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.

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.