TROY SENIK
Staff Writer
Farmers use scarecrows for the purpose of signaling danger where there is none. In L. Frank Baum’s children’s classic “The Wizard of Oz” (itself an allegory for protectionist propaganda) the Scarecrow is the character without a brain. In the parlance of logic, a straw man argument is one intentionally used to misrepresent the position of one’s opposition.
Choose the imagery you like, but in examining the case of the recently foiled attempt by the United Arab Emirates-based company Dubai Ports World to take over management of several American ports, the metaphor of the scarecrow holds.
The apoplexy that accompanied the proposed deal was probably best represented by Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), a man who, even by the standards of the U. S. Senate, seems hell-bent on ensuring that he becomes the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every wake. Schumer, in a post on his Website referred to the fact that “next week control of the port of New York and New Jersey will be handled over to Dubai Ports World.”
No such thing ever occurred, nor was it ever planned. What Schumer either failed to disclose or completely ignored was that it was management and not ownership of American ports that was set to change hands.
First, no functions of either national defense or military matters would have fallen into the hands of Dubai Ports World (DPW), for the simple reason that none of them were ever held by British shipping ports group, P&O, the firm that was transferring management responsibilities to DPW. No management firm, foreign or domestic, controls port security, which is administered by the United States Coast Guard under the terms of the International Shipping and Port Security (ISPS) code.
Even if one feared radical Islamic infiltration from the inside, no access to sensitive security documents would be allowed unless specifically authorized by the Coast Guard under the terms of the ISPS, a standard that holds equally true even for domestic port workers.
But the above scenario is relatively implausible. The reality is that most port employees would remain Americans.
It’s quite simple: DPW, a corporation with an American CEO, would have retained the American staff already present. It wouldn’t have lined America’s docks with extras from Jerry Bruckheimer movies as some congressional Democrats happily implied. What’s more, DPW had actually made several extraordinary security concessions, such as providing state-of-the-art screening devices as its own expense at all 51 ports under its management and allowing the Department of Homeland Security to have a right of approval on all of DPW’s senior management officers. Any American company offering such concessions would be feted for the kind of corporate citizenship that has largely been absent during the Enron area. Our friends from Dubai, however, were met by a cowardly Congress brandishing a cudgel.
This benign proposal inflamed so quickly from the corporate greed that DPW was noble enough to forswear. Eller & Company, a Florida firm that previously did business with P&O and feared financial loss under DPW, obtained the assistance of a lobbyist who quickly invented an Arab boogeyman for mainstream media and effectively turned the nation against its own long-term interests.
Indeed, an autopsy of the deal quickly reveals how much we have lost. With most American firms unable to realize the efficiencies necessary to manage major international ports and DPW now pressured to sell their American assets to a domestic company, the results will likely be inefficiencies that harm international commerce and imperil the livelihood of many of those American port employees.
We also have now fundamentally jeopardized the chances of getting the United Arab Emirates to sign on to the same sort of bilateral trade agreements the we have previously struck with other moderate Arab regimes such as Jordan, Morocco, Bahrain and Oman. One of the terms of these agreements?
Ignoring the Arab world’s boycott of Israel. Security indeed.
03-23-2006