The questions a shocked America is asking its President

by Rupert Cornwell

Why has it taken George Bush five days to get to New Orleans?

President Bush was on holiday in Texas when Katrina struck. He then spent Monday on a pre-arranged political fundraising tour of California and Arizona, which he did not cancel or curtail. On Tuesday he surveyed the hurricane damage - but only from the flight deck of Air Force One, prompting criticism that he was too detached from the suffering on the ground. He didn’t give a speech until Tuesday afternoon - 36 hours after the storm first hit - and didn’t embark on a proper tour of the region until yesterday. Key advisers have come under fire for similar levels of detachment. As the full magnitude of the disaster unfolded, the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, was seen buying shoes in New York, and Dick Cheney remained on holiday.

How could the world’s only superpower be so slow in rescuing its own people?

It will probably take months, even years, to answer that question.
But here are a few factors to consider: 1) the federal government’s
disaster relief agency, Fema, has lost considerable clout because the
priority at the Department of Homeland Security has been
counter-terrorism; 2) the homeland security director, Michael Chertoff,
has no experience in disaster relief; 3) because of Fema’s low profile,
almost no contingency measures were taken before Katrina struck; 4) the
under-resourced local Army Corps of Engineers appeared completely
unprepared to conduct emergency operations after the levees were
breached; 5) nobody appears to have considered the communications
problems inherent in loss of phone and cell-phone service.

Why did he cut funding for flood control and emergency management?

Another question likely to be the subject of official
investigations. Local and former federal officials are in little doubt
that the budgetary priorities of Iraq, tax cuts and the "war on terror"
are to blame. Disaster prevention experts have been studying New
Orleans for years and urging upgrades to its levees and other
preventive measures. The Army Corps of Engineers was supposed to carry
out some of this work last year, but its funding was cut. It seems the
Bush administration considered the risk of malicious human attack and
the risk of the ravages of nature, and found itself incapable of
holding both ideas in its head.

Why did it take so long to send adequate National Guard forces to keep law and order?

The National Guard is under pressure in every US state because of
the strains of deployment in Iraq. More than one-third of Louisiana’s
10,000 guardsmen are either in Iraq or Afghanistan. No mass deployment
of guardsmen from other states is being contemplated because they are
all needed in Iraq too. At first, only 3,000 guardsmen were sent to New
Orleans, but that was increased to about 10,000 as looting and gun
violence became widespread.

How can the US take Iraq, a country of 25m people, in three
weeks but fail to rescue 25,000 of its own citizens from a sports arena
in a big American city?

America’s obsession with maintaining its pre-eminent position as the
world’s largest superpower means it is incapable of responding swiftly
and effectively to a humanitarian crisis. While it has the firepower
for fighting wars, it does not have the leadership and skills to combat
natural disaster.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world...

Steve Bell cartoon from the Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/cartoons/...