Port decision won't put U.S. in a safe harbor

Chicago Sun-Times ^ | March 19, 2006 | MARK STEYN

[Cannoneer No. 4]

How's that Dubai ports deal going? You remember, the one where Dubai Ports World agreed to sell its U.S. port operations to an American company?

[Cannoneer No. 4]

Same article previously posted under a different title here:

Steyn: Arab world needs more Dubais

[G.Mason]

Printer friendly version for your convenience.

[DUMBGRUNT]

"officials at FAA headquarters who on the morning of 9/11 found it all a little too much and just walked out of the room?"

What is that about?

[G.Mason]

" ... If I were Dubai Ports World, I'd sell the U.S. operations to Cosco, the Chinese Commies who run port operations in California, just for the fun of watching congressional heads explode. Or does Washington's new fun xenophobia stop at the (Pacific) water's edge?"

A thoroughly enjoyable and informative article, which is exactly why it won't fly.

Thanks

[Cannoneer No. 4]

I dunno.

[G.Mason]

Dayton: FAA, NORAD hid 9/11 failures

By Greg Gordon, Star Tribune Washington Bureau Correspondent

July 31, 2004

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Sen. Mark Dayton, D-Minn., charged Friday that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) have covered up "catastrophic failures" that left the nation vulnerable during the Sept. 11 hijackings.

"For almost three years now, NORAD officials and FAA officials have been able to hide their critical failures that left this country defenseless during two of the worst hours in our history," Dayton declared during a Senate Governmental Affairs Committee hearing.

(snip)

During the hearing, Dayton told leaders of the Sept. 11 commission, that, based on the commission's report, a NORAD chronology made public a week after the attacks was grossly misleading. The chronology said the FAA notified the military's emergency air command of three of the hijackings while those jetliners were still airborne. Dayton cited commission findings that the FAA failed to inform NORAD about three of the planes until after they had crashed.

And, he said, a squadron of NORAD fighter planes that was scrambled was sent east over the Atlantic Ocean and was 150 miles from Washington, D.C., when the third plane struck the Pentagon -- "farther than they were before they took off."

Dayton said NORAD officials "lied to the American people, they lied to Congress and they lied to your 9/11 commission to create a false impression of competence, communication and protection of the American people." He told Kean and Hamilton that if the commission's report is correct, President Bush "should fire whoever at FAA, at NORAD ... betrayed their public trust by not telling us the truth."

Asked about Dayton's allegation, a spokesman for Colorado Springs-based NORAD said, "We stand on our testimony to the commission" and declined to discuss the 2001 chronology. Erin Utzinger, a spokeswoman for Dayton, said the senator "assumes the FAA knew of NORAD's coverup."

From …

Mash here

[DUMBGRUNT]

Thanks for the info.
Sen Dayton like the blind squirrel, would find something on occasion?

[G.Mason]

"Sen Dayton like the blind squirrel, would find something on occasion?"

Only because he smelled something like a rope to put around the necks of the present administration.

I am constantly amazed that we, as a country, can survive, in spite of the ineptness and ignorance of Congress, and the outright traitorous acts of the Democrat Party. (Not to mention the Rino's)

[Valin]

Congress' demand that DPW sell its U.S. operations to someone even if there's no someone to sell them to is almost a parody of the Democrats' (and naysaying Republicans')(Valin says: The Know-Nothings) approach to national security

Well put Mark.

[jec41]

Okay; We'll have a trade war. America will manage all of its own properties and the Islamo fascists and their sympathizers and Communists can manage theirs. I bet we will still come out ahead!

Tankers in the U.S. merchant fleet, which are inspected by the Coast Guard, adhere to some of the strictest regulations in the world. But U.S. ships now make up as little as 3 percent of the world tanker fleet, and account for less than half the tanker visits to San Francisco Bay.

Nobody wins a trade war but its the citizens and businesses that suffer not governments. Not a single member of congress would be sent home without a paycheck. We import over 60% of all our oil. 700 tankers come in to the SF bay daily and thats but one port. A oil embargo of but 30% would be grimier than our worse depression and would result in at least a 20% unemployment rate in a few months. Our GDP would plunge, our debt would skyrocket if any countries would buy our securities. Meanwhile that oil would be sold to India and China who are restricted by lack of oil and they would become much stronger. In addition what is it that we have to trade that Islam countries must have and cannot and already do obtain from Europe. If they insisted on being paid in euros rather than dollars the dollar would no longer be the worlds primary currency and that movement is already afoot. The three largest shipping lines in the world are Hutchinson of Hong Cong, DPW of UAE and a Indonesian shipping company. Two are Islam and one is of China. Yet it may be possible to win such a war but it would remain a hardship for Americans for many, many years and we may never regain our former status. Have your war!!!!

