Rick Monteverde writes: >Jed - don't you think that granting foreign interests a stake in what we >have here might actually mitigate foreign attitudes towards terror >attacks against the US?
I doubt we can accomplish that. 95% of the men in Saudi Arabia consider Bin Laden a national hero because he attacked us, and I expect a similar proportion support him in the UAE. These people hate our guts as violently as we hated the Nazis, because they feel that we supported tyrannical governments for the past 50 years. (Which is true -- we did.) This kind of deep-rooted hate is not going to be "mitigated" any time soon. It will take generations. The first step must be to end our use of oil. We must stop sending billions of dollars to tyrants and terrorists. This river of money has corrupted and destroyed their culture. Foreign interests . . . would be fine. A private corporation based in another country with a clean reputation would be fine. But this corporation is owned by the government of the United Arab Emirates. The UAE is one of only three countries that recognized the Taliban government, and it has deep links to terrorism. It was "an important transshipment point for the smuggling network of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani scientist who supplied Libya, Iran and North Korea with equipment for making nuclear weapons." (N. Y. Times) To hand over control of our ports to them, in a time of war, would be like putting a Japanese MITI-chartered construction firm in charge of repairing the Yorktown before the battle of Midway. To my mind, this has nothing to do with racism. I do not want to see employees of the UAE government in charge of one of the most critical and -- at present -- porous and badly managed security risks in the US. - Jed
