Biloxi or Baghdad?

“This is a national emergency. This is a national disgrace.

“This is not a FEMA operation. I haven’t seen a single FEMA guy. We can send massive amounts of aid to tsunami victims, but we can’t bail out the city of New Orleans.”
— Terry Ebbert, New Orleans homeland security adviser

“Get off your asses and do something!”
— New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin

By now we’ve all seen hours of coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Clearly we are dealing with a huge natural disater. What began as a tragedy on a par with 9/11 has worsened exponentially. The refugees, the looting, the walking wounded, the corpses—I don’t need to tell you. But, the disaster within the disaster has been the poor Federal response to Katrina due to shameful incompetence, shocking arrogance and serious funding cuts to pay for the war.

Shameful Incompetence
The first and most obvious question: How can an evacuation be mandatory with no mass transit made availble? There are busses, ferries, streetcars, and Amtrak trains in New Orleans. Why were they not used? The second obvious question: an empty city has to be protected from looting and lawlessness. Why wasn’t the National Guard called in right away? Perhaps because Louisiana National Guard is currently serving in Iraq.

Shocking Arrogance
The public responses from the Bush Administration has been terrible on an emotional level. Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff has implied that poor people brought this on themselves by not getting out of town. FEMA Director Michael Brown said he was unaware of the tens of thousands at the convention centre until Thursday, despite the fact they had been advising people for days to gather there. President Bush joked about New Orleans being a party town from his college days. Even the conservative Manchester Union Leader in New Hampshire slammed Bush’s poor response, writing that “A better leader would have flown straight to the disaster zone....”

By Thursday New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was in tears. “Get off your asses and do something!” he pleaded in an interview. Even Ted Koppel was exasperated by the bungled efforts. He told Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff, “Here we are essentially five days after the storm hit and you’re talking about what’s going to happen in the next couple of days.... You didn’t make preparations for what was going to happen in the event that [a category four storm hit]. Why didn’t you?”

Serious Funding Cuts
Perhaps the most damning evidence of poor leadership from the White House is the funding diverted from New Orleans last summer for the war in Iraq. In June 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, said that money for levee repair had been moved for Homeland Security and the war in Iraq.

In 2001, FEMA reported that a hurricane hitting New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S. But the Bush administration cut funding for New Orleans flood control by 44% to pay for the Iraq war. Emergency managers in New Orleans had been warned that the levee system could break in a major hurricane. And yet this week Bush told Diane Sawyer, “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.”

The simple fact of the matter is that with a staggering national deficit run up by the Republicans, it is not possible to run a war and have enough money for natural disasters. We have to choose between Biloxi and Baghdad. — T