Parochial Safety

The uproar over the UAE company's contract to protect our ports is, as the NYTimes columnist suggested today, of President Bush's own creation. We will likely never know whether this is in fact a good or bad idea because the administration has so thorougly poisoned the waters in the matter of rational consideration of what best protects us from terrorists that, like the boy who cried wolf, we could be eaten while skeptics who have tired of the warnings stand by.

I have a friend who has a big role in private companies' contracting with the government to protect our ports. From conversation with him I have become persuaded that t is likely the number one concern we ought to be focused on, and the conventional wisdom about how best to do that is flawed.

But we will never be able to have an informed debate about it. Because the administration arbitrarily targeted Iraq and, by inference, the entire Arab world, following 9/11, it is impossible to make discerning judgments about what makes good policy sense.

How devoutly I hope we dodge this bullet. My friend has put the fear of God into me about what it would mean for a dirty bomb to be set off in a container in Long Beach. The technology exists to examine all cargo - it is being done in Hong Kong. But the combination of an inept Homeland Security agency and the administration's political avarice that keeps them creating new fears to further their ambitions, has done much to limit our ability to focus resources and energy where it could be the msot critical.

The irony is that if we suffer a major attack it will be at leas in part because this administration has failed us. But we will be told it is yet further evidence that we need these "tough realists" to protect us.