Katrina’s putrid waters may be slowly receding but there is another storm currently whipping up. This time, it’s a political one. Bang smack in its eye are the White House, the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, including FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency), as well as Louisiana’s governor and the mayor of New Orleans.
Americans, shocked at the slow response to the humanitarian tragedy that played out on our screens over the past week, want someone to blame.
President Bush says the flood disaster could not have been foreseen. He was wrong. There is so much evidence out there to the contrary, including warnings from oceanographers who accurately detailed the effects of a Category 5 hurricane on New Orleans.
The New Orleans District of the Army Corps of Engineers warned the White House earlier this year that pumps could be knocked out by water surges, while several sunken levees urgently needed to be raised, but their pleas were ignored. The suggestion is that funds earmarked for these essential repair projects had been diverted to fuel the ongoing invasion of Iraq.
Unlike the president, FEMA can hardly feign ignorance as it carried out an exercise, last summer, based on a mock Category 3 hurricane. At the time, the probability of flooding with thousands of the city’s poorest residents being unable to leave was a staple of FEMA’s pretend scenario.
The authorities clearly forewarned of the disaster’s potential scope, critics are naturally asking: “Where were the buses to carry the poor, the sick and the elderly to safety prior to the anticipated flood and why did it take those buses five days to arrive after the event?”
FEMA is heaping the blame on state and local officials, especially Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco for failing to request its involvement from the get-go. The White House spin machine, striving to protect the administration’s collective back, is eager to concur.
At a grassroots level, the president and his administration has come under fire for not reacting swiftly enough to scenes of more than 25,000 mainly African-Americans sweltering in 90 degree temperatures in the Superdome without life-sustaining essentials.
These impoverished individuals with only the clothes on their backs were vulnerable to murder, rape and intimidation. The elderly were left to die in wheelchairs, newborns were found in dumpsters, asthmatics struggled to breathe without their ventilators, diabetics were vulnerable without their insulin and those with heart problems had to make do without their live-saving pills.
Others, rescued from the roofs of their homes were dumped down on highways, where they stayed for days without shelter or sustenance watching National Guard vehicles and empty coaches trundle past, their drivers averting their eyes from humanity’s most wretched. The forgotten are still huddling in their attics or floating face down in the faeces, oil and chemical-infested gumbo.
There were a few who refused to leave their pets. One small child fled from rescuers clutching his dog, leaving his mother screaming in the helicopter above.
Reporters from conservative networks uncharacteristically lost their cool and heaped blame on authority, much to the embarrassment of their party-line adhering anchors. With buildings on fire in the French Quarter, looters ransacking shops and the sound of pistol fire, one reporter likened the old town to the Wild West. British newspapers pontificated on how easily the veneer of civilization can be peeled away.
As the world looked on in amazement, wondering how great swathes of the superpower could so closely resemble an impoverished Third World country, bewildered Americans became angry. They began to ask why their president was content to fly over the region in Air Force One at 17,000 feet prior to a jolly round of golf when he should have been on the ground with sleeves rolled-up.
Dick Cheney, as usual, kept an invisible profile, while three days after the storm Condi Rice visited expensive New York shoe stores before enjoying a night out at the theater. It wasn’t until Friday that the administration changed tack and began to take the disaster seriously.
Since George Bush’s inspection of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana when his helicopter touched down for a few “touching” photo-ops, the cavalry has finally arrived in force. But with estimates of up to 10,000 dead in Louisiana alone, critics are saying “too little, too late”.
Now that most evacuees have been safely bussed or airlifted to new temporary shelters, leaving New Orleans a ghost town guarded by 7,000 troops the blame game is on in earnest.
The distraught New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, who has been a vehement critic of the White House, sluggish Federal agencies and Governor Blanco throughout, told CNN on Saturday that “the CIA will wipe me out”. He’s been accused of being paranoid.
The burgeoning anti-war camp blames the Pentagon for sending 30 percent of Louisiana’s National Guard to Iraq and for neglecting to secure the nation.
African-Americans, such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson, author Robert D. Bullard, Oakland Pastor Frank Pinkard and the rapper Kayne West are putting the government’s lethargy down to inherent racism.
“George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” said West during an NBC telethon. A chastised Ms. Rice responded by dashing down to her home state of Alabama to refute those allegations.
A top official of Jefferson parish blames bureaucracy. “We’ve been abandoned by our own country,” he told NBC, breaking down in sobs. “Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now.”
In the meantime, offers of international assistance are flooding in. Members of the Arab League have been urged to contribute to the relief effort with Kuwait having already pledged a whopping $500 million and Qatar $100 million.
Joining the blame game is the Iraqi government which faults its fellow-Arabs for being more concerned about the superpower’s misfortunes than the 1,000 Shiite pilgrims, who were crushed on a Baghdad bridge or drowned last week.
There is little doubt that heads will roll...but the question is this: Will they be the ones currently attached to the shoulders of the culpable or those of convenient fall guys? I’m no psychic but I don’t need a crystal ball to know the answer to that one.
