Another Update on Ports Security

As the dust settles a bit around the furor over the takeover of the management of six major U.S. ports by the government of the United Arab Emirates, several things are clear:

* A fair number of smart people agree with me that the issue is not the deal itself, although it raises a bunch of questions on its own.

President Bush's veto threat is idiotic -- and has only served to further anger his fellow Republicans -- but he's probably right on this one.

* The issue is the lousy state of ports security specifically and homeland security generally some four and a half years after 9/11 despite Bush administration bluster to the contrary.

The vitriolic Republican reaction to the deal was all but inevitable following publication last week of a Republican report revealing the stunning magnitude of the administration's failure to deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

* The administration's ongoing ineptitude on homeland security has resulted in the unthinkable: The Democrats have seized the high ground on a national security issue.

Here's a roundup of comments from hither and yond:

From a Washington Post editorial:

You know there's something suspicious going on when multiple members of Congress -- House, Senate, Democrat, Republican, future presidential candidates of all stripes -- spontaneously unite around an issue that none of them had known existed a week earlier. . . . [W]e're wondering if perhaps American politicians are having trouble understanding some of the most basic goals of contemporary U.S. foreign policy. A goal of "democracy promotion" in the Middle East, after all, is to encourage Arab countries to become economically and politically integrated with the rest of the world. What better way to do so than by encouraging Arab companies to invest in the United States? Clearly, Congress doesn't understand that basic principle, since its members prefer instead to spread prejudice and misinformation.

Mansoor Ijaz in National Review Online:

It is understandable that American politicians would want to seek clarifications, safeguards, and accountability on the DP World deal in honor of all those who were mercilessly murdered on that tragic September morning. But the best way to honor their memories is to use the Dubai deal as a model to build effective bridges to the Arab and Muslim world — as we did in Pakistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan — instead of erecting barriers that reveal America's paranoia and fear about some Islamist doomsday scenario no one can predict, all the while alienating the very people we need to help raise up the Muslim world's disaffected so they are not so desperate to tear us down.

From a New York Times news analysis:

The administration's core problem at the ports, most experts agree, is how long it has taken for the federal government to set and enforce new security standards — and to provide the technology to look inside millions of containers that flow through them.

Only 4 percent or 5 percent of those containers are inspected. There is virtually no standard for how containers are sealed, or for certifying the identities of thousands of drivers who enter and leave the ports to pick them up. If a nuclear weapon is put inside a container — the real fear here — "it will probably happen when some truck driver is paid off to take a long lunch, before he even gets near a terminal," said Stephen Flynn, a retired Coast Guard commander who is an expert on port security at the Council on Foreign Relations.

. . . "I'm not worried about who is running the New York port," a senior inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency said, insisting he could not be named because the agency's work is considered confidential. "I'm worried about what arrives at the New York port."

Will Bunch in Attytood:

All these righty talking-head types seem stunned . . . that Bush didn't know about the ports deal until he read about it just a few days ago. Surprised that our president was out of the loop on something? Our question is this: Are you freakin' kidding me? Where have you people been for five years?

This isn't Jimmy Carter telling callers they took orange sunshine and to listen to some Allman Bros. This is exactly the guy you knew you were voting for not once but twice: The least-involved, most out-of-the-loop president in American history.

Here's the deal, OK. If you're truly outraged about the Bush's administration's support for Arab terrorists, then you shouldn't just stop a UAE company from buying our ports. You also need to stop buying any oil produced in Saudi Arabia, because that money directly supports terrorists. And unless they're willing to do that (and they aren't), then the critics of this are being hypocritical.

Peggy Noonan asks in a Wall Street Journal op-ed column why terrorists would want to target ports when airport security remains so lousy:

It's almost five years since 9/11, and since the new security regime began. Why hasn't it gotten better? Why has it gotten worse? It's a disgrace, this airport security system, and it's an embarrassment.

. . . So we're all talking about port security this week . . . That debate is turning bitter, and I wonder if the backlash against President Bush isn't partly due to the fact that everyone in America has witnessed or has been a victim of the incompetence of the airport security system. Why would people assume the government knows what it's doing when it makes decisions about the ports? It doesn't know what it's doing at the airports.

This is a flying nation. We fly. And everyone knows airport security is an increasingly sad joke, that TSA [the Transportation Security Administration] itself often appears to have forgotten its mission, if it ever knew it, and taken on a new one--the ritual abuse of passengers.

Now there's a security problem. Solve that one.