Obama's Political Revenge on the Gulf Coast

What follows is directly from Wikipedia. Ask youselves "why would the president not accept help from a country that has the ability to save our coast?"

Three days after the oil spill began, the Netherlands offered ships equipped to handle a spill much larger than Deepwater—at no charge. "Our system can handle 400 cubic meters per hour," Weird Koops, the chairman of Spill Response Group Holland, told Radio Netherlands Worldwide. Each Dutch ship offered more capacity than the total for all ships that the U.S. was then employing.^[205]
The Dutch also offered to prepare a contingency plan to protect Louisiana marshlands with sand barriers and a Dutch research institute developed a strategy to begin building 60-mile-long (100 km) dikes within three weeks. The Netherlands government owns ships and high-tech skimmers and gives an oil company only 12 hours to demonstrate it has a spill under control. Otherwise, the government dispatches its ships at the company's expense.^[205]
According to a Dutch official, the U.S. government responded to the Dutch offer with "Thanks but no thanks," despite BP's desire to bring in the Dutch equipment.^[206] After the U.S. refusal, the Dutch kept their vessels on standby. By May 5, the U.S. had also turned down offers from 12 other governments that maintain spill response fleets. Ironically, the superior European technology runs afoul of U.S. environmental rules. The Dutch vessels, for example, continuously extract most of the oil and return vast quantities of nearly oil-free water to the sea. However, "nearly" doesn't comply with the U.S. standard of 15 parts per million and so the technology was rejected.^[205]
In U.S. waters ships must store oil-contaminated water. Admiral Allen explained on June 11, "We have skimmed, to date, about 18 million gallons of oily water--the oil has to be decanted from that [and] our yield is usually somewhere around 10% or 15% on that." In other words, U.S. ships have been removing material that is 85-90% water from the Gulf, requiring them to make up to 10 times as many trips to storage facilities to off-load, an approach Koops calls "crazy."^[205]
The Americans later relented and took the Dutch up on part of their offer. The U.S. airlifted the Dutch equipment to the Gulf and then retrofitted it to U.S. vessels. And the U.S. further postponed the clean-up operation to train U.S. crews to operate the equipment.^[205]
To avoid using Dutch ships and workers, the U.S. government asked them to train American workers to build the sand berms. Apparently using Dutch trainers was acceptable. According to Floris Van Hovell, a Dutch spokesman, Dutch dredging ships could complete the Louisiana berms twice as fast as the U.S. companies.^[205]
This is not the first time the U.S. spurned Dutch help in an oil spill. When the Exxon Valdez leaked oil in 1989, a Dutch team with clean-up equipment flew unasked to Anchorage airport to offer help. They, too, were told to take their equipment and go home.^[205]
The U.S. Jones Act prohibits the use of foreign ships and foreign crews in port-to-port shipping. However, U.S. officials have offered conflicting statements about its applicability to the cleanup task. Adding to the confusion, on June 19, the Coast Guard actively requested skimming boats and equipment from the Netherlands, Norway, France, and Spain.^[206]

As of June 25, The U.S. State Department listed 70 assistance offers from 23 countries, and indicated that 8 had been accepted, counting the Dutch skimming equipment (but not ships) as such an acceptance

Revenge? Power Lust? you decide