Andrew Sullivan in The Times
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1764115,00.html
"Like many seismic events, Katrina’s 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: “The New Orleans hurricane
scenario may be the deadliest of all. In the face of an approaching
storm, scientists say, the city’s 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.
“Thousands 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.”
Katrina, of course, was category four.
So what was done to prevent this scenario? There was indeed an
attempt to rebuild and strengthen the city’s 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: “It appears that the money has
been moved in the president’s budget to handle homeland security and
the war in Iraq, and I suppose that’s the price we pay. Nobody
locally is happy that the levees can’t be finished, and we are doing
everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for
us.”
It’s 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: “You can do everything for other countries, but
you can’t do nothing for your own people. You can go overseas with
the military, but you can’t get them down here.”
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: it’s
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: “On 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.”
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 Orleans’ 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 didn’t help
coming after a five-week vacation, when most Americans are lucky to
get two."
<rest of article at Times website>
Michelle Malkin on Michael Brown
http://michellemalkin.com/archives/003458.htm
"During his visit to Mobile, Ala., on Friday, President Bush singled
out Michael D. Brown, head of the Federal Emergency Management
Agency, for praise:
"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."
Really? "Brownie's" job is to direct the federal response to natural
disasters such as Hurricane Katrina. Let's review his public
statements during the past week:
- He admitted that he didn't act more aggressively because as late as
last Sunday he expected Katrina to be a "standard hurricane" even
though the National Weather Service in New Orleans was already
predicting "human suffering incredible by modern standards."
- He proved himself utterly clueless about the disaster unfolding in
New Orleans. He claimed that the federal relief effort was "going
relatively well" and that the security situation in New Orleans was
"pretty darn good."
- He blamed the flood victims in New Orleans for failing to evacuate
on time, even though local authorities failed to make municipal
vehicles available to residents who could not drive or did not own
their own cars.
"It took four days to begin a large-scale evacuation of people
stranded in the Superdome stadium and to bring in significant amounts
of food and water to an American city easily accessible by motorway,"
the Observer notes. "Relief agencies took half that time to reach
Indonesia after the Boxing Day tsunami. "
Although the delay was not entirely the fault of the Bush
Administration, Brown's complacency clearly didn't help. And his
bumbling statements after the hurricane struck have not inspired
confidence.
This is not the time to give a weak performer the benefit of the
doubt. The FEMA director's role in the ongoing recovery effort is too
important to be entrusted to a clueless political hack with such poor
judgment.
Rather than praise Michael Brown, Bush should fire him."
--
William T Goodall
Mail : [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Web : http://www.wtgab.demon.co.uk
Blog : http://radio.weblogs.com/0111221/
"Build a man a fire, and he will be warm for a day. Set a man on fire
and he will be warm for the rest of his life" - Terry Pratchett
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