On September 11th, the City of New York did a fantastic job, better than anything FEMA could have done, and that was a disaster nobody saw coming (well...no that's a topic for another post). FEMA's role should be to manage, not participate.
Congress' role should be to get out of the way.
04 March 2006
Welcome.
Welcome to The View From The Ground, a new blog that (I hope) will be a repository of semi-regular postings from the view of those of us who have the "boots on the ground." Since my background is in Emergency Services, it may take on something of a slant in that direction, but I hope to get views from people outside the industry, as well.
This will be open to thoughts on the world at large. As the guy who runs this blog, and is ultimately responsible for its content, I reserve the right to edit comments containing inflammatory language and senseless "flaming" of other posters. I am not necessarily going to edit out all the four-letter words. But a post that contains mostly four-letter words and not much else will probably get axed.
'Nuff said from me.
This will be open to thoughts on the world at large. As the guy who runs this blog, and is ultimately responsible for its content, I reserve the right to edit comments containing inflammatory language and senseless "flaming" of other posters. I am not necessarily going to edit out all the four-letter words. But a post that contains mostly four-letter words and not much else will probably get axed.
'Nuff said from me.
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