From The Times of London

Focus: When the levees broke, the waters

rose and Bush’s credibility sank with

New Orleans
Link Here
The president tumbled to the epic scale of the disaster far, far too late, says Andrew Sullivan

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.

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.

On Friday, 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 onto the talk shows and cable television last week.

The reaction from Washington seemed more like one of mourning about a disaster that had happened and was over, not mobilisation to prevent and counter a catastrophe that was still in full swing.

As for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, it soon became a joke. After CNN had shown scenes of chaos in the New Orleans Convention Center — 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 center to make sure that they have the food and water, the medical care that they need.”

The same day, Chertoff scolded a National Public Radio reporter for asking about the chaos at the convention center, telling him not to believe rumours, and that food and water were being delivered to anyone who needed them. The disconnect between rhetoric and reality seemed vast. Anyone with a television seemed to know more than the men assigned to manage the disaster. To add insult to injury, President 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, American citizens were still helpless across the region; and yet the president was “satisfied”. Over two years after the invasion of Iraq, the road to the 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 the effort in Iraq to succeed, Bush’s response to Katrina can only be grim news.

That disaster exposed something else that few want to discuss: race and class. New Orleans is a city that has barely ever functioned effectively, and that was part of its charm. But it was also a city in which the enormous gulf between rich and poor was wider than elsewhere. When you look at the images of those stranded and left behind, they are overwhelmingly poor and black.

The wealthier and better informed escaped. And abandoned by their government, with bodies floating in the water, this underclass vented its rage.

A CNN host, receiving an avalanche of angry e-mails and calls, declared: “I’m 62. I remember the riots in Watts, I remember the earthquake in San Francisco, I remember a lot of things. I have never, ever, seen anything as bungled and as poorly handled as this situation in New Orleans. Where the hell is the water for these people? Why can’t sandwiches be dropped to those people in the Superdome? What is going on? This is a disgrace.” The Superdome itself became a scene from a Mad Max movie, with rumours of child rapes, suicides and overwhelming stench of overflowing toilets and spreading disease. Looking at corpses left stranded for days on the street, one resident told the Associated Press: “I don’t treat my dog like that.”

There was a sense that if this had happened in a largely white city, the response would have been far more urgent. There was a sense that the largely poor underclass in New Orleans was dispensable, that they could wait for help, that they should have left anyway. The fact that many were too poor to have cars or an easy alternative destination seemed to pass many by.

And the crime and looting that followed merely reinforced these prejudices and generalisations.

ch has been achieved in America this past decade in rescuing the poor and the black from welfare dependency and crime. But New Orleans is a terribly poor city: 50% of its children live below the poverty line, and when the tide rose, they sank first.



Of course, the president cannot be blamed for an act of God. And the authorities cannot be held responsible for generations of poor governance. But Bush can be held accountable for cutting the funds needed to repair the levees and the slack, casual way he first responded. In 1906, after the San Francisco earthquake, the first federal aid arrived two hours after the first shock. With today’s technology and infrastructure, people were still stranded in New Orleans five days after the hurricane. On the day Katrina hit, the president continued with a tour to promote his new medicare entitlement; he was with a man who had defended white supremacy, and was photographed playing the guitar and laughing.

On some cable channels, they began to run a ticking clock of the days and hours that people had been left abandoned. It reminded me of the televised reminders in the 1970s of how many days had passed since Americans had been taken hostage in Iran. In short: Bush, seemingly oblivious to the public relations disaster unfolding, began to look as if he could get Carter-ised.

The Bush-haters, of course, piled it on. But conservatives were not happy either. What this revealed was a staggering lack of organisation for emergency procedures four years after 9/11.

I received an e-mail from a Republican Las Vegas police officer trained in emergency management: “Some people say that you can’t hold the president responsible for this. Oh, yes you can. Because when he looked over at John Ashcroft after the jets hit the towers and said, ‘I want you to make sure this never happens again’, it was not meant to be specific to ‘no more planes hitting large buildings on the East Coast, right, boss’. It was meant that no American should have to run for his life through an American city. While Americans may perish in a senseless, unforeseen disaster, we’d save the ones we could . . . Ask yourself this: What if Al-Qaeda blew up the levees instead of the hurricane? Would the response have been any different?”

The president’s approval ratings were already in the very low 40s. The tracking poll of his response to the crisis showed discontent rising fast. By Friday, 70% were saying the government had not done enough; and a majority disapproved of the president’s handling of the crisis. At times like this, people normally rally round their president. This time, many are turning on him. And my sense is that this is just the beginning. On Friday the Republican Senator Susan Collins announced her intent to launch an investigation into what went wrong. Members of the Black Congressional Caucus said they were “ashamed of America”.

What harm can come to Bush? Not much: except a worrying weakening of his ability to carry the public for the war in Iraq. A competent Democrat could clean up with a message to restore government for the people rather than for special interests. But these days, a competent Democrat is an oxymoron. Hillary has been silent. She figures she need do nothing but let the anger vent on Bush.

But in Republican circles, one real change may have occurred. In a matter of days, Rudy Giuliani’s chances of becoming the next president improved drastically. What people want now is someone who can make the federal government work again. They want an executive who can fight a war and keep them safe. Nobody represents that kind of need better than Giuliani. His social liberalism — which makes him anathema to the religious fundamentalists who control the Republican party — would be overwhelmed by his appeal to law-and-order Republicans. Those 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.

LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON

Accusations that George W Bush has done too little too late to bring relief to America’s southern states devastated by hurricane Katrina echo criticism of his father’s actions 13 years ago, writes Gareth Walsh.

Andrew, a category 5 hurricane — Katrina was category 4 — hit Florida on August 24, 1992 killing at least 15 people and leaving thousands homeless. Damage was estimated at $26.5 billion.

Initially Bush Sr made a good start by flying to Florida just hours after the hurricane hit. The following day he toured devastated areas of Louisiana.

Commentators drew a favourable contrast with his performance after hurricane Hugo in 1989, when it had taken him a week to visit Charleston, South Carolina.

At first the relief operation seemed to go well. Additional troops were drafted into south Florida, 2,000 tons of supplies were shipped in and $300m was allocated to finance recovery efforts. But, as with Katrina, law and order broke down in the damaged cities when it took longer than expected to get aid to the people who needed it most.

Bush was thrown onto the defensive as Bill Clinton, then the Democratic presidential candidate, attacked him over the delays in delivering federal aid.

A scrawl by one frustrated householder on the roof of a wrecked home in Florida city put it bluntly: “Bush, if you want to get re-elected, help”, it read.

Bush was ousted from the White House by Clinton just over two months later.