Chertoff; we would have been better off if Dubai owned the ports

Homeland security chairman Michael Chertoff is saying that the US would have been better off if Dubai owned the ports. He went on to say that the US "missed a great opportunity", that would have strengthened ties between out 2 countries. He also said if Dubai owned the ports, it actually would have been made up safer from attack. Is he right???


http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-03-23-chertoff-ports_x.htm

Will they "stay the course" in the Dubai deal?

Maybe if Dubai owned NOLA things would have been different. off their own coast, the competent, capable oil lords have been constructing sand islands that you have to see to believe. In various decorous forms and patterns the engineers dutifully keep pouring sand onto the constantly eroding condo havens hoping to put thousands of people(albeit rich) on absurd nouveau beach front property. The disruption , as anyone who has ever lived on a lake where beaches are routinely created by shielding and disrupting the incoming waves, is destroying the original beaches and the ecology. So you you basically have an oil glutted aristocracy literally pouring sand into the warming rising ocean on to make a Venice of the mediterranean- on a whim.

Not only do the engineers not argue with the buyers, there is a certain mischievous gleam in their eye when on camera. Magazines brag and purr about the fantastic project. Imagine such priorities in NOLA. At least the rich would have taken the brunt of the storm, but the insurance companies forced to restore the sand castles would be so broke the city proper and all other flood-land landholders would be stripped of coverage.

No this is not the security end of the business but in a country that small and tyrannically run, such madness must run as deep and the sand protection is shallow. This is the type of hubristic madness that forms the ambitions of this nation the Bushes so desperately want to ally with. The kindest thing one could possibly say is that all contracts with the sheiks is the traditional empire way of getting the money flowing back- like drifting sand- into American coffers, screw the security fallout. It isn't about security at all but the money.

And again I'd like to reiterate the possibility that the wild ambition and terror underworld connections(with genuine sympathy there) just might have had something to do with the Cole being bombed in Aden harbor where Dubai wished to control all the ME-Asia trade traffic. And why oh why is Dubai the only company, like Halliburton is the only company, one can possibly turn to? Just because they are the highest bidder looking for profits so far beyond the actual business that everyone else is left behind?

http://www.findaproperty.com/story.aspx?storyid=6846

and

Published on Thursday, July 14, 2005 by TomDispatch.com
Sinister Paradise.

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0714-31.htm

Does the Road to the Future End at Dubai?
by Mike Davis

The narration begins: As your jet starts its descent, you are glued to your window. The scene below is astonishing: a 24-square-mile archipelago of coral-colored islands in the shape of an almost finished puzzle of the world. In the shallow green waters between continents, the sunken shapes of the Pyramids of Giza and the Roman Coliseum are clearly visible