UAE Ports Deal: The Fly Reacts

Several times in the last few days, the story about the deal between the feds and the United Arab Emirates with regard to management of several U.S. ports has come into conversation. People have asked me what my take is. As I'm so fond of doing, I'm going to knock it out with bullet points.

I don't think the deal is a good idea. This isn't a bunch of migrant workers from Mexico picking fruits and vegetables in a field; this is management of ports. It's high tech, high stakes work, particularly given the overwhelming degree of vulnerability that has been identified in U.S. ports for several years now following 9/11. It doesn't matter to me that the company chosen was a state-owned company from the United Arab Emirates (who happen to be our allies; we have bases there, after all): I would disapprove just as much if the management of U.S. ports was being out-sourced to a Canadian firm, a British firm, or a Japanese firm. There are plenty of American companies that are every bit as qualified to do the job, and that kind of government contract is competitive enough that they'll have bidders. As far as I'm concerned, out-sourcing this sort of work is not only a compromise of our national security, it's also completely unnecessary.

I don't blame President Bush for this decision. As some of you may have read, he found out about it from the press, not from his advisors. This is precisely the kind of thing that a president is supposed to delegate; it's not President Bush's job to know each and every miniscule detail of the operation of the federal government. He's not a supervisor, he's not an overseer, he's not a micro manager: he's the President of the United States. If it were his job to do everything, you'd have no Secretary of Defenes, no Secretary of the Treasury, and no president would ever have time to sleep or eat.

That having been said, President Bush and his advisors totally botched the public relations aspect of the issue. When asked, President Bush should not have let on that he wasn't fully informed about the issue; he should have declined to comment, or made a statement saying that the deal was still under review, and then he should have gotten Vice President Cheney to shoot the public relations advisors in the face with a shotgun behind closed doors. Not only should some of President Bush's subordinates have looked for a better solution than to turn over port management to a foreign company, the public relations advisors should have handled the issue with more nuance and skill. This incident has made President Bush look foolish and uninformed, when the truth is that it's not his job to be intimately acquainted with details like this. President Bush dropped the ball in his own comments (particularly when he said that he'd veto any contrary bills in Congress), but the real failure is with his staff of advisors, who dropped the ball so completely on this issue as to warrant... Well, to warrant being shot in the face with a shotgun by the Vice President. Not point blank or anything, from a good distance, and with something small, like a 20 gauge, a la Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck in Armageddon.

Ya dig?