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| September 2, 2005 | ||||
The Disastrous Proof of a Failed Foreign Policy: The Specter of New Orleans |
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| by Christopher Deliso | ||||
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Had it been a terrorist attack, half of the earth's surface would no doubt have been vaporized by American nuclear bombs by now. Yet for all its trickery and deceit, even the Bush administration can't blame the flattening of New Orleans on terrorists. Nor can it hide behind a wall of red-blooded bluster, demanding bloody retaliation against evil, for the act of violence that has left the Gulf (America's, this time) devastated was a random act of nature. Or was it? After all, it's not as if the southeastern United States is afflicted annually by hurricanes or anything… Accidents Waiting to Happen Indeed, Hurricane Katrina was eminently predictable. In another way, so was the terrorist onslaught of Sept. 11. For the lay meteorologists of foreign policy who recognized well in advance that the U.S. had made itself a target of Islamic extremists, precisely because of its military presence in the Middle East and unconditional support for Israel, the attacks were pretty much inevitable. The latter catastrophe has so far led to two wars marked by lies and an utter lack of official accountability. But the former disaster, if we're lucky, just might lead us out of the morass generated by Bush's reaction to the terrorists – if, as seems far more likely this time around, the president won't be able to evade the "accountability moment" he said had transpired successfully with his reelection. For as commentators like Paul Craig Roberts and Norman Solomon have been quick to point out, the War Party's obsession with invading Iraq has directly and needlessly exacerbated Hurricane Katrina's destructive power – which now reflects rather poorly on their judgment. According to the Washington Post, the National Guard troops of the two states afflicted – Mississippi and Louisiana – are for the most part fighting in, or recovering from, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The hurricane's massive damage is now "stretching the limits of available manpower." According to the article, Mississippi's National Guard currently has over 4,000 soldiers lost to the Iraq campaign, while Louisiana has about 3,000 troops in Baghdad alone. "Missing the personnel is the big thing in this particular event. We need our people," stated Mississippi National Guard Spokesman Lt. Andy Thaggard to the Post. Lacking enough local troops to deal with this massive humanitarian disaster, the Pentagon has had to call in thousands more from distant states. But it gets worse. As with 9/11, certain preventative measures could have been taken beforehand that would have greatly minimized Katrina's destructive power. While the Bush administration contradicts its own intelligence services in claiming that that no one could have seen the terrorist attacks of 2001 coming, it is shocking now to see how ill-prepared the government was to deal with something that is basically an annual threat. After all, were a blizzard to strike Hawaii, no one would blame the Honolulu Fire Department for not having stocked enough snowplows. Yet having detailed advanced evacuation plans in an endemic hurricane zone is something completely different. Indeed, as Paul Craig Roberts implies, the Battle of N'Orleans is where the president might get a crack at his second accountability moment: "Distracted by its phony war on terrorism, the U.S. government had made no preparations in the event Hurricane Katrina brought catastrophe to New Orleans. No contingency plan existed. Only now after the disaster are FEMA and the Corps of Engineers trying to assemble the material and equipment to save New Orleans from the fate of Atlantis. "Even worse, articles in the New Orleans Times-Picayune and public statements by emergency management chiefs in New Orleans make it clear that the Bush administration slashed the funding for the Corps of Engineers' projects to strengthen and raise the New Orleans levees and diverted the money to the Iraq war. "Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, told the New Orleans Times-Picayune (June 8, 2004): '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.'" Sadly, the "war on terror" that every state and county cashed in on in the aftermath of Avoidable Disaster No. 1 resulted in a needless allocation of millions of dollars to places where they weren't likely to ever be used. This lamentable triumph of pork-barrel politics owed as much to the greed of elected officials as it did to the total (and continuing) failure to do honest risk assessments. Indeed, al-Qaeda in Tiptonville, Tenn., or a hurricane in New Orleans? It's too tough to call… A Lament for Exit Strategies There are some debates that just shouldn't have to exist. Often, they derive from unjustifiable wars. And so while for the past two years the pundits have been debating the need for an "exit strategy" for Iraq, and what such a strategy would involve, when it would be implemented, etc., it seems that this little distraction helped to keep American leaders firmly focused