Daily Mail, 5 September 2005

Hurricane Katrina has done more than reshape the geographical landscape of the southern states of America. It has also landed a pulverising blow on its political landscape, from which it may be even harder to recover.

As relief finally arrived for the stricken survivors of the catastrophe, a political salvage operation was also getting under way to counter the savage condemnation raining down on President Bush from all sides. But the repercussions go far wider and deeper than the political reputation of one man.

America has undergone two seismic shocks in the past four years. First was 9/11 which destroyed its hitherto intact sense of invulnerability. Traumatic as that was, however, it reinforced its belief in its own heroic image and transformed American policy accordingly, with enormous consequences for the rest of the world.

By contrast, Katrina’s impact is lethal. For this disaster has struck hard at America’s sense of it own omnipotence. Its unrivalled sense of itself as the best and most powerful country on the planet which can do literally anything that it wants now lies at the bottom of the sea of sewage and decomposing bodies that has obliterated one of America’s great cities and turned an area larger than the size of Great Britain into a disaster zone.

Disbelieving Americans have had to face the fact that for day after agonising day the world’s greatest superpower was unable to provide food, water and medical supplies to the thousands stranded by the flood, unable to scramble buses or planes to evacuate them, unable to do anything while an unknown number of victims died not from the impact of nature’s savagery but from astounding American incompetence.

Of course no-one should be blamed for a natural calamity of enormous ferocity. But human agency — or more to the point, the lack of it — was the cause of an untold loss of human life.

True, the disaster has handed the many enemies of America and President Bush a golden opportunity to exploit it for political ends. With undisguised gloating, they have claimed that the hurricane was caused by global warming, or that the looting and anarchy took place because part of the National Guard was tied up in Iraq —and that both are the President’s fault.

Both claims, however, are demonstrably absurd. Hurricanes are no stronger or more frequent now than they ever were. As for the National Guard, they were there all the time; 7000 additional troops have now turned up and started restoring order. They hadn’t been sent previously simply because no-one with the faintest idea was in charge and the management of the relief operation was a complete shambles at every level.

In New Orleans and Louisiana, attempts to rebuild the flood defences were mired in bureaucracy as fragmented as it was corrupt — even though everyone knew what was coming. Several years ago, emergency planners predicted that the destruction of New Orleans by a hurricane was the third most likely disaster to hit the US behind a terrorist attack on New York and an earthquake in California.

But they did nothing because they complacently assumed the defences would hold. And so when disaster struck there was no rescue plan that could cope — just endless buck-passing and obstructive rivalries.

Nevertheless, President Bush’s own absence of leadership has also been lamentable. He failed to visit the stricken area until way too late; he consistently claimed things were under control even while the TV screens were showing people starving to death. At a time of unprecedented catastrophe for the nation, its leader appeared to be wholly divorced from reality and at the mercy of events.

But there are deeper failures still. Anti-war critics claim that the flood levees were not rebuilt because the money had been diverted to Iraq and homeland security. Quite apart from the fatuous implication that America should never spend money prosecuting any foreign wars or safeguarding its citizens from terrorist attack, it is a distortion.

Louisiana’s flood defences were underfunded both at state and at federal level throughout the 1990s under successive presidents. Moreover, the problem was not that the defences hadn’t been upgraded. Indeed, the levee near Lake Pontchartrain that gave way and inundated much of the city had been completed and was in good condition. Instead, New Orleans drowned as a result of a fundamental strategic error — that the levees were only built to withstand a force three hurricane, a decision made decades ago based on a cost-benefit analysis, and Katrina was force four.

This disaster has exposed the dark underbelly of the American dream. The hurricane has stripped bare the ugly reality of America’s racial and social polarisation, just as it peeled away the thin veneer of civilisation itself.

The shocking orgy of looting and rape that followed the flood has to be set in the context of a largely poor, black city where the murder rate was already ten times the national average because the local forces of law and order had long ago given up.

America’s downside is the terrible poverty of the southern black underclass — the people who were the principal victims of this disaster because they did not have the means of their white neighbours to flee the city at speed. This undeniable truth has led in turn to the suspicion that the relief effort was so slow because the lives of poor black people were considered of less value, a radioactive charge which is already being exploited by the black demagogues Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

But given the staggering incompetence of the American system from top to bottom, one has to wonder whether, if an American city had to be evacuated following a terrorist attack, similar mayhem would not ensue regardless of the colour of its inhabitants.

Whether we like it or not — and many do not — the free world relies on America for its security. And this is why hurricane Katrina is potentially toxic for the rest of us.

President Bush is already weakened by the ongoing struggle in Iraq. If the view settles that he fouled up over New Orleans he will be politically crippled, his authority will evaporate and the defence of the west will be left leaderless. Which is why political predators and western fifth columnists such as George Galloway and ‘Hanoi Jane’ Fonda are now busily assembling to redouble their attack.

The dismaying fact is, however, that America has handed them their weapons. Those of us who remain convinced it was right to remove Saddam Hussein and that the west faces an unparalleled threat from global terror are aghast beyond words at the staggering incompetence of the leader of our defence, first in Iraq after the fall of Baghdad and now in New Orleans.

The danger is that this double whammy might now reshape America’s political landscape once again — but this time by undermining that belief in itself which gives it the will to fight for freedom and democracy. For that to be avoided it must now acknowledge its failings and restore belief in both its political class and in itself.

American cities have been rebuilt before from the ashes of hurricanes, fires and other disasters. This time, however, America has looked into the toxic floodwaters and seen an ugly and horrifying reflection. Everything now depends on how well it clears up this mess, both in the southern states and in the political sphere. The stakes are enormous, for all of us.

Posted by melanie at September 5, 2005