Forget the Saddam Offensive--Focus on Our Defenseless Ports

It was a clear day, and as my plane approached LAX, I looked out at the humongous Los Angeles-Long Beach port that handles more than

4 million cargo containers and 500,000 cruise ship passengers a year.

Maybe it was a selfish concern, but given the national drumbeat for war, a question about my immediate well-being came to mind.

Who should I be more afraid of?

A) A madman thousands of miles away in Iraq, or,

B) One of the world’s 70,000 suspected terrorists coming through the port with some horrible weapon and launching an attack in our own backyard?

It’s not even close.

A Sunday story by my colleague Josh Meyer quoted federal sources saying that an unknown number of Al Qaeda-trained soldiers have been trying to infiltrate the United States to launch “spectacular” attacks.

Saddam I’m not losing sleep over. But these guys, wherever they might be, scare the devil out of me.

A few days after flying over the port, I went sailing in the Long Beach Harbor. I’m out there on my $800 rust bucket, staring up at the big tankers anchored offshore, and guess what. There are roughly 6 million different ways for somebody to sneak in and try something.

While wheezing around out there, I saw a Coast Guard boat with a mounted M-60 rifle. Very nice to see our boys in action, but I was reminded of the National Guard troops who were sent into airports after Sept. 11 to make us feel better about flying, even as bags were being loaded unexamined onto planes.

We’re doing a better job than ever of screening cargo shipments from overseas, but only about 6% or 7% of what’s unloaded in American ports is inspected by hand.

“I wake up every morning thinking how lucky we are that nothing has happened,” says Stephen Flynn, a former Coast Guard commander who’s with the Council on Foreign Relations. Flynn believes the nation’s ports are extremely vulnerable, and that an attack on the L.A. Harbor could stagger the nation’s economy.

This being the case, a question comes to mind.

Why on Earth are we directing the nation’s resources, conversation, manpower and energy toward Iraq?

The biggest threat to our security in the new world isn’t Saddam’s potential to build a nuclear weapon in the next six or seven years. It’s some fanatic slipping into this country in the next six or seven minutes, while we’re all waving flags and singing hymns. If you were a terrorist who wanted to strike in the U.S., wouldn’t you prefer that we were distracted in Iraq?

It’s not a stretch to imagine an American future with dirty bombs blowing up our harbors. It’s not beyond the pale to imagine suicide bombers at sporting events and nerve gas attacks in subway stations.

And yet there has been precious little discussion about whether an attack on Iraq lowers or raises those risks.

Republican, Democrat, House, Senate--scarcely a whimper. All but a few lonely outcasts are standing at attention as President Bush, who often sounds like a second-stringer on the high school debate team, keeps repeating the words “regime change” and mispronouncing nuclear.

If we’re going to war to prevent a nuclear holocaust, shouldn’t we at least all know how to pronounce it? It ain’t nukular, George. Trust me on this.

The economy is dragging, painful budget cuts looming, and virtually no one in Congress has batted an eye over an estimated cost of $50 billion to $150 billion to blow Saddam out of his shoes and knock his beret into Iran. (We’ve spent less than $100 million since Sept. 11 on security at the nation’s 361 ports of entry.)

All those billions of dollars for a war that could plunge the Middle East into further turmoil and spawn hundreds of thousands more anti-U.S. terrorists.

Where’s the marching in the streets? The angry letters? Have we forgotten about the 1st Amendment?

I swear everyone’s on medication. It’s all $2 flags and patriotic geegaws at the drugstore checkout counter. There’s a national soundtrack for war--the daily bugle calls from Washington, the vapid yammering of pundits and five-star choreographers on cable news--and it’s working like a mass narcotic.

I called Washington to talk to the one congressman who, more than anyone, has refused to drink the Kool-Aid. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) told me I’ve got it wrong, and insisted the public is not on board.

“I don’t care what the polls say. The people in my district are saying, ‘Look, I can’t afford the cost of prescription drugs. What’s my government doing about this?’ ” Kucinich said. “There’s a disconnect between Washington and the reality people live with every day. Saddam Hussein is not a threat to this country, but our sagging market is.”

Kucinich thinks politicos are too busy mugging on TV to listen to the people they represent.

Would it be smarter to seal our transit hubs and cover the rest of our turf than to send tens of thousands of troops overseas? Of course it would be. But it would be even smarter, Kucinich says, to figure out how we got to the point where people want to do us in.

Instead of joining the war cry, he says, our leaders ought to be asking why we snubbed Kyoto, why we refuse to embrace alternative energy, why we snub the international criminal court, why we’re inclined to trample the U.N. charter, and why our government is willing to be “a hired gun for the oil industry.”

Here’s a scenario to consider, Kucinich said. What if some country were to ignore international law, insist on a regime change and send its military to the U.S. to assassinate our leader. Then, to finance the operation, they started selling off our resources on the international market.

“I mean, it’s really chilling,” he said.

What’s chilling is that the entire military and half the Guard could be bogged down for years in the Middle East. I’ll try my best to cover our flank while they’re away, but I don’t know how long I can hold off 70,000 terrorists with a 22-foot sailboat.

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Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at steve.lopez@latimes.com