Dubai Ports

It seems to me that the Administration made some serious errors here.  There are two questions to be discussed and they only focussed (or allowed the opponents to) on one.   The two questions should be entirely severable.  The first, is who should administer the ports?  There we should be relatively agnostic about who does it.  The Dubai company, if as the Administration claimed, has experience.  So this would be a relatively simple procurement.  The second question is the one of security.  In that case NO private firm should be involved.  Is the government competent in figuring out how to make our ports more secure?  Based on a couple of years experience with the TSA - the answer is sort of with a lot of reservations.  But the President and his people could have abated this seeming slap at the Dubai by separating the questions.  What were they thinking?