We Should Live - Ben Bateman

Remember Halliburton? Back in the run-up to the second Gulf War, the libs couldn’t stop talking about how the impending hostilities were all about making Cheney’s business buddies rich.

The funny part was that few people understood what Halliburton did, or how it was going to make money in Iraq. Many assumed that it would just take the Iraqi oil somehow. Unless you have some kind of education or experience relating to the oil industry, the phrase “energy services” doesn’t mean much. What kind of services does an oil well need? You just kinda stick a straw in the ground and the oil bubbles out, like in The Beverly Hillbillies. Isn’t that how it works?

Well, no. Producing oil and natural gas is actually fantastically complicated—so complicated that it’s difficult just to give a novice a sense of how big it is. It’s full of scientific, engineering, and financial challenges that require expertise just to know how to ask the questions correctly, let alone how to answer them.

My point is that no one on the Left cared about that stuff. All they knew—all they wanted to know—was that Halliburton had something to do with oil, there’s lots of money in oil, Cheney was connected to Halliburton, and Iraq was full of oil. Therefore, obviously, the whole war was just a scam to make money for Halliburton.

It sounded silly, didn’t it? The response should have been: What the heck do YOU know about the energy services business? But nobody wanted to go there, because that conversation requires knowledge and experience far beyond the scope of ordinary political chatter. There’s a limit to the amount of detail that the public will absorb—and to the amount of research time that political commentators can devote to a single story.

Today much of the conservative blogosphere is in an uproar because a company somewhere in the Middle East has some kind of ownership rights involving some US ports. to my friends on the Right, I say: What the heck do YOU know about the international shipping trade, exactly? I know that I know nearly nothing about it, and that knowledge apparently puts me way ahead of most conservative bloggers and commentators.

According to this article, about nine million containers pass through our ports every year. (This article puts it closer to ten.) That’s a river of commerce upon which our current prosperity depends. Shall we hire an army of customs inspectors to paw through each container, which on average is about forty feet long and weighs about thirty-thousand pounds? Even if you wanted to pay the taxes to hire them all, the inspection time alone would cripple international trade, because so many big companies today rely on just-in-time inventory.

Beyond ignorance of international shipping, the uproar over the ports demonstrates the sort of simplicity of thought about contractual relationships that law schools beat out of every first-year student. The news stories say that the UAE company “owns” those ports, or that it’s “leasing” them, or that it “manages” them. What does that mean? What rights would Dubai Ports World really have? The only precise answer lies in many inches of dense legal documents, or you can get an approximate answer from someone with real experience in international shipping. But if you haven’t read the documents, and if you have experience with international shipping, then don’t assume that you know what it means to own, lease, or manage a US port.

Michelle Malkin is apparently the leading conservative blogger who is upset about this. Here’s what she’s worried about:

The issue is not whether day-to-day, on-the-ground conditions at the ports would change. They presumably wouldn’t. The issues are whether we should grant the demonstrably unreliable UAE access to sensitive information and management plans about our key U.S ports, which are plenty insecure enough without adding new risks, and whether the decision process was thorough and free from conflicts of interest.

She apparently assumes that our security measures and contingency plans for US ports are carefully kept secrets. I doubt that it works that way. The only way to secure international commerce is to work with our friends, not hide from them.

Those who are in hysterics over the ports seem to imagine that international container traffic is like the US mail, where anybody can pay the postage and stick their parcel into the stream, and our only defense is to pluck out the bad parcels at some later point. But the people who actually do this stuff for a living seem to agree that such a system could never be secure, because the modern streams move too fast. The only way to secure the system is to scrutinize containers as they enter the system. This is why the Container Security Initiative (“CSI”), for example, focuses on identifying and inspecting high-risk containers in foreign ports before they enter the stream of commerce, rather than trying to pluck them out afterwards at US ports. The US Customs and Border Protection (“CBP”) agency has a detailed multi-layer plan for securing US ports, which includes CSI, random inspections, large-scale radiation checks, and a partnership with the large international businesses for ensuring that cargo stays secure before it even enters the containers.

A mere hour’s research into the world of international container security should show that the professionals, who really know about this, say that you don’t keep containers safe with super-secret port security protocols. You keep the containers safe through openness, by establishing mutual-trust relationships with the major foreign ports and the major international shippers. If the review process on this deal seems cursory, maybe that’s because the Bush Administration wisely left the decisionmaking to the people who do this for a living and know how to handle it, rather than barge in like a bunch of arrogant amateurs who think that an afternoon’s Googling means that they know just as much—or more!—as those who have spent a lifetime in the industry.

Also, I’m astonished at how easily the conservative blogosphere has assumed that the UAE is run by a bunch of crazy rag-heads who can’t be trusted. The typical smear is that the 9/11 hijackers “had ties” to the UAE, or that they planned part of their operation in the UAE. If that’s the standard, then we can hardly trust US companies to operate our ports, because “we” (meaning someone in the country) taught them how to fly the planes! Can anyone seriously claim that the UAE government had anything to do with 9/11? I don’t think so.

In all this soon-to-be-forgotten hoopla about the ports, I smell one of the Right’s age-old vices: isolationism. The outside world is a source of constant change and stress that tempts us to pull up the drawbridge, lower the portcullis, and shut everyone else out.

Attention conservatives: Read your history! Isolationism Does. Not. Work! Unless we intend to kill all 1.4 billion Muslims, we need a serious plan on how to establish a peaceful Muslim world. The UAE seems like exactly the sort of country that we should embrace, but this ridiculous panic is driving us away from them, pushing us to welsh on a legitimate business deal, and making us appear unreliable in the international arena. Plus, it’s damaging the President and helping the Democrats, who get to pretend that they care about national security while helping their union buddies.

Finally, let’s assume, just for argument, that Michelle Malkin, et. al. are correct in that this deal might have measurably lowered security at certain US ports. Let’s assume that, had the port deal gone through, then there was a measurable chance that a future a terrorist plot might have succeeded, whereas now it will fail because the ports will stay in non-Muslim hands. What’s the chance? Five percent? Three percent? One percent?

But now look at the real damage that this stupid uproar has already caused. President Bush has been damaged politically, and will have trouble advancing his agenda for several months. Congressmen will waste time holding hearings and conducting investigation. The Democrats are ecstatic. Maybe they can use this to hammer Republicans in the 2006 elections that are only eight months away. Those are real 100%-certain costs that we’re suffering right now because some conservatives decided to throw themselves into a panic rather than thinking logically.

It must feel good to engage in dark conspiracy-mongering, where even those who appear to be our friends are secretly our enemies, and we can trust no one. It must feel good, but it’s childish. In the real world, we must manage real risks, and the political cost of this tantrum has already far outweighed whatever risk the deal might have represented. The point of politics is to accomplish goals, not just to feel good. So my fellow conservatives, I beg you: Can we please drop this self-damaging non-issue, and move on to something serious?

Edit: Tweaked the title a little for parallelism.