Washington
What did Katrina tell us? Much we already knew. Our politics is as poisoned as in the Nixon era. Even the worst disasters are exploited to score on one’s enemy.
Where September 11 united us, Katrina divides us anew. No sooner had she made landfall than Robert Kennedy Jr was accusing the beleaguered Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour of moral complicity in the disaster — for having opposed the Kyoto Protocol.
As it became apparent that African– Americans, two thirds of New Orleans’s population and almost all its poor, had stayed behind or been left behind, the race card was played. Bush was indifferent, it was said, because those suffering most were black. But when the looters and rapists turned out to be black, and the army and National Guard and aid workers rescuing the victims turned out to be white, the race-baiters got a deserved hiding from the radio Right.
The anti-war movement seized on the 7,000 Guard troops from Louisiana and Mississippi in Iraq. Were these soldiers not in the Persian Gulf taking Iraqi lives, it was said, they would have been on the Gulf of Mexico saving American lives. But five days after the storm hit, the White House regained its footing. The 82nd Airborne was in New Orleans. Guard troops were pouring in. The tens of thousands mired in the squalor and terror of the Superdome and Convention Center had all been evacuated. And the Bush spin doctors had tied the can to the hapless mayor of New Orleans and Governor Blanco of Louisiana.
The turnaround was impressive. Yet Bush’s reputation for leadership has suffered grievous damage. Even his own backers blame the President for flying off to the west, after the hurricane hit, to fiddle with a gift guitar from a country singer and talk about matters unrelated to the worst disaster in American history. Katrina may do as much to bring Bush down as 9/11 did to raise him up. Not only did the administration slash the Army Corps of Engineers’ budget for the levees that held back Lake Pontchartrain, but the Department of Homeland Security and Fema, its subsidiary, responded with torpor, confusion and incompetence, though the nation knew for days that a monster storm was charging up the Gulf.
‘Who Lost New Orleans?’ is the question of the hour. And Democrats will not let slip this opportunity to cripple Bush, even if means their own mayor and Governor Blanco end up as collateral damage. If they do not overplay their hand, like the race-baiters, they and their media auxiliaries can make Americans forget the leader who stood atop the pile of rubble in Manhattan, and reinvent Bush as a man of callous disregard who heads a blundering regime that has contributed to the death of more Americans than died on 9/11. Sensing Bush’s weakness, editorial writers are proposing that, as part of the healing process, he nominate a ‘centrist’ to replace Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. Should Bush comply with the demands of these extortion notes, the betrayal would break his presidency.
For George W. Bush, it has been the vacation from hell. His approval rating is as low as it has ever been. He is on the amnesty side, the liberal side, of the immigration crisis, when even the canny Democratic Governor of New Mexico, Bill Richardson, has declared a state of emergency, hailing as patriots the ‘Minutemen’, those volunteer border-watchers Bush dismissed as ‘vigilantes’. And each August day he drove off his Crawford ranch, Bush had to pass Cindy Sheehan and Camp Casey. As Claudius reminded us, ‘When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.’
The Bush Doctrine — no Axis of Evil nation will be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons — is being defied by North Korea and Iran, and the EU3 are balking at hauling the mullahs before the Security Council. Half the country believes Iraq was a mistake and wants out. The Sunnis intend to sink the constitution. Bush’s latest policy line — ‘As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down’ — prompts a question: how can US-trained Iraqis crush an insurgency when their US trainers, the finest soldiers in the world, could not?
America remains a superpower, but seriously overstretched. With armed forces of 1.2 million, we are fighting insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, have troops in scores of countries, and are committed to defend dozens of others all over the world. The US budget is $400 billion in deficit, as 77 million Baby Boomers approach retirement age and eligibility for social security and Medicare. Either the Bush tax cuts go and we recruit hundreds of thousands more troops, or the war guarantees must be re-assessed and the empire abandoned.
My feeling is that when the time comes to choose, the empire goes. Message from Katrina: come home, America.
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