By John Tabin on 3.10.06 @ 12:09AM
Nearly everyone involved in the ports fiasco has acquitted himself terribly.
To appreciate fully how terribly nearly everyone involved in the
ports fiasco has acquitted himself, one must start from the
beginning. In October of last year, the state-run United Arab
Emirates firm Dubai Ports World approached the U.S. Treasury
Department about plans to purchase Peninsular and Oriental Steam
Navigation Co., the British firm that among other things runs six
major U.S. ports. Over the next few months, the deal was approved
by numerous executive agencies, mainly through the Treasury-led
Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. The
Departments of Energy, Transportation, and Homeland Security were
all in the loop, along with the intelligence community. All okayed
the deal.
The deal would allow DP World access to sensitive security
information at U.S. ports. It's hardly a stretch to suggest that a
UAE company might have employees who, either out of ideological
sympathy or simple corruption, might pass such sensitive
information on to terrorists. That risk might be outweighed by the
benefits of strengthening the U.S.-UAE alliance; the Emirates have
been very helpful in the war on terror. But that's a policy
decision too important to be left to the bureaucrats and
spooks.
It is incredible that the White House was by all appearances
totally blindsided when the deal was reported by the Associated
Press on February 11. President Bush was reportedly not briefed on
it until February 16, by which time Chuck Schumer and other
opportunists had already run for the cameras. Bush himself didn't
mount a defense until February 21, one day after Senate Majority
Leader Bill Frist proposed legislation to delay the deal. Bush
threatened to veto any congressional move to scotch the deal -- and
was roundly rebuked in the polls. The February 24 Rasmussen survey, the first to
take the temperature on the ports deal, showed overwhelming
opposition -- and most startlingly, a Democratic advantage on
national security.
On Wednesday the House Appropriations Committee voted 62-2 to
block the ports deal. Frist and House Speaker Dennis Hastert met
with Bush yesterday morning and told him that he faced veto-proof
opposition to the deal on Capitol Hill, and DP World announced
plans to divest operations of its U.S. ports to an American entity
to be named later. Meanwhile, they're seething in Dubai, and
whispering about retaliation. "[Members of the UAE royal family
are] saying, 'All we've done for you guys, all our purchases, we'll
stop it, we'll just yank it,'" a source told The Hill yesterday:
Retaliation from the emirate could come against
lucrative deals with aircraft maker Boeing and by curtailing the
docking of hundreds of American ships, including U.S. Navy ships,
each year at its port in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the source
added.
We must hope the UAE doesn't follow through with such retaliation,
particularly the bit about banishing our Navy. But it's clear that
while approving the deal in the first place may have been a
mistake, killing it at this stage may be even worse. Plenty of
people in Washington should be ashamed.
topics:
Transportation, Energy
