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	Can Bush survive Nature's Fury? by Gordon Adams, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto Baltimore Sun / The Independent / The Guardian USA   08 September 2005   "After Katrina Fiasco, Time for Bush to Go", by Gordon Adams. (The Baltimore Sun)   The disastrous federal response to Katrina exposes a record of incompetence, misjudgment and ideological blinders that should lead to serious doubts that the Bush administration should be allowed to continue in office.   When taxpayers have raised, borrowed and spent $40 billion to $50 billion a year for the past four years for homeland security but the officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency cannot find their own hands in broad daylight for four days while New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast swelter, drown and die, it is time for them to go.   When funding for water works and levees in the gulf region is repeatedly cut by an administration that seems determined to undermine the public responsibility for infrastructure in America, despite clear warnings that the infrastructure could not survive a major storm, it seems clear someone is playing politics with the public trust.   When rescue and medical squads are sitting in Manassas and elsewhere in northern Virginia and foreign assistance waits at airports because the government can't figure out how to insure the workers, how to use the assistance or which jurisdiction should be in charge, it is time for the administration to leave town.   When President Bush stays on vacation and attends social functions for two days in the face of disaster before finally understanding that people are starving, crying out and dying, it is time for him to go.   When FEMA officials cannot figure out that there are thousands stranded at the New Orleans convention center - where people died and were starving - and fussed ineffectively about the same problems in the Superdome, they should be fired, not praised, as the president praised FEMA Director Michael Brown in New Orleans last week.   When Mr. Bush states publicly that "nobody could anticipate a breach of the levee" while New Orleans journalists, Scientific American, National Geographic, academic researchers and Louisiana politicians had been doing precisely that for decades, right up through last year and even as Hurricane Katrina passed over, he should be laughed out of town as an impostor.   When repeated studies of New Orleans make it clear that tens of thousands of people would be unable to evacuate the city in case of a flood, lacking both money and transportation, but FEMA makes no effort before the storm to commandeer buses and move them to safety, it is time for someone to be given his walking papers.   When the president makes Sen. Trent Lott's house in Pascagoula, Miss., the poster child for rebuilding while hundreds of thousands are bereft of housing, jobs, electricity and security, he betrays a careless insensitivity that should banish him from office.   When the president of the United States points the finger away from the lame response of his administration to Katrina and tries to finger local officials in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, La., as the culprits, he betrays the unwillingness of this administration to speak truth and hold itself accountable. As in the case of the miserable execution of policy in Iraq, Mr. Bush and Karl Rove always have some excuse for failure other than their own misjudgments.   We have a president who is apparently ill-informed, lackadaisical and narrow-minded, surrounded by oil baron cronies, religious fundamentalist crazies and right-wing extremists and ideologues. He has appointed officials who give incompetence new meaning, who replace the positive role of government with expensive baloney.   They rode into office in a highly contested election, spouting a message of bipartisanship but determined to undermine the federal government in every way but defense (and, after 9/11, one presumed, homeland security). One with Grover Norquist, they were determined to shrink Washington until it was "small enough to drown in a bathtub." Katrina has stripped the veil from this mean-spirited strategy, exposing the greed, mindlessness and sheer profiteering behind it.   It is time to hold them accountable - this ugly, troglodyte crowd of Capital Beltway insiders, rich lawyers, ideologues, incompetents and their strap-hangers should be tarred, feathered and ridden gracefully and mindfully out of Washington and returned to their caves, clubs in hand.   (Gordon Adams, is director of security policy studies at the Elliott School of International Affairs at the George Washington University).   September 6, 2005   "Can Bush survive Nature's Fury", by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto. (The Independent)   Teflon helped Bill Clinton slide out of disasters. George Bush seems coated with armour plating: dense, dull and impenetrable. Terrorists hurl fire and bombs; political opponents let fly insults and derision; Bush's own incompetence bombards him with boomerangs. Most recently, Cindy Sheehan has assailed the President with a mother's tears, which might have found a way to corrode his breastplate or trickle through the chinks. Yet Bush carries on, battered but essentially undamaged.   Armour, however, is no protection against flood. Disasters usually distract critics, silence malcontents, flatter leaders, and improve presidents' ratings. Not this time. Katrina could be the storm that finally scatters Bush's strangely tenacious following.   It is not just that he has handled the crisis badly. His first response was a bemused look, reminiscent of his mental paralysis at the news of 9/11. He then committed a terrible blunder, telling disaster victims to "take personal responsibility". The individualist message was miscalculated, offensive to the altruism that disasters always ignite. Next, the President seemed to think that it was more important to stop the looting than to save lives. His gaffes don't end. In storm-torn Biloxi, he referred two distraught women, who collapsed in his arms, to the Salvation Army shelter.   