[Mb-civic] Even conservatives agree

[Allison Burnett]

The Sunday Times - World
 
September 04, 2005 

Focus: When the levees broke, the waters rose and Bush¹s credibility sank
with New Orleans
The president tumbled to the epic scale of the disaster far, far too late,
says Andrew Sullivan

Like many seismic events, Katrina¹s true impact might take a while to
absorb. What started as a natural disaster soon became an unforeseen social
meltdown and potential political crisis for the president. The poverty,
anarchy, violence, sewage, bodies, looting, death and disease that
overwhelmed a great American city last week made Haiti look like Surrey.

The seeming inability of the federal or city authorities to act swiftly or
effectively to rescue survivors or maintain order posed fundamental
questions about the competence of the Bush administration and local
authorities. One begins to wonder: almost four years after 9/11, are
evacuation plans for cities this haphazard? Five days after a hurricane,
there were still barely any troops imposing order in a huge city in America.
How on earth did this happen? And what will come of it?

In the past, American disasters have led to political changes ‹ the
Johnstown flood in 1889 and the Galveston hurricane in 1900 led to fury at
class privilege and a government that seemed not to care for the poor. The
1927 flood in New Orleans ‹ and the inequalities it exposed ‹ propelled the
rise of the populist demagogue Huey Long.

There seems to me a strong chance that this calamity could be the beginning
of something profound in American politics: a sense that government is
broken and that someone needs to fix it.

It did, after all, fail. It failed to spend the necessary money to protect
New Orleans in the first place. This disaster, after all, did not come out
of the blue.

Below is a passage from the Houston Chronicle in 2001, which quoted the
Federal Emergency Management Agency on the three likeliest potential
disasters to threaten America. They were: an earthquake in San Francisco, a
terrorist attack in New York City (predicted before 9/11), and a hurricane
hitting New Orleans.

Read this prophetic passage and weep: ³The New Orleans hurricane scenario
may be the deadliest of all. In the face of an approaching storm, scientists
say, the city¹s less-than-adequate evacuation routes would strand 250,000
people or more, and probably kill one of 10 left behind as the city drowned
under 20ft of water.

³Thousands of refugees could land in Houston. Economically, the toll would
be shattering . . . If an Allison-type storm were to strike New Orleans, or
a category three storm or greater with at least 111mph winds, the results
would be cataclysmic, New Orleans planners said.²

Katrina, of course, was category four.

So what was done to prevent this scenario? There was indeed an attempt to
rebuild and strengthen the city¹s defences. But the system of government in
New Orleans is byzantine in its complexity, with different levees answering
to different authorities, and corruption and incompetence legendary.

More politically explosive, the Bush administration has slashed the budget
for rebuilding the levees. More than a year ago, Walter Maestri, emergency
management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, told the New Orleans
Times-Picayune: ³It appears that the money has been moved in the president¹s
budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that¹s
the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can¹t be finished,
and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security
issue for us.²

It¹s still unclear whether even with higher levels of funding the levees
would have been strong enough to withstand Katrina in time. The Army Corps
of Engineers has backed the president and said that the levees were built
for only a category three hurricane and were in satisfactory shape. But
levees need constant maintenance and an agency with a one-year budget cut of
$71m might have skimped. The connection between shifting funds to fight wars
abroad rather than to defend against calamity at home is a politically
explosive one. As one Louisianan said: ³You can do everything for other
countries, but you can¹t do nothing for your own people. You can go overseas
with the military, but you can¹t get them down here.²

To make matters worse, thousands of Louisianan National Guardsmen, who might
have been best able to maintain order, are deployed in the deserts of Iraq,
in a war that is increasingly unpopular. Again: it¹s hard to know if this
really would have made a huge amount of difference, but the argument has the
force of a category five political storm.

In fact, there are plenty of troops and National Guardsmen who could have
responded adequately. Iraq holds only 10.2% of army forces. There are
750,000 active or part-time soldiers and guardsmen in the US today. The
question then becomes: where were they? The Sun Herald in Biloxi,
Mississippi, said last week: ³On Wednesday, reporters listening to horrific
stories of death and survival at the Biloxi Junior High school shelter
looked north across Irish Hill Road and saw air force personnel playing
basketball and performing calisthenics.²

Where was the urgency to get these soldiers to rescue the poor and drowning
in nearby New Orleans, or the dying and dead in devastated Mississippi? The
vice-president was nowhere to be seen. The secretary of state was observed
shopping for shoes in New York City. The president had barely returned to
Washington; and had already opined that nobody had foreseen the breaching of
New Orleans¹ levees.

Earth to Bush: the breaching of the levees had been foreseen for decades. If
anyone wanted evidence that this president was completely divorced from
reality, that statement was Exhibit A. It didn¹t help coming after a
five-week vacation, when most Americans are lucky to get two.
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