Thursday, February 23, 2006

A Question About that UAE Port-Running Company

So, is there actually any substantive reason that this particular company is unqualified to run the ports? (I've seen some vague speculation about behind-the-scenes links to Bush, but Bush only ever gives jobs to people he already knows, so there's nothing particularly special there.)

As far as I can tell, the uproar comes down to "Oh, no! We can't let the towelheads run our ports! They'll let all of their nuclear-bomb toting cousins in!" And that's monumentally stupid, even by the standards of the American public.

My local paper (The Record of Hackensack, NJ) quotes a bunch of yahoos who are angry for no specific reason, and then notes that two of the 9/11 hijackers came from the UAE (as, I imagine, the closest thing they can find to a fact amid the noise). Of course, the company running the port of Newark now (P&O Ports North America) is based in the UK, and all four of the July 7th London bombers were British. So, if we're tarring countries with the terrorist brush, the UK has twice as many confirmed suicide bombers as the UAE.

I have no opinion about whether Dubai Ports World (the company in question) is qualified to do the job; I simply don't know. (On the other hand, they seem to be a major world-wide player in this area, and are buying the company currently running the operations. That seems to indicate that they know what they're doing.) But the people complaining about them seem to be doing so merely because it's a company headquartered in an Arab country, which is just asinine.

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