[ClaireSolt]

I think we have allowed Congress to get into too many things way exceeding thir constitutional role. I am sympathetic with them, in a ay. How could anyone pretend to have the expertise needed to legislate in all of the areas. Imagine going from hearings on Amtrack to bird flu, whew! We need to clip their wings big time.

[A.A. Cunningham]

Port decision won't put U.S. in a safe harbor

March 19, 2006

BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

How's that Dubai ports deal going? You remember, the one where Dubai Ports World agreed to sell its U.S. port operations to an American company?

"It appears," huffed Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), "that the divestiture announcement from DPW last week may have been nothing more than a diversion designed to deflect attention away from this outsourcing of American port security. Congressional action blocking this deal is the only true assurance we have that this deal is dead."

You go, girl! Tote that barge, lift that bale, git a little drunk an' you land in Congress! Why doesn't the House of Representatives buy the port operations with the money earmarked for prescription drugs for seniors or Hurricane Katrina "relief"? I don't expect a busy woman like Schultz to run the new company herself -- though she could certainly put in a couple of shifts at the Port of Miami each weekend -- but how about that INS official who mailed Mohammed Atta his visa six months to the day after he died in an unusual flying accident in Lower Manhattan? How about leaving the ports to those State Department chaps who approved the 9/11 killers' laughably incomplete paperwork ("Address in the United States: HOTEL, AMERICA")? Or how about those officials at FAA headquarters who on the morning of 9/11 found it all a little too much and just walked out of the room?

After all, all those guys are still working for the U.S. government. By golly, if we're gonna have security breaches at American ports, let's make sure they're all-American security breaches! If I were Dubai Ports World, I'd sell the U.S. operations to Cosco, the Chinese Commies who run port operations in California, just for the fun of watching congressional heads explode. Or does Washington's new fun xenophobia stop at the (Pacific) water's edge?

Congress' demand that DPW sell its U.S. operations to someone even if there's no someone to sell them to is almost a parody of the Democrats' (and naysaying Republicans') approach to national security: Goddammit, we may not know what we're for but we sure as hell know what we're against. In that sense, whatever one's dissatisfactions on this third anniversary of the Iraq invasion, the Bush Doctrine remains the only game in town. It recognizes that the problem has to be fixed at the source, which means changing the nature of the terrorist breeding grounds. That's not sappy internationalism, but taking the game to the enemy.

Right now, in the generally squalid Arab world, you'll find four types of regimes:

1. Dictators with oil (Iraq, Libya)

2. Monarchs with oil (Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states)

3. Dictators without oil (Egypt, Syria)

4. Monarchs without oil (Jordan, Morocco)

Numbers 1 and 3 are, almost by definition, unreformable: In essence, they have to be overthrown or made to see that the only option is self-liquidation. The second category -- monarchs with oil -- are also largely unreformable: They're basically a globalized version of the dhimmi economy. The dhimmi -- the non-Muslim in a Muslim society -- was obliged to pay the jizya, a special tax levied on him as an infidel. When Islam in its heyday conquered infidel lands, it set in motion a massive transfer of wealth, enacting punitive taxation to transfer money from nonbelievers to Muslims -- or from the productive part of the economy to the nonproductive. That's why almost all Muslim societies tend toward the economically moribund. You can see it literally in the landscape in rural parts of the Balkans: Christian tradesmen got fed up paying the jizya and moved out of the towns up into remote hills. For the House of Saud, oil wealth is a global jizya: an enormous wealth transfer from the economically productive world -- Europe, North America -- to Islam. The Saudi state uses oil money as a giant welfare check to keep its people quiescent and too pampered to revolt. You can say the same about many of the Gulf statelets.

But Dubai, with less oil than its fellow emirates, can't depend on the global oil jizya. It's had to diversify into banking and tourism: These days it's like Hong Kong with an en suite Lawrence of Arabia theme park. Unlike almost anywhere else in the Arab world, it's moving toward a non-deformed socioeconomic structure. Next to Morocco, it's about the best shot at real reform among the existing regimes. To be sure, they're not hot for Jews and there are some pretty disgusting books for sale in their stores. But so what? You can say the same about Paris and London.

And yes, DPW is a "state-owned" bauble, just as King Willem III of the Netherlands was a founding shareholder of Royal Dutch Shell petroleum, just as Prince Maurits of Orange founded the Dutch East India Company, the original Royal Dutch shell company and the Halliburton of its day. In monarchical societies, economic innovation often begins with royal protection.

