Published Feb 23, 2006
Apparently, we’re all supposed to get our panties (or, I guess, in my case, boxer briefs) in a twist because a bunch of our ports are going to be run by people from Dubai. Apparently, said people from Dubai will, with malice aforethought, leave our ports open to terrorist attack. There is no specific rationale — apart from a general and vague divergence of overall goals — presented for why destroying our port infrastructure will be the goal of these same ports’ new managers, but this viewpoint is certainly widely accepted as reasonable. But it’s not reasonable; it’s racist.
There is one and only one reason we’re worried about having owners from Dubai, and that’s because they’re Arab. We wouldn’t be hearing this about the Danes or the South Africans or the Brazilians. The United Arab Emirates have been our allies for decades now, reliable providers of oil, and bulwarks first against the Iraqis (who used to be socialist Arab nationalists, and thus our enemies), and now the Iranians. The Emirates have advanced infrastructure and a great airline. What’s the possible problem? These people sound like the Swiss, or the Thais, not like crazed suicide bombers; but that’s what we’re assuming of them.
It’s simply reprehensible that, in this day and age, our politicians would feel comfortable voicing such a knee-jerk, racist reaction publicly. It’s even worse that nobody’s calling them on it. Worst of all, however, is the couching of such talk in the language of national security. It’s not as if we’ve deployed any meaningful national security around our ports; speaking from such a position of hipocrisy, it would be far better if our politicians would say “We don’t want these people around our ports because they’re Arabs, and Arabs are a bunch of suicide-bombing pathological terrorists. Go away Arabs.”
If there are real reasons to object to the port deal, then let’s do it; but let’s not make a stink because we don’t like the skin tone or religion of the people who will run our ports now. As much as it pains me, viscerally and in my soul, to say this, I think the administration has done nothing wrong here. There was no reason the President needed to know about this before it happened, and, if he did know about it, I’d like to applaud him for being open-minded enough that he can be bought by anyone, regardless of color or creed.
Let me say up-front that I am not actually opposed to the port deal — from what I’ve read, it sounds like getting the Dubai folks (or better, the Singapore folks) to run our ports, would be a grand idea.
However, I think the notion that the only reason to oppose the deal is racism, is wrong — it’s a vicious lie being promulgated by the administration, and I’m frankly surprised you’d fall for it.
First off, the CFIUS (Committee on Foreign Investment in the US) procedure for evaluating this type of investment was not followed. In any case where security might possibly be implicated, there’s supposed to be a 45-day security review, on top of the 30-day economic review. While it is my impression that this 45-day security review would probably result in a thumbs-up, I do not think my personal impression is enough reason to do away with the review!
Second, and more importantly, I’m sure there are some people in the UAE who wish us ill — banks in the UAE were implicated in financing 9/11. With our independent port security only scanning 5% of containers, I do not think it’s unreasonable to consider the people who control logistics — tracking what’s inside the containers — a potential security risk. The actual owners and management do not have to wish us ill in order for a small cadre of employees, with the ability to mislabel containers (which will subsequently get no scrutiny) to do us tremendous harm.
While I think the level of the reaction has been unwarranted, I think the administration is, as usual, wrong. It bothers me that “my side” is wrong too, but, at least among the group I most agree with (including my congressperson) they are at least less wrong than Bush.
Well, in my own defense, I wrote ths before the administration had gotten its act together enough to play the racism card, so any wrongness should be attributed to my faulty thought processes alone and not to my vulnerability to propaganda.
That said, in the first few days after the announcement of the deal — when this entry was written — all I heard, frankly, was how we should fear terrorism because the ports were going to be run by Arabs. Since then, opposition, especially on the left, has become more reasoned. Things like CFIUS review and the overall question of whether or not we should outsource critical infrastructure tasks — these are valid reasons that we should reconsider the deal at hand. But we still hear the message, explicitly from some directions and implicitly in other cases (and not at all in many, if not most, cases), that Arabs are terrorists and will cause our ports to be blown up. That’s a disturbing statement to hear in this day and age, although I really don’t know why hearing it surprises me.