away from thinking of far more likely exit strategies in the homeland itself. For just as shocking as the reappropriation of manpower and material equipment for the Iraq adventure is the apparent lack of what could less figuratively be described as an exit strategy for New Orleans – that is, how to get the thousands of victims the hell out of town while maintaining at least some semblance of law and order. Essentially, what the initial reports – of unruly mobs, arson and looting, armed gangs firing at police and aid helicopters – reveal is that securing the exit of New Orleans resembles quite remarkably the American entrance into Baghdad. And the horrifying descriptions of carnage could just as well have come from any ordinary day in Iraq: "[A]n old man in a chaise lounge lay dead in a grassy median as hungry babies wailed around him. Around the corner, an elderly woman lay dead in her wheelchair, covered with a blanket, and another body lay beside her wrapped in a sheet." And then the kicker: "'I don't treat my dog like that,' 47-year-old Daniel Edwards said as he pointed at the woman in the wheelchair. 'I buried my dog.' He added: '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.'" It took an unprecedented tragedy to do it, but it looks like the government's indefensibly wrong priorities are finally starting to become obvious, even to war supporters. It will be very interesting to see over the next few weeks and months how the War Party can continue to justify "staying the course" in destructive overseas missions, even as New Orleans and the southern coast lie in ruins. In short, in its random wrath and apolitical existence, a natural disaster may just do what Cindy Sheehan, for all her incontestable moral authority, could not: galvanize a politically diverse majority of Americans to demand their elected officials take care of their needs before those of foreigners. A Specter of Self-Condemnation And this is precisely where the spectacle of New Orleans takes on frightening and ugly dimensions. It exists as a direct indictment of the hubristic government's belief in limitless resources and endless wars. It is, in fact, a ghastly manifestation of foreign policy gone wrong. And so the hurricane's aftermath becomes a garish, distorted reflection of all of America's modern wars rolled up into one. The busloads of refugees, and their fetid holding pen in the Louisiana Superdome, conjure up images of the Kosovo refugee crisis of 1999, another needless tragedy caused directly by American bombing. The lawlessness, thievery, and gunfire on city streets are eerily reminiscent of the wave of looting that followed American tanks into Iraq's capital in spring of 2003. The rotting corpses and terrorized residents in New Orleans share the same experience with ordinary people in Iraq, who continue to suffer the outcome of America's failure to leave a country where it is clearly unwanted. And finally, framing it all, the stunning photos of a flattened city directly evoke painful memories of that other Ground Zero, the one that began it all, almost exactly four years ago. As was the case then, amidst the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center, the specter of New Orleans exists as a reproach to a government whose foreign policy has been very successfully in one thing – putting America last. …And a Betrayal There is another kind of precedent for the disaster, of course. The great San Francisco earthquake of 1906 resulted in identical destruction, mayhem, and looting, and the National Guard was also there to help. An editorial from that time put their contribution in context: "[T]he work done and still being done by the National Guard of California will be long and gratefully remembered by the people of San Francisco and the State. The Minute Men and the Old Continentals were the National Guard of their day. "They were the National Guard (militia) that fought through the Revolution. Our present National Guard is descended in direct official line from those citizen soldiers that stood, yielding not, at Saratoga, Ticonderoga, Stony Point and Yorktown, and have proved themselves worthy of their ancestors." By ensuring that Louisiana's National Guardsmen are kept far from home in Iraq, locked in a pointless war of attrition, prevented from saving their own kin and ordered to kill foreigners instead, President Bush is dishonoring this proud legacy. |
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Christopher Deliso is an American journalist, travel writer and author concentrating on the Balkans and Southeast Europe, where he has lived and traveled for almost a decade. His criticisms of interventionist foreign policy can be found in his writings for Antiwar.com, and in his recent work on the West's failures to eradicate foreign-funded Muslim extremists in the Balkans, The Coming Balkan Caliphate: The Threat of Radical Islam to Europe and the West (Praeger Security International, 2007). Mr Deliso directs the Balkan-interest news and analysis website, Balkanalysis.com and is also the author of a travelogue, Hidden Macedonia (Haus Publishing, London). He holds an MPhil with distinction in Byzantine Studies from Oxford University.
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