Things to consider on failed ports deal
Re “Arab Firm Gives Up Ports Deal,” March 10
We should ignore the posturing by politicians about who is going to administer our ports. What’s needed is a law requiring each incoming container to be made in the shape of a Trojan horse. That might dramatize the real problem enough to get people’s attention.
Turning port administration over to a well-connected American firm isn’t going to change the basic fact that almost 19 out of 20 containers coming into the country slide through the ports without inspection. Any caring lawmaker has to know it’s only a matter of time before one of those containers carries some type of horrible devastation. The story of the Trojan horse has endured through the ages as a warning that deserves to be heeded.
ALLAN LARSON
Marina del Rey
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What is going to happen when foreigners start to pull out their investments in U.S. companies? Or, heaven forbid, they cash in their U.S. government bonds? Are the Democrat billionaires in the Senate, or George Soros, going to buy them all up?
JUDITH OLAH
Beverly Hills
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Re “Goodbye, Dubai,” editorial, March 10
Your editorial skirts the underlying problem that led to the Dubai Ports World rejection -- the justified national distrust of anything the Bush administration undertakes. This distrust has resulted from the policies that began with the squandering of a budget surplus to give tax breaks to folks who said they didn’t need them, enacting a disastrous Medicare prescription drug plan that favors pharmaceutical firms and forbids Medicare to negotiate for prices, and ineptness in handling the Hurricane Katrina disaster.
The worst of it is the misadventure in Iraq, which besides the cost in lives and injuries probably will exceed half a trillion dollars before we are out of it.
Rejection of the ports deal is simply the American people telling this administration that they have had enough.
EDWARD HUJSAK
La Jolla
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Your editorial is wonderfully international and enlightened. But ordinary Americans, who really work in operating companies, were justifiably rattled by the proposed ports deal.
Security systems can be thwarted, and the more information a miscreant has, the easier any security system can be undone. With the United Arab Emirates running several major U.S. ports, would it not be easier for a would-be terrorist to patiently work himself into a position where he could learn important details about port operations and security weaknesses? Some remember that Osama bin Laden comes from a prominent Saudi Arabian family, also supposedly our allies.
But perhaps the surest proof that this was a bad deal was that Bush so heartily endorsed it.
BENJAMIN MARK COLE
Los Angeles
