| 22 February 2006 Ports of Entry The Golden Dome of the Tomb of Askariya is down this morning, as armed men stormed the shrine in Samarra, placed charges, and blew it up. The tomb is home to the remains of the tenth and eleventh Imams, successors to the Prophet, and holy to the Shia part of Islam. The twelfth Imam is supposed to be among us, and will be revealed at the end of time. Speculation is that Sunni terrorists conducted the outrage, though I am sure someone will get around to blaming the Israelis or the Marines at some point. But it seems pretty clear that this is intended to ratchet things up in the war without end. Whatever the response to this is in the Shia community, the event is going to contribute to the Islamophobia that is rising in the West. I am suspicious by nature, and I am not going to claim that everything is going to be OK. I have lived too many winters to make an assertion like that, and sweated enough summers in Washington to be skeptical of the blather from any politician or lawyer. I am not going to tell you that the Emir of Dubai is a great guy, though I think he actually was. I use the past tense because the old Emir, who owned Dubai Ports, which is buying P &O Port Services, which in turn runs facilities at six U.S. ports, passed away in January in Australia, where he was shopping for race horses on the Gold Coast. Sheik Maktoum bin Rashid al Maktoum, was only 62 when he passed away. He was immediately succeeded by his younger brother Sheik Mohammed, the Defense Minister, and the body was flown back to Dubai on his private Boeing 747, the big one, which is a useful platform to own if you transport a lot of horses. The al Maktoums have worked hard to make Dubai a player in the world of horseracing. They founded the Dubai World Cup, which has a purse worth six million dollars. They own Godolphin Racing Stables in the UK, to ensure that a steady stream of world-class horses are ready to be flown on demand to any racing venue. It is too soon to tell what Emir Mohammed is going to be like now that he is in power. I bet he would be fun to party with. His reputation is that he is a wheeler-dealer, and the intellectual force behind Dubai as a financial dynamo. If we wanted to know more about him, we could as the people who work for him at the stud farm he owns in central Kentucky. He is probably a little uncomfortable with the attention he is getting right now, but he has powerful friends. The President is defending his decision to permit the transfer of operations of the P&O ports to the Emir, and so is Secretary Chertoff, who is looking a little tired these days. Hurricane Season is only three months away, after all. But the Administration is confronting a mutiny in the Senate, and an insurgency in the House. Mr. Bush has had to step out smartly to get in front of the rising tide of xenophobia. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is among the mutineers, and so is Speaker of the House Denny Hastert. There are letters flying all over the Hill, requesting hearings and demanding explanations. Mr. Bush says the furor is based on bias against the Emir, who has been fore-square in the fight on terror. Terror is bad for horses, and bad for racing. But that argument doesn't play this week. Legislation to block the transfer will be sponsored by Senator Chuck Schumer, the dolorous senior Senator from New York, and Congressman Jack King. They will introduce the bill next week when Congress re-convenes, and the President says he will veto it. That would be a first, since he has not vetoed a single thing in his two terms in office. Here is what this is really about, politics aside. There are no American players in the port facility business anymore. The last big one was the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, which became CSX for reasons best known to itself. There is- or was- a national security issue about U.S. national control of the Sea Ports of Embarkation and Debarkation (SPOEs and SPODs, in the parlance of military planners). Control of the ports is essential in deployment of armed forces overseas, since even today, ninety-percent of the military equipment travels by sea. That does not account for what is coming in this direction in all those containers. Nor, as a wise old friend pointed out to me, does it account for the containers that are unloaded to travel by rail across the country and be re-loaded for further transport. But American ownership of the ports was a matter that ended a long time ago. We regulate them, enforce UN-sanction security regulations, and the system seems to work pretty well. P&O runs terminal operations in six American ports: New York, New Jersey, Miami, Baltimore, New Orleans and Philadelphia. As with most political arguments, the facts are wrong. P&O does not control the ports. It operates facilities in them. I have a professional associate who works in the maritime trade in New Orleans. He points out that the Port of New Orleans stretches from the Head of Passes in the Gulf to the upper point of navigation for ocean-going ships at Baton Rouge's upper bridge. That is over four hundred miles in length, and has shipping facilities the whole way. P&O manages approximately 2,000 linear feet on the east bank of the river. There are three hundred active-duty Coast Guard personnel, a forty-member harbor police force, and ninety Parish sworn police officers in the area. They are augmented by hundreds of private security guards, of which P&O will probably be responsible for staffing three positions. They will probably be required to be U.S. nationals. If they are not, that is a matter that can be changed with the stroke of a pen. It is about the same situation in the other five port complexes. Is it a matter for concern and discussion? Sure. But it appears to be a manageable issue, since I have heard no controversy about the number of facilities owned by the Chinese. P&O is a British company, and the BBC World Update informs me that over 3,000 Britons are estimated to have attended jihadi training camps. American companies could not compete in this segment of the global market, and they got out of the business. That should be the matter for discussion, but that is too complicated and not easily reduced to sound-bites. It is easier to point at some horse-lovers and shout that they are Arabs. But I challenge you on this: do you know if they are Shia or Sunni? Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra |