Rather than provide the necessary resources to protect American ports, the Bush administration supported an unfunded mandate that won't make America safer, according to an article in today's New York Times.
16 months ago President Bush pushed through Congress a new "Law of the Sea," mirrored by a global code, which requires every port in the world "to create counterterrorism systems — computers, communications gear, surveillance cameras, security patrols — to help secure America against an attack" by July 1st.
Unfortunately, very few ports will have the resources to comply with these new laws. Even American ports don't have enough resources, because of Bush's misplaced priorities:
President Bush's budget for port security in the coming year is $46 million, while the costs of compliance in the United States alone will reach $7 billion.
Ports that aren't able to comply will be severely punished, fracturing the global economy:
But Carl Bentzel, a Democratic counsel to the Senate Commerce Committee, said most of the world's ships and ports "have so far to go and the costs are so high that most will not be in compliance" by July 1.If that happens, the United States has three choices, maritime security experts say. It can enforce the law, creating potential economic chaos abroad; bend the law, saying economic imperatives make full enforcement impossible; or apply the law selectively, creating a two-tier system in which rich ports in Europe and Asia trump poor Caribbean ones like Puerto Cortés.
Poor countries like Honduras will be the hardest hit by any sanctions that flow from the failures of the new law:
"If the United States were to bar ships from the port for even a week, "our national economy would collapse," said Mauro Membreño, chief of Honduras's new National Commission on Port Security."
Destroying the global economy only exacerbates terrorism.
"We want to protect our borders," said Kim Petersen, who runs one of the world's biggest maritime consultancies, SeaSecure. "But what happens when we cripple the economy of a developing country and create a breeding ground for the very problems we're trying to prevent?"