Not even Canute could stop the waves, and the ludicrous inadequacy of the coastal defences was a long-standing scandal that the region's state authorities, not just the Federal Government, had neglected. But the victims grew angry because of the slowness of the President's response, the inadequacy of federal funding, the shameful facts of federal agencies' indifference to warnings, and the helplessness of the Government in the face of growing chaos and suffering. Bush became a new Nero, fiddling while New Orleans flooded.   The terrible truth is now out: the Government cut flood prevention funds to pay for war. So far, the question hasn't been asked, but you can see it between the lines in the press and sense it trembling on millions of lips: if the Government can find money and manpower for Baghdad, why not for Biloxi? On Friday, five days after the disaster, Congress voted $US10 billion ($A13 billion) of relief aid. Nobody around the Gulf Coast feels grateful. "Not before time," they say.   Countless unbiased journalists have reported how non-government agencies, charitable institutions, and philanthropic individuals took care of Katrina's victims, while the authorities' efforts seemed invisible - as if the whole operation were a gruesome exercise in privatisation. It took five days for the circling helicopters to rescue survivors, five days for the National Guard to arrive with food and water for those stranded in New Orleans. Americans are bound to make a so far unspoken, but glaringly obvious, comparison with the resolve the Government shows when it tackles the President's real priorities: war, power, petroleum, environmental profligacy.   For deeper reasons, the present crisis is particularly challenging for Bush. Like his counterparts in al-Qaeda, Bush is a fundamentalist, with beliefs undisciplined by science or reason. The more he bangs on about prayers for the victims of disaster, the more he invites the obvious ripostes. On the one hand, hostile fanatics claim Katrina was a ray from God's zapper, shot to immobilise a limb of the Great Satan. On the other, the secularists sneer with the usual taunt in the face of disasters: "Where is God?"   The President is not theologically supple enough to answer effectively. Maybe this is why he looks bemused: is he still sure of having his God's approval?   Under the "yah boo" exchanges of religious and irreligious zealotry lurks a serious issue. Bush has staked his reputation on eco-scepticism. He doesn't believe in global warming. He shelves environmental projects. He despises Kyoto. He dismisses predictions that nature's revenge will swamp human arrogance. After Katrina, Bush's appraisals of environmental threats look worthless.   Bad news for the disaster victims is bad news for the President. And the bad news keeps coming. After days immured in the foetid refuge of the Superdome in New Orleans, thousands of hungry, filthy, critically dehydrated, penniless, virtually shirtless refugees - most of whom were black - were stranded for hours in buses that the police turned away from an overcrowded emergency camp in Houston.   In the foul, corpse-strewn, sewer-like streets of New Orleans, the crisis has entered a new phase. The psychology of altruism has evaporated. To begin with, it was "women and children first". Now it's "every man for himself", in a horrifying caricature of Bush's philosophy of individualism. Looters kill for the spoils of catastrophe, as predatory as the roaming alligators that have come in from the wetlands. Estimated numbers of dead keep rising.   A second disaster looms: the long-term health of people who have been dehydrated, starved, deprived of medication, and marooned in cities that have become insanitary swamps. By Friday, the relief effort was just beginning to look organised - but the horror stories and recriminations will drive the successes out of the news. They multiply hourly: abandoned prison inmates leaping to their deaths after days without water; doctors overcome by the stench in hospitals where the lavatories can't be flushed; hundreds dying, while waiting for a rescue vessel that is anchored in red tape.   The rest of America has rallied. Despite the Lone Ranger rhetoric of freedom, amazing reserves of solidarity bind US society. It starts with neighbourliness, swells into civic pride, and becomes patriotism. My university opened its classes to students displaced from the Gulf Coast, helping to lead a similar movement around the nation. Schools where refugees have taken shelter have done the same. Disaster relief has become a national, rather than a federal, effort. The Government is outdone, engulfed and isolated by a wave of sympathy for fellow citizens in distress.   Regional authorities in the Mississippi Delta who failed to foresee the tragedy are, for the moment, escaping most of the resentment. Governor Hailey Barber of Mississippi disarmingly confesses failure while wanting to make up for it. People believe Barber when he promises that "we're gonna hitch up our britches". Bush, meanwhile, keeps promising a better future, when what the victims want is present relief. His uneasy optimism seems reflected in the gleaming eyes of fat-cat friends, prowling for prospective reconstruction contracts.   When the terrorists struck on 9/11, Bush could make any number of mistakes, and still gain in popularity, because there were aliens on hand to hate. This time Bush cannot rail against God or, with his environmental record, make an enemy of nature. He cannot bomb the sea or invade the wind. God and nature are on the same side, and they no longer look like America's coalition partners. Even in the context of a natural occurrence, where there is no real enemy, people still need to hate and long for vengeance. Slowly, inexorably, with a chilling uniformity, the accusing gazes are focusing on the White House.   (Felipe Fernandez-Armesto lectures at Tufts University, Massachusetts, and is visiting professor of global environmental history at Queen Mary College, London).   September 6, 2005   "Disaster lays bare America's dark side", by Jonathan Freedland. (the Guardian)   The water flows in and the water flows out, washing away all that once lay on the surface - and revealing what lies beneath. So it is with all floods in all places, but now it is America that stands exposed. And neither America nor the world likes what it sees.   The first revelation was not spoken in words, but written on the faces of those left behind. Television viewers from Brussels to Bangalore could not help but notice it, and Americans from Buffalo to Bakersfield could not deny it. The women pleading for their lives in handwritten signs, the children clinging to tree branches, the prisoners herded on to a jail roof — they were overwhelmingly black.   This will not be news to most Americans. They know that a racial divide still haunts their country, as it has from its very founding. Like a character in a Shakespearean tragedy, race is America's fatal flaw, the weakness that so often brings it low.   Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, could see the danger. "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just," he wrote in 1785, reflecting on the crime that was slavery. "His justice cannot sleep forever."   Time and again, America has been forced to wake up to the racial injustice that has been its historic curse. It was the source of a civil war in the 19th century and of repeated battles through the 20th. From the desegregation and civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s to the Los Angeles riots and even the O.J. Simpson trial of the 1990s, America has undergone periodic reminders that it is in the relationship between black and white that it has failed to honour its own, animating ideals.   Katrina has rammed home that message once more, with lacerating force. White Americans, who regarded New Orleans as a kind of playground, a place to enjoy the carnal pleasures of music, food, drink and more, have learned things about that city — and therefore their society — that they would probably have preferred not to know. They have discovered that it was mainly white folks who lived on the higher, safer ground, while poorer, black families had to huddle in the cheaper, low-lying housing — that race, in other words, determined who got hit.   They have also learned that 35 per cent of black households in the area did not have a car. Or that the staff and guests of the Hyatt Hotel were evacuated first, while the rest, the mainly poor and black, were at the back of the queue. Or that 28 per cent of the people of New Orleans live in poverty and that 84 per cent of those are black. Or that some people in that city were so poor they did not have the money even to catch a bus out of town — that race, in other words, determined who got left behind.   Most Americans want to believe that kind of inequality belongs in the past, in the school textbooks. But Katrina has shaken them from that delusion.   They have had to face another painful truth. Their Government has proved itself incompetent. Yes, it could act quickly once it had decided to act — but it idled for days. This disastrous performance will surely saddle the remainder of George Bush's presidency, just as the botched Desert One rescue of American hostages from the besieged US embassy in Tehran hobbled that of Jimmy Carter.   But the shock may do more than shift perceptions of the current administration. For 25 years, the dominant US ideology has been to shrink the state. "Government is not the solution to our problem," declared Ronald Reagan. "Government is the problem." That defined the limits for state activism thereafter. After decades of energetic government programs, from Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal in the 1930s to Lyndon Johnson's Great Society in the 1960s, the state was compelled to retreat. Taxes would go down and the government would do less.   Mr Bush personifies that ideology with more vigour than anyone since Reagan. Yet now, after Katrina, the national mood might alter. Americans have seen where small government leads. The authorities in Louisiana, including the military, pleaded long ago with Washington to reinforce the levees. The Army Corps of Engineers asked for $US105 million ($A137 million): the White House gave them $US40 million.   It is conceivable that Americans will now call a halt to their quarter-century experiment in limited government — and the neglected infrastructure that has entailed. There are some tasks, they may conclude, which neither individuals nor private companies can do alone — and evacuating tens of thousands of people from a drowning city is one of them.   Yesterday The New York Times' resident conservative columnist, David Brooks, wondered if there could now be a "progressive resurgence". There is a precedent. After an earlier Louisiana disaster, the flood of 1927, there was public outrage that not a single federal dollar had gone to feed or shelter the victims: the army had even demanded reimbursement from the Red Cross for the use of its tents. From now on, the public resolved, the federal government would have to protect the vulnerable. That shift paved the way for the activism of Franklin Roosevelt and all that followed. Nearly 80 years on, history might be about to repeat itself.   Finally, America will have to get over the shock of seeing itself in a new, unflattering light. It is not just the lawlessness, violence and gun culture that has been on show in New Orleans. It is also that America likes to think of itself as the "indispensable nation", the strongest, richest, most capable country on earth.   That belief had already taken a few blows. The vulnerability exposed on 9/11 was one. The struggle in Iraq — where America has become a Gulliver, tied down — is another. But now the giant has been hit again, its weak spot exposed. When corpses float in the streets for five days, the indispensable nation looks like a society that cannot take care of its own. When Sri Lanka offers to send emergency aid, the humiliation is complete.   That could lead to a shift in priorities, a sense that too much energy was diverted to Iraq and Afghanistan. It could even see the US retreating from the world.   But don't count on it. In the 1970s, US confidence was also shaken — by defeat in Vietnam, by the serial failure (and worse) of government institutions. What followed, after the interval of the Carter presidency, was a period of gung-ho bullishness that became the Reagan era. It may look battered — but only a fool would count America out.
