Earth to Bush
Earth to the President: warnings ignored at your peril
Andrew Sullivan
September 05, 2005
From The Australian
LIKE many seismic events, Katrina's true impact might take a while to absorb. The poverty, anarchy, violence, sewage, bodies, looting, death and disease that overwhelmed a great city last week made Haiti look like a paradise.
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 George W. Bush's 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 the US. How on earth did this happen? And what will come of it?
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 most likely disasters to threaten the US.
They were an earthquake in San Francisco, a terrorist attack in New York city (predicted before September 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 20 feet (6m) 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 111mp/h (178km/h) winds, the results would be cataclysmic, New Orleans planners said."
Katrina 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."
To make matters worse, thousands of Louisiana National Guardsmen, who might have been able to maintain order, are deployed in the deserts of Iraq, in an increasingly unpopular war.
However, there are plenty of troops and National Guardsmen who could have responded adequately. Iraq holds only 10.2 per cent 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?
Where was the urgency to get these soldiers to rescue the poor and drowning in 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. The President had barely returned to Washington; and had already opined that nobody had foreseen the breaching of New Orleans's 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.
As chaos spread, the President seemed passive. He said on Friday that he was "satisfied" with the response, but not the results. What does that mean? Then he held a photo-op with Senator Trent Lott, whose house had been demolished. "The good news is - and it's hard for some to see it now - that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before," Bush said. "Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house - he's lost his entire house - there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch."
According to the official White House transcript, laughter followed that remark. Lott was Senate majority leader until a few years ago, when he was forced to resign because he said he regretted that racial desegregation had taken place in the South in the 1950s and 1960s. So while the poor and the black were drowning or dying, Bush chose to chuckle in the South. It beggared belief.
Why was martial law not imposed? That was a question nobody seemed able to answer. The mayor of New Orleans unleashed a diatribe at the lack of federal response, while Michael Chertoff, the head of homeland security, pronounced himself proud of the work of his department.
Later Bush was forced to say on television that the response to disorder in New Orleans was "not acceptable". But wasn't he ultimately responsible? In the 2000 debate with Al Gore, he had said that coping with natural disasters made him, a hands-on governor, better suited to the presidency than Gore, then vice-president. That quote began to find its way on to the talk shows and cable television last week.
As for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, it soon became a joke. After CNN had shown scenes of chaos in the New Orleans Convention Centre - with bodies, looters, people dying of diabetes, children lacking basic amenities, and disease spreading - the head of the agency, Michael Brown, went on television and said: "We just learnt about that today, and so I have directed that we have all available resources to get to that convention centre to make sure that they have the food and water, the medical care that they need."
To add insult to injury, Bush appeared with Brown and congratulated him for doing "a heck of a job".
The President seemed oblivious to reality. One reason why this event may reverberate is exactly that disconnect. Five days after a hurricane, US citizens were still helpless across the region; and yet the president was "satisfied". More than two years after the invasion of Iraq, the road from Baghdad airport to the Green Zone is still not secure, and yet the President has pronounced himself pleased with progress.
The resonance was not lost on many Americans. There comes a point at which the central question of this presidency - its competence - overwhelms every other issue. If the President's credibility is shattered at home, how can it be restored abroad? For anyone who wants Iraq to succeed, Bush's response to Katrina can only be grim news.
In Republican circles, one real change may have occurred. In a matter of days, chances of former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani becoming the next president improved drastically. Republicans know when an almighty error has been made. And last week, their president failed them. It will take enormous political work for him to win them back now.
Andrew Sullivan
September 05, 2005
From The Australian
LIKE many seismic events, Katrina's true impact might take a while to absorb. The poverty, anarchy, violence, sewage, bodies, looting, death and disease that overwhelmed a great city last week made Haiti look like a paradise.
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 George W. Bush's 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 the US. How on earth did this happen? And what will come of it?
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 most likely disasters to threaten the US.
They were an earthquake in San Francisco, a terrorist attack in New York city (predicted before September 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 20 feet (6m) 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 111mp/h (178km/h) winds, the results would be cataclysmic, New Orleans planners said."
Katrina 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."
To make matters worse, thousands of Louisiana National Guardsmen, who might have been able to maintain order, are deployed in the deserts of Iraq, in an increasingly unpopular war.
However, there are plenty of troops and National Guardsmen who could have responded adequately. Iraq holds only 10.2 per cent 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?
Where was the urgency to get these soldiers to rescue the poor and drowning in 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. The President had barely returned to Washington; and had already opined that nobody had foreseen the breaching of New Orleans's 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.
As chaos spread, the President seemed passive. He said on Friday that he was "satisfied" with the response, but not the results. What does that mean? Then he held a photo-op with Senator Trent Lott, whose house had been demolished. "The good news is - and it's hard for some to see it now - that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before," Bush said. "Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house - he's lost his entire house - there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch."
According to the official White House transcript, laughter followed that remark. Lott was Senate majority leader until a few years ago, when he was forced to resign because he said he regretted that racial desegregation had taken place in the South in the 1950s and 1960s. So while the poor and the black were drowning or dying, Bush chose to chuckle in the South. It beggared belief.
Why was martial law not imposed? That was a question nobody seemed able to answer. The mayor of New Orleans unleashed a diatribe at the lack of federal response, while Michael Chertoff, the head of homeland security, pronounced himself proud of the work of his department.
Later Bush was forced to say on television that the response to disorder in New Orleans was "not acceptable". But wasn't he ultimately responsible? In the 2000 debate with Al Gore, he had said that coping with natural disasters made him, a hands-on governor, better suited to the presidency than Gore, then vice-president. That quote began to find its way on to the talk shows and cable television last week.
As for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, it soon became a joke. After CNN had shown scenes of chaos in the New Orleans Convention Centre - with bodies, looters, people dying of diabetes, children lacking basic amenities, and disease spreading - the head of the agency, Michael Brown, went on television and said: "We just learnt about that today, and so I have directed that we have all available resources to get to that convention centre to make sure that they have the food and water, the medical care that they need."
To add insult to injury, Bush appeared with Brown and congratulated him for doing "a heck of a job".
The President seemed oblivious to reality. One reason why this event may reverberate is exactly that disconnect. Five days after a hurricane, US citizens were still helpless across the region; and yet the president was "satisfied". More than two years after the invasion of Iraq, the road from Baghdad airport to the Green Zone is still not secure, and yet the President has pronounced himself pleased with progress.
The resonance was not lost on many Americans. There comes a point at which the central question of this presidency - its competence - overwhelms every other issue. If the President's credibility is shattered at home, how can it be restored abroad? For anyone who wants Iraq to succeed, Bush's response to Katrina can only be grim news.
In Republican circles, one real change may have occurred. In a matter of days, chances of former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani becoming the next president improved drastically. Republicans know when an almighty error has been made. And last week, their president failed them. It will take enormous political work for him to win them back now.