Two days ago, I posted up the views of a reader from New Orleans who laid the blame for the disastrous aftermath of the hurricane squarely at the door of the Democrats and in particular the governor of Louisiana. In the interests of balance, I reproduce here a contrary view from an American reader.

‘I was extremely interested to read the letter from one of your readers about the devastation in New Orleans. While your reader was correct that President Bush does not deserve all of the blame for the incompetence and mismanagement that magnified the scope of this disaster, your reader nonetheless makes a variety of unsupported and dishonest arguments.

‘Your reader clearly attempt to blame Democratic policies, personalities and economics for all of New Orleans' current security problems. If only President Bush had been in charge of the National Guard, the argument goes, they would have been more disciplined and would have acted far sooner to dispel the riots. However, federal mismanagement has been already apparent through the lack of military coordination in the disaster response. It was clear two days before the hurricane hit that this would be a disaster on a national scale, and that national strategic interests were at stake. Why weren't Army and Air Force helicopters sent immediately? National Guard police could only do so much from the flooded streets of the city, but the President is authorized to use federal military capabilities in such a state of emergency.

‘In a similar fashion, your reader faults the governor for relying on the Clinton-era director of FEMA for assistance, even while the current director, Michael Brown, has already demonstrated his incompetence. I will not go into the examples of his many egregious blunders in this letter, for reasons of length. However, if one wishes to discuss how cronyism and "third-world political systems" can wreak havoc on government, one needs look no further than at his being appointed as director of FEMA. Meanwhile, our Director of Homeland Security has been quoted as having stated that this disaster was unexpected, even while various governmental reports have long labeled New Orleans as a disaster waiting to happen. Of course the Homeland Secretary is not responsible for the disaster of the hurricane; shouldn't he be held responsible, however, for the stupidity of his own excuses?

‘On a deeper level, your reader ignores the central questions that Hurricane Katrina poses for modern conservatism in America. Congress voted to divert funding for New Orleans' levees towards "homeland security," and National Guard forces have been diverted to fight the war in Iraq, an important and vital component of America's security in its own right. On a purely pragmatic level, is it really possible to succeed in Iraq, strengthen America's borders against terrorism at home, fund disaster relief for Katrina and other possible future terrorist attacks, all while rejecting any sort of progressive income tax or increases in federal taxation? Is deficit spending meant to continue indefinitely as the alternative, and is this really a viable "fiscal conservative agenda"?

‘Your reader claims that local private organizations such as churches will provide the best disaster relief to the hundreds of thousands of lives devastated by Katrina. On one level, these organizations can be much more efficient than government agencies because they are less bureaucratic. However, rebuilding the infrastructure of the city, reinstalling sanitation and electricity and repaving roads, not to mention providing basic care for the city's poorest inhabitants, will require the commitment of an involved government at the highest federal level, and assuming that the private sector will coordinate and fund such efforts is naïve at best.

‘In addition, in ascribing such influence to church outreach your reader implicitly assumes that the poor in New Orleans are organized around effective, cohesive religious and ethnic communities. In fact, the opposite is the case. New Orleans was perhaps distinctive in the extreme savagery of its ghettos, and the inability of civic organizations to penetrate poor areas. This was not solely due to Democratic corruption and incompetence. In certain cities, at certain other times, corruption has managed to go hand in hand with systems of patronage that may have been mob-like and far from perfect, but that also created certain levels of protection and neighborhood authority that were at some level responsible. This was not the case in the worst neighborhoods of New Orleans, where the closest thing to "neighborhood authority" in the slums might have been the drug lord that terrorized the neighborhood.

‘On another basic level, Hurricane Katrina questions the basic American ethos of self-sufficiency. Americans may be more accepting of economic inequalities than Europeans because of our ingrained belief in "pulling oneself up by ones bootstraps," but even Americans find it extremely difficult to watch the images of third-world level poverty and desperation being broadcast over the dinner-time news. People may shrug their shoulders and say that "life is tough" for the poor in times of stability, but when someone who already has nothing is simply the victim of bad luck by living in the path of a hurricane, even the most libertarian Americans might acknowledge a responsibility on the part of our country to provide a "safety net" in times such as these. Inevitably of course, some people will blame the poor and desperate for their own situation, for the fact that they could not spontaneously stop their community from breaking into riots or for the fact that they chose to remain in New Orleans rather than lose the remnants of what they had.

‘What remains to be seen, however, is whether these images will unsettle Americans enough that they question why such extreme poverty exists in our country year-round. I suspect that such questions, if they are asked, will be short-lived and soon forgotten in the public discourse amidst the many other news stories which are grabbing our public's attention, some of which, like Iraq, are very important, and some of which, like Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt's divorce, are less so. This is not because Americans are in any way heartless or lack conviction; indeed, I believe Americans to be among the most generous and loyal of people. But we may lack the attention span and long-term focus to seeing our efforts through to the very end. The futures of both Baghdad and New Orleans rest on whether America can commit the attention and resources of its government to fixing the root problems of these cities, which extend beyond merely rebuilding buildings and roads to addressing problems of ideology, leadership and civic morality.’