Sunday night, March 12th, I watched the National Geographic special “Mega Structures” series that covered Palm Island and three larger island complexes Dubai is building in the Persian Gulf. Watching the enormous engineering, planning, supply and execution job one state in the United Arab Emirates is accomplishing in a short time period brings one startling reality to the fore. That reality is that Dubai could and would have solved our reconstruction problems in the Gulf Coast in jig time while we seem increasingly incapable of doing that job at all.

The current port management debate in the United States has risen to the surface under the guise of a security problem, but really gained impetus because Americans found for the first time that our ports have not been under American control for a long time. Whether it’s the British or Dubai Ports World that manages our ports really isn’t the problem. The surprise to the American people is that we can’t do it ourselves and had to call in outside help long ago. Maybe we can get China to build a wall along our borders.

The first comparative difference is a leadership problem. Dubai recognized that the oil that made them wealthy is not going to last forever. To supplement this disappearing resource they are turning to the tourist market. They have set out to maximize their natural resources into an attraction irresistible to tourists.

Instead of using their wealth and people for invasions and occupations, which probably wouldn’t get them very far anyway, they have set out to win the “hearts and minds” (and money) of the world’s tourists and property speculators. It’s a business difference.

Their next decision was that instead of using steel and concrete to build these islands they would use natural elements. They would build the first island literally from the bottom up and build it out of the same materials at the base of islands all over the world – sand, gravel, rock and dirt. The only thing they left out was volcanic eruption.

The next thing they did was to hire “experts” from all over the world, experts in every pertinent field of ecology, oceanography, underwater exploration, mining, shipping, heavy equipment, and so forth. And they coordinated this into one continuous chain of supply, demand, and design with only one purpose – to build a large island complex where none had been before, hang the expense.

Of course, they hit problems all along the way. But they solved every one of them. Very quickly they learned that special cargo ships could more quickly load indigenous sand from the sea bottom and do so better than what could be trucked from their almost endless supply of desert sand.

Another was the problem of earthquakes. While the Persian Gulf is free of hurricanes, it does have occasional earthquakes. Once they had land above sea level, they used huge vibrators driven into the ground to vibrate and compact the sand, gravel, and rock just like an earthquake would. It worked, but they had to add to the sinking ground as fast as they did this.

Started in 2000, the first palm shaped island complex, “Palm Jebel Ali,” is already near completion and completely sold out. Three other larger island complexes have been started and are racing to completion within the same time frame.

What does this say about our own problem? What does it say about one oligarchy versus another?

In 2005, we had three hurricanes of the same size strike our Gulf Coast. One of these, Katrina, breached the levees that were designed, built, and maintained by the federal government’s Army Corps of Engineers devastating one of our historic cities, causing almost a half million people to leave their homes and jobs, and costing the loss of at least a thousand lives in New Orleans alone.

After promising to rebuild New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast “bigger and better than ever” in “the greatest reconstruction effort the world has ever seen” our esteemed leader, George W. Bush, backed off by waiting to see what the “local” officials wanted to do about it. When they said that they wanted the government’s levees rebuilt to withstand larger hurricanes and estimated the costs at $22 billion – Bush committed $6 billion to the job.

This is the same man who has run up the national debt $337.2 billion in the last five months and lied us into the senseless invasion of a hapless republic in the Middle East that never meant us any harm. What does that tell you about our leadership and our own capabilities to solve a crisis?

Both Bush and Clinton shelved the SELA project that is a well developed and heavily endorsed (by environmentalists at least) plan to take water from the Mississippi River and use it to replenish and nourish the protective wetlands that have been depleted in Southern Louisiana. This plan has been around since the early Nineties and has never been given proper attention even though it would not have disturbed developments already in place.

To top it all off, on March 14th the Washington Business Journal reported that, in true Tammany Hall fashion, the Carlyle Group has filed to take over U.S. port operations after the Dubai company succumbed to the pressure put on its acquisition of the British firm currently managing these ports and ended up promising to sell our port management to an American company.

Evidently, the president’s connections will trump the vice president’s this time. Isn’t that nice?