So saying "Get lost, Dubai" isn't a new steeliness so much as a retreat into an unsustainable bunker mentality more sentimental than Bush's liberty promotion. My National Review comrade John Derbyshire has been promoting the slogan "Rubble Doesn't Cause Trouble." Cute, and I wish him well with the T-shirt sales. But, in arguing for a "realist" foreign policy of long-range bombing, he overlooks the very obvious point that rubble causes quite a lot of trouble: The rubble of Bosnia is directly responsible for radicalizing a generation of European Muslims, including Daniel Pearl's executioner; the rubble of Afghanistan became an international terrorist training camp, whose alumni include the shoebomber Richard Reid, the millennium bomber Ahmed Ressam, and the 9/11 plotters; the rubble of Grozny turned Chechen nationalists into pan-Islamist jihadi. Those correspondents of mine who send me e-mails headed "Nuke Mecca!" might like to consider the broader strategic impact on a billion Muslims from Indonesia to Yorkshire, for whom any fallout will be psychological rather than carcinogenic. Rubble is an insufficient solution, unless you're also going to attend to the Muslim world's real problem: its intellectual rubble.

Arab Muslims fought in Afghanistan, British Muslims took up arms in Bosnia, Pakistani Muslims have been killed in Chechnya. When you're up against a globalized ideology, you need to globalize your own, not hunker down in Fortress America. Right now the Arab world's principal exports are oil and Islamism. Ports management is a rare diversification and long overdue.

© Mark Steyn 2006

Copyright © Mark Steyn, 2006

[Valin]

We need to clip their wings big time.


Well said!

[Mind-numbed Robot]

I am constantly amazed that we, as a country, can survive, in spite of the ineptness and ignorance of Congress, and the outright traitorous acts of the Democrat Party. (Not to mention the Rino's)

Don't forget the innate inefficiency of a large government bureaucracy. The larger the government, the more inefficient.

[Mind-numbed Robot]

700 tankers come in to the SF bay daily......

Better check that stat. That is a lot of traffic to manage even without unloading time. That is one tanker entering the bay every two minutes 24 hours a day. At that rate they would be lined up half way across the Pacific.

How many unloading spots do they have, how long does it take to unload each tanker, do they take on something else or leave empty?

That number sounds way too large to me.

[jec41]

That number sounds way too large to me.

Thanks, it was. The article that printed that information was wrong. I went to the port data. Its 700 a year or about two a day for SF.

[G.Mason]

"Don't forget the innate inefficiency of a large government bureaucracy. The larger the government, the more inefficient."

Excellent point.

I suppose with 300,000,000 citizens, and how many more illegals [?], we aren't going to be getting a smaller, more effective government, anytime soon.

One drawback to folks living "forever" is that our representatives stay in office until they really get the handle on thieving from the other states to support themselves and their "give me more" constituants, and become so entrenched that they rarely get deposed.

[Mind-numbed Robot]

If they live forever so will we and we know their kind of government is not sustainable. So, we outlast them, have 50 - 100 years of good times and start the cycle all over again.

[G.Mason]

"If they live forever so will we and we know their kind of government is not sustainable. So, we outlast them, have 50 - 100 years of good times and start the cycle all over again."

I will leave that to the younger crowd. I'm gonna cash in while I can still enjoy life. I hope. ;)

Re: Your tag line ... (Not all that needs to be done, needs to be done by the government.)

Allow me to bore you with the following letter I sent a neighbor who is trying to get our area to agree to city water.

" XXXXX & XXXXX XXX XXXXX
XXXX S. Sxxxxx Terrace
Inverness, FL 34450

September 9, 2005

Dear XXXXX:

Thank you for your letter of September 9, 2005 and with reference to your well water and whether we would like to have city water.

Firstly, our answer is absolutely not!

Secondly, do you have your water (well) tested annually? Do you have a system for your well that insures it being safe and potable for your consumption?

The assumption that government is the answer to all our problems is an erroneous one.

Should you have been reading the local news articles about the problems with ”city” water, you may have noticed that there is trouble in paradise.

As far as the costs you refer to, would it surprise you to know that our “city” water, in Seminole FL, had as much chlorine in it as did our swimming pool?

Rhoda and I are quite satisfied with out well, our well treatment system, and the “costs” are much less than government can possibly supply it for.

You are hereby invited to our home, for a sample of what really good, home-purified water tastes and looks like.

Sincerely,

XXXXXXX xxx XXXXX XXXXX

She hasn't spoken to me since! ;)