I think I’m safe in saying that most Americans are with me on this crazy port deal.
The polls show it. The radio talk shows make the point. Most of my e-mail in recent days suggests it.
But I have received a surprising number of e-mails telling me I am “misunderestimating,” as George W. Bush might say, the president and his team. These e-mailers tell me the president really knows what he’s doing. And, essentially, I should shut up.
They tell me the United Arab Emirates company is not going to be running the security operations at the six U.S. ports, just other facets of the operations. They tell me it would be “discriminatory” to exclude the Arabs from getting the contract.
To these folks, I would like to pose a hypothetical for starters. Let’s suppose the nation of India was looking to find a company to run its port operations. Do you imagine there is any possibility that it would consider, for more than a flat second, a Pakistani-owned company to do the job?
I don’t think so. And neither should the United States consider any Arab-owned company to run sensitive port operations – even if Americans are officially in charge of security. First of all, as we all know, security is pitiful at our ports now. Is it likely to get better when a country known for its jihadist sympathies is running things?
As to the president knowing what he’s doing: Didn’t he say he didn’t even know about the considerations that went into this decision – or the decision itself – until he heard about the controversy?
I actually heard him say “the government” had looked at this carefully.
Let’s see. The president didn’t look at it carefully. The Congress is up in arms over the decision. Exactly which branch of government was it that examined this matter?
As to the “discrimination” charge, this is the most amazing of all positions. And I say this as an American of Arabic heritage. Discrimination is something we do. The word literally means “the ability or power to see or make fine distinctions; discernment.”
In other words, it’s, generally speaking, a good thing, a necessary thing. An alternate meaning in our parallel universe is “bias” – making unfair decisions based on faulty or predetermined characteristics.
I tend to think that governments and ordinary people should use their abilities to make fine distinctions – to use their powers of discernment. If we don’t, we will make a lot of bad decisions.
And this decision on the port operations is bad. It’s horrible. It’s unforgivable. It’s horrendous. It’s potentially disastrous. The only good thing about it is that it may serve to undermine American’s false sense of confidence in their overly centralized bureaucracy in Washington.
Yes, we need to be more discriminating – not in the worst sense of the word, but in the best sense of it.
In this case, that means not allowing port operations to be controlled or run or supervised in any way, shape or form by a company owned by jihadist tyrants and Islamist oil sheikhs.
Why is this even being debated in our post-Sept. 11 world?