	Earth to The President: Warnings ignored at your Peril by Andrew Sullivan The Sunday Times / The Guardian   September 4, 2005 (Sunday Times)   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 defenses. 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 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."   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.   Republicans know when an almighty error has been made. And last week, their president failed them.   September 5, 2005   "Bush team tries to pin blame on local officials", by Julian Borger. (The Guardian)   Bush administration officials yesterday blamed state and local officials for the delays in bringing relief to New Orleans, as the president struggled to fend off the most serious political crisis of his presidency.   His top officials continued to be pilloried on television talk shows by liberals and conservatives alike, but the White House began to show signs of an evolving strategy to prevent the relief fiasco from eclipsing the president's second term.   The outrage over the government's relief effort has hit Mr Bush at a time when he is already weakened by the gruelling war in Iraq. The threat is not only to his place in history; it could also cripple his second-term agenda, undermining his plans to privatise the social security system and to end inheritance tax.   Mr Bush also faces a much more difficult task in appointing an ideological conservative to take the supreme court seat of William Rehnquist, who died on Saturday.   The White House drew encouragement from an initial poll suggesting most Republican voters were sticking by him, and his supporters also pointed to Mr Bush's track record of recovering from mistakes. His initial response to the September 11 attacks was also sharply criticised. With that in mind, the first plank in the political recovery strategy has been to try to make up for lost time. On Saturday Mr Bush ordered 7,000 more troops to the Gulf coast.   As important as the content of the speech was its sombre tone. It was clear the White House realised that making a joke about his young hell-raising days in New Orleans in the course of a flying visit to the flooded city on Friday, was a mistake that reinforced allegations he had failed to take the disaster seriously enough.   The White House also announced yesterday that the president had cancelled public engagements, instead, he was due to return to the scene of the devastation.   The second element of the White House plan is to insist, in an echo of the September 11 attacks, that the scale of the disaster, the combination of a hurricane and the collapse of the levee system around New Orleans, could not have been foreseen.   Mr Bush was castigated for saying on Wednesday: "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees". It was pointed out that there had been a string of investigations and reports in recent years which had predicted the disaster almost exactly.   Nevertheless, administration officials stuck to the line yesterday. In a string of television interviews, Michael Chertoff, the head of the homeland security department, called the situation an "ultra-catastrophe", as if the hurricane and flood were unrelated events. "That 'perfect storm' of a combination of catastrophes exceeded the foresight of the planners, and maybe anybody's foresight," he said.   The third element in the administration's political response has been to counter-attack against the blame directed at the federal authorities, particularly the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) and its parent body, the homeland security department.   In his weekend radio address, Mr Bush implied many of the problems had been caused by lower levels of government. The scale of the crisis "has created tremendous problems that have strained state and local capabilities. The result is that many of our citizens simply are not getting the help they need, especially in New Orleans. And that is unacceptable."   Unnamed White House officials, quoted in the Washington Post, directed blame at the Louisiana governor, Kathleen Blanco, a Democrat, for being slow to call for outside help and to declare a state of emergency. Ms Blanco, meanwhile, resisted a federal attempt to take over control of local police and national guard units - an attempt some Louisiana officials saw as a political manoeuvre that would help blame the weak response in the first week on the state.   The depth of America's polarisation could prove a bulwark preventing Mr Bush's political support from collapsing altogether. A poll by the Washington Post and ABC News on Friday night, showed that, of those questioned, 46% approved of the way the president had handled the relief efforts while 47% disapproved.   The spotlight began to turn yesterday on Michael Brown, the head of Fema, who had minimal emergency management experience before joining the agency in 2001, and had spent the previous 10 years organising horse shows for the International Arabian Horse Association. Press reports claimed he had had to leave that job because of questions about his performance.
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