You have more experience of working for Arabs Pat, is there something you haven't told us ?
I have nothing but good things to say about my year in Kuwait. The Kuwaitis were welcoming (except for one very short, very wide, older lady and that's a very funny story) and generous to a fault. Although I would not want to spend the rest of my life there, I would do it again in a heartbeat. I have no personal ill feelings about Arabs or Muslims in general, in fact at a personal level, it is just the opposite. As a class of people, I have much more of a problem. I am offended that when something bad happens here, all of our news shows run clips of Arabs dancing in the streets waving their automatic weapons in the air and cheering. It is really hard to not be affected by that sight especially when the moderates are typically silent.
My opinion regarding unrest in the Middle East (just in case anyone wants to hear it), especially with the Palestinians, is that it is largely caused by their views on nationality. When WWI ended (and all other wars before it) and the Treaty of Versailles redrew the map of the Middle East, you were whatever nationality you were depending on what side of a border you ended up on. You didn't loose your rights as a citizen. That didn't happen with the partitioning of Palestine. The displaced Palestinians (who, according to my understanding, left voluntarily) ended up as people without a country. They have now lived in refugee camps for generations. They are not citizens of the countries in which they reside nor can they ever be. Of course they want to drive Israel into the sea. I would too. If they had been absorbed in 1948, we wouldn’t have the crisis we have today. There would have still been bad feelings but the displaced would have gotten on with their lives. Now there is no solution but to give them a country they can call their own.
How does the Palestinian problem factor into my opinion of the DPW take over of P & O you might ask? As I mentioned earlier, the Muslims are generous to a fault (you need to be careful not to admire anything of theirs or they are likely to try to give it to you). One of the pillars of Islam is helping those less fortunate than yourself. So, there are lots of charity organizations that collect money for various causes including education. The problem is that too much of this money ended up funding schools that taught two things – the Koran and hatred of the west, America in particular. The result is that we have at least two generations of mostly poor people educated in those madras’s who are happy to die if it means taking a western devil with them. And, some of those people live in Dubai as evidenced by two of the 9/11 hijackers.
I would be against ANY foreign government owning ANY vital American asset. I am less unhappy about a foreign company owing American assets but if you ask me, it is simply stupid to let your avowed enemies guard your gates. Yes, yes, the UAE in principle is our friend. And yes, they are ONLY taking over terminals not total port security, BUT in the position of terminal managers, they are privy to port security procedures and that is a security risk in MYHO. The terminal operators are the last buffer between the outside world and the US and they also require security. This whole issue has brought to public attention the fact that 80% of US ports are controlled by non-US companies. Is this just more type of work that Americans don’t want to do so we outsource it to cheap foreign labor?
If I were king, I would inform the foreign companies that own any critical US asset that they had a year to sell out to an American company at fair market value or we would nationalize their business. In the future, I would look at a particular country’s policy regarding foreign investment. If they place restrictions on foreign investment, we would apply those same restrictions on their investment in American companies/land.
I remember Belgium refusing to sell us ammunition during the Falklands campaign, now we are having to equip our new aircraft carriers with either French or US planes and the US are refusing to give us the weapon command codes??
And we’re your BEST friends? If this is the kind of thing that happens between friends, what happens when we’re not quite best friends?