Though handled poorly, port deal is the right call

Too bad President Bush messed up so badly in his handling of the Dubai ports contract, because he's dead right about the most crucial aspects of the deal.

Not only is it jingoistic to suggest that an Arab-owned firm is less fit to conduct business at U.S. ports than a British firm, but such reasoning masks the real security and terrorism-related issues at stake.

The global shipping business is just that — global. Unless America wants to unplug itself from the global economy, U.S. officials must rely on the help of those who package the goods, ship the containers and monitor the ports of embarkation if they hope to find the dirty bomb hiding in the haystack of crates before it gets to New York Harbor.

The port of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates is one of only 42 major ports around the world — and the only one in the Middle East — to sign on to a 2002 U.S. Container Security Initiative.

That means Dubai lets U.S. agents on its soil to help in testing and security oversight of U.S.-bound shipping containers — a huge intelligence boon.

That doesn't mean that shipping security is perfect. Far from it.

Huge gaps exist. Only a relative handful of shipping containers are inspected. More than one-third escape all oversight before arriving at U.S. ports, the Government Accountability Office found last year.

Yet, the best way to address that loophole is not by dissing Dubai. It is by adding to such foreign cooperation and by building up the budgets of the U.S. agencies actually charged with port security, notably U.S. Customs and the Coast Guard.

When the Dubai deal blows up in its face, the Bush administration will have only itself to blame.

The White House's excessive secrecy, its disdain of Congress, its tin ear about security politics, its insularity and the president's disturbing penchant to outsource critical decision-making to close aides and Cabinet members created a political tsunami where there should just have been choppy waters.

Now, the controversy has the potential to wreck relations with those parts of the Arab world that still stand in the U.S.'s corner.

Lame-duck Bush didn't even know his team had voted to give an Arab government-owned firm a high-profile U.S. ports contract until it was a public hot potato, the White House admitted Wednesday.

No one bothered to consult Congress — then everyone acted surprised when members objected.

The Bush team blew off a legally required 45-day secondary review in those cases where sensitive work is to go to a foreign government-owned firm, The New York Times reports. Yet, no official could offer a public explanation for why this was.

And Bush's reaction to Republican defections was to threaten a veto that will be overridden.

The White House is losing this political contest because it has exhausted its political capital even before the fight begins.

Congress needs to wake up to what's really at stake, and it's about a lot more than terminal operations.

The U.S. container-security effort remains relatively puny. It desperately needs more money, more high-tech monitoring gadgets and more agents.

There is no going back to a colonial-era world in shipping. The companies that run port operations and container transport are from all over and are staffed and managed accordingly.

Even Dubai Ports World, the Arab government-owned company seeking to run terminals at six major U.S. ports, has a U.S. senior vice president, a U.S. general counsel and a U.S. Navy man as its outgoing chief of operations, The Washington Post reports.

On U.S. shores, virtually all critical port jobs still are controlled by U.S. dockworker unions that maintain a tight hold on hiring practices.

Making it seem that America dislikes all Arabs could cause far more damage to U.S. security interests than a port-management contract in which pencil pushers have limited ability to monkey with security.

There may be a legitimate — even pressing — argument that some ports, like New York Harbor, are so critical to national security, given their proximity to millions of people, that their terminal operations cannot be outsourced to non-U.S. firms.

In that case, make that argument directly without introducing the canard that all Arabs are terrorists in waiting, and that it's possible to return to a world of safety where all security loopholes can be plugged. They aren't, and we can't.

Elizabeth Sullivan is foreign-affairs columnist and an associate editor of the editorial pages for The Plain Dealer of Cleveland. She can be contacted at bsullivan@plaind.com