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this is a good article
Falluja Floods the Superdome
by Frank Rich
AS the levees cracked open and ushered hell into New Orleans on Tuesday,
President Bush once again chose to fly away from Washington, not toward it,
while disaster struck. We can all enumerate the many differences between a
natural catastrophe and a terrorist attack. But character doesn't change: it
is immutable, and it is destiny.
As always, the president's first priority, the one that sped him from
Crawford toward California, was saving himself: he had to combat the flood
of record-low poll numbers that was as uncontrollable as the surging of Lake
Pontchartrain. It was time, therefore, for another disingenuous pep talk, in
which he would exploit the cataclysm that defined his first term, 9/11, even
at the price of failing to recognize the emerging fiasco likely to engulf
Term 2.
After dispatching Katrina with a few sentences of sanctimonious boilerplate
("our hearts and prayers are with our fellow citizens"), he turned to his
more important task. The war in Iraq is World War II. George W. Bush is
F.D.R. And anyone who refuses to stay his course is soft on terrorism and
guilty of a pre-9/11 "mind-set of isolation and retreat." Yet even as Mr.
Bush promised "victory" (a word used nine times in this speech on Tuesday),
he was standing at the totemic scene of his failure. It was along this same
San Diego coastline that he declared "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq on the
aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln more than two years ago. For this return
engagement, The Washington Post
reported 83001078.html>,
the president's stage managers made sure he was positioned so that another
hulking aircraft carrier nearby would stay off-camera, lest anyone be
reminded of that premature end of "major combat operations."
This administration would like us to forget a lot, starting with the simple
fact that next Sunday is the fourth anniversary of the day we were attacked
by Al Qaeda, not Iraq. Even before Katrina took command of the news, Sept.
11, 2005, was destined to be a half-forgotten occasion, distorted and
sullied by a grotesquely inappropriate Pentagon-sponsored country music
jamboree on the Mall. But hard as it is to reflect upon so much sorrow at
once, we cannot allow ourselves to forget the real history surrounding 9/11;
it is the Rosetta stone for what is happening now. If we are to pull
ourselves out of the disasters of Katrina and Iraq alike, we must live in
the real world, not the fantasyland of the administration's faith-based
propaganda. Everything connects.
Though history is supposed to occur first as tragedy, then as farce, even at
this early stage we can see that tragedy is being repeated once more as
tragedy. From the president's administration's inattention to threats before
9/11 to his disappearing act on the day itself to the reckless blundering in
the ill-planned war of choice that was 9/11's bastard offspring, Katrina is
déjà vu with a vengeance.
The president's declaration that "I don't think anyone anticipated the
breach of the levees" has instantly achieved the notoriety of Condoleezza
Rice's "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would
take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center." The
administration's complete obliviousness to the possibilities for energy
failures, food and water deprivation, and civil disorder in a major city
under siege needs only the Donald Rumsfeld punch line of "Stuff happens" for
a coup de grâce. How about shared sacrifice, so that this time we might get
the job done right? After Mr. Bush's visit on "Good Morning America" on
Thursday, Diane Sawyer reported on a postinterview conversation in which he
said, "There won't have to be tax increases."
But on a second go-round, even the right isn't so easily fooled by this
drill (with the reliable exception of Peggy Noonan, who found much
reassurance in Mr. Bush's initial autopilot statement about the hurricane,
with its laundry list of tarps and blankets). This time the fecklessness and
deceit were all too familiar. They couldn't be obliterated by a bullhorn or
by the inspiring initial post-9/11 national unity that bolstered the
president until he betrayed it. This time the heartlessness beneath the
surface of his actions was more pronounced.
You could almost see Mr. Bush's political base starting to crumble at its
very epicenter, Fox News, by Thursday night. Even there it was impossible to
ignore that the administration was no more successful at securing New
Orleans than it had been at pacifying Falluja.
A visibly exasperated Shepard Smith, covering the story on the ground in
Louisiana, went further still, tossing hand grenades of harsh reality into
Bill O'Reilly's usually spin-shellacked "No Spin Zone." Among other hard
facts, Mr. Smith noted "that the haves of this city, the movers and shakers
of this city, evacuated the city either immediately before or immediately
after the storm." What he didn't have to say, since it was visible to the
entire world, was that it was the poor who were left behind to drown.
In that sense, the inequality of the suffering has not only exposed the sham
of the relentless photo-ops with black schoolchildren whom the president
trots out at campaign time to sell his "compassionate conservatism"; it has
also positioned Katrina before a rapt late-summer audience as a replay of
the sinking of the Titanic. New Orleans's first-class passengers made it
safely into lifeboats; for those in steerage, it was a horrifying spectacle
of every man, woman and child for himself.
THE captain in this case, Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary,
was so oblivious to those on the lower decks that on Thursday he applauded
the federal response to the still rampaging nightmare as "really
exceptional." He told NPR that he had "not heard a report of thousands of
people in the convention center who don't have food and water" - even though
every television viewer in the country had been hearing of those 25,000
stranded refugees for at least a day. This Titanic syndrome, too, precisely
echoes the post-9/11 wartime history of an administration that has rewarded
the haves at home with economic goodies while leaving the have-nots to fight
in Iraq without proper support in manpower or armor. Surely it's only a
matter of time before Mr. Chertoff and the equally at sea FEMA director,
Michael Brown (who also was among the last to hear about the convention
center), are each awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom in line with past
architects of lethal administration calamity like George Tenet and Paul
Bremer.
On Thursday morning, the president told Diane Sawyer that he hoped "people
don't play politics during this period of time." Presumably that means that
the photos of him wistfully surveying the Katrina damage from Air Force One
won't be sold to campaign donors as the equivalent 9/11 photos were. Maybe
he'll even call off the right-wing attack machine so it won't Swift-boat the
Katrina survivors who emerge to ask tough questions as it has Cindy Sheehan
and those New Jersey widows who had the gall to demand a formal 9/11
inquiry.
But a president who flew from Crawford to Washington in a heartbeat to
intervene in the medical case of a single patient, Terri Schiavo, has no
business lecturing anyone about playing politics with tragedy. Eventually
we're going to have to examine the administration's behavior before, during
and after this storm as closely as its history before, during and after
9/11. We're going to have to ask if troops and matériel of all kinds could
have arrived faster without the drain of national resources into a quagmire.
We're going to have to ask why it took almost two days of people being
without food, shelter and water for Mr. Bush to get back to Washington.
Most of all, we're going to have to face the reality that with this
disaster, the administration has again increased our vulnerability to the
terrorists we were supposed to be fighting after 9/11. As Richard Clarke,
the former counterterrorism czar, pointed out to The Washington Post last
week in talking about the fallout from the war in Iraq, there have been
twice as many terrorist attacks outside Iraq in the three years after 9/11
than in the three years before. Now, thanks to Mr. Bush's variously
incompetent, diffident and hubristic mismanagement of the attack by Katrina,
he has sent the entire world a simple and unambiguous message: whatever the
explanation, the United States is unable to fight its current war and
protect homeland security at the same time.
The answers to what went wrong in Washington and on the Gulf Coast will come
later, and, if the history of 9/11 is any guide, all too slowly, after the
administration and its apologists erect every possible barrier to keep us
from learning the truth. But as Americans dig out from Katrina and slouch
toward another anniversary of Al Qaeda's strike, we have to acknowledge the
full extent and urgency of our crisis. The world is more perilous than ever,
and for now, to paraphrase Mr. Rumsfeld, we have no choice but to fight the
war with the president we have.
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