February 27, 2006, Port pourri
Apparently, the Coast Guard had issued a report questioning the homeland security implications of portions of the proposed Dubai Ports World's acquisition of the American operations of British Peninsular and Oriental, the current operator of some ports, after which DPW will operate six twenty-one American ports. While some Republican senators, like Susan Collins of Maine, appear gung ho on having hearings to inquire as to implications of the deal, it looks like Bill Frist has been brought back to the reservation, and he favors waiting the whole 45 days of the voluntary rubber stamp sweetheart non-Congressional review that DPW proposes "submitting" to.
Meanwhile, this piece from Fox News lays out a number of the legislative proposals floating around, including those of Senators Schumer and Collins to require Congress to approve or disapprove of the deal within 30 days after the executive branch rubber stamp review. Other bills are a ludicrous bill sponsored by the ludicrous Senators Clinton and Menendez (NJ's newest senator replacing Corzine who became governor) to ban foreign companies from operating American ports (good luck!) and yet another bill sponsored by Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison to beef up security measures at ports and other sensitive locations in general.
In the meantime, the White House seems hellbent on going forward with this. This from the BBC tells us that GOP Senator Lindsey Graham also wants to hold up the ports deal.
Have you figured it out yet? Exactly. Neither Frist nor Bush is running for anything this year, so they can be downright blahse about the criticism, and insist that bid'ness is bid'ness. The other senators-- both parties-- are not lame ducks, and realize that the years and years of cognitive dissonance the Bush Administration has been programming us all with (Arabs = Terrorists) is coming home to roost, here and now, with this [politically insane] maneuver.
We'll see how it goes. IMHO, the situation is radioactive. Not in the homeland security sense, as my read on this is that it probably really will make no difference one way or another in any practical sense whether this deal goes forward (and I live four blocks from a seaport, albeit not one subject to this deal)... but in the political sense... for years, Republican members of Congress have helped ensure that "the war President" made sure Democrats were unable to make a chink in the Republicans' "we're tough on national security" impregnable castle wall, only to see their beloved President now lower the drawbridge over the moat, open the castle gate and dismiss all of the guards for lunch... just as the GOP senators and Congress members prepare for the '06 mid-terms.
The castle guards, it would seem, are not the only ones out to lunch...
Comments
TD- How has the story about how Iran and Russia agreed to move Iran's uranium to Russia fallen through the cracks. To me, this is huge. I've even heard rumors that this agreement was due to an indirect threat from France to use nuclear force. If this agreement is for real... Iran can't make weapons. Nonetheless, the so-far unofficial agreement seems to be only hidden in a Times story and lightly reported on elsewhere. Maybe you could make some sense of this.
Posted by Ben at February 27, 2006 11:17 PM
There's always this from our comrades at Pravda, summarizing the breakthrough.
More interesting and more to the point (MY point) is this from Euriasanet discussing the deal, and noting how tenuous it is. Still, it seems designed to enable Russia and China to credibly veto any action against Iran at next week's UNSC session,which is why it won't happen.
Oh yes... my point. Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamani, is actually in charge, and worked out this compromise; the figurehead madman Ahmandidjad is, of course, as I have told readers here many times, no more in charge than his reformer predecessor Khatami. Which is, of course, good news for the world: Iran is not run by apocalyptic messianist madmen; it is run by corrupt-to-the-core theocratic tyrants, who do not want to be disassembled in a thermonuclear exchange with us, Israel, or anyone else.
What I've been saying in recent posts is that Iran seems to be playing world events (such as that nice vacuum we've created in neighboring majority Shia Iraq, and evidently seem to have invited chaos into Shia parts of Saudi Arabia) is that Iran (and its friends in Russia and to some extent China) seem to be behaving far more rationally than we are (if rationality is to advance its own national interest, as opposed to the interests of our defense contractors of course... I guess what's good for Bechtel and Halliburton and Dynegy and GE is good for America... except that it isn't.)
Bush's bad poll numbers show that most of the public has woken up to this game and just how incompetently the United States has been playing it; but given the fecklessness of the opposition party, will any of this matter at the coming elections in such a way as to make a difference?
Posted by the talking dog at February 28, 2006 10:42 AM