A Level Gaze

A Level Gaze

"What effect must it have on a nation if it learns no foreign languages? Probably much the same as that which a total withdrawal from society has upon an individual."
--G.C. Lichtenberg

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

If You Want a Job Done Right, Do It Yourself

I've listened enough to people saying that the UAE deal for the ports is bad because it involves Arabs. Please stop, it's not a good argument. There are Arabs with whom we have problems, but blanket statements like this are crap, even if 90% of the American public agrees with you. Farming out our port security would be a bad idea if we were hiring an army of Unitarian Terminator clones from Prince Edward Island. Security must come from the government. Failure to recognize this is what's wrong with this plan, and that's all that's wrong with it.

The port issue has nothing to do with the UAE. It has nothing to do with their being Arabs. It has nothing to do with their alleged ties to terrorists or terrorism. It has to do with the fact that They Are Not Us. I would feel the same way if we were entrusting the security of our ports to the English or the Japanese or the French, or any private American company, for that matter.

Why? Because the safety of our country is just not as important to any of them as it is (or should be) to the United States Government.

I don't care what Cheney and Rumsfeld tell you, security is the government's job, period. It's why governments exist in the first place. No nation that depended on mercenaries for protection has ever survived for long, and with good reason. However well the hired guns are paid, eventually they will decide to take over themselves, melt away from a threat they would rather not face, or just take the money and do a half-assed job. They simply cannot care enough. When it's the government's job, it's either protect the nation or be obliterated. That's the kind of motivation you want in your protectors, and nothing less is acceptable.

After the 9/11 attacks, the government hired and trained airport security personnel for exactly this reason. Private companies were simply not reliable enough.

I'm aware that the security of the ports in question is currently in the hands of a British company, and I'm not ok with that either. This might be the one place where I could see myself on the same page as the Bush Administration: we're in a post-9/11 world, in which our security, especially at the points at which we make the most contact with the rest of the world, has become deadly serious. The time for handing off our responsibilities to a company with the words "Steam Navigation" in its name has long since passed.

Entrusting the safety of our ports to a foreign entity might, I repeat, might, be acceptable if we were manifestly incapable of doing the job ourselves. But for a country that never tires of styling itself as the world's lone superpower, the very idea is a sick joke.

The fact that George W. Bush, after being president for over five years, is threatening to use his first veto on this issue is just icing on the cake. Everything he has touched has been a disaster. If he's stamping his feet and screeching about it, you know it's got to be a doozy.

posted by David at 2/21/2006 10:54:00 PM ::

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