THIS MODERN WORLD

Think of everything this country has done over the past four years in the name of fighting terrorism — the Patriot Act, the invasion of Iraq, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, etc., etc. Americans have shrugged at some of it, eagerly embraced the rest. Why? Because of our collective inchoate fear of another catastrophic attack…an attack which only in the wildest neocon paranoid wet dream would inflict more damage than Hurricane Katrina actually has inflicted.

We’ve been told for four years that we’re at war to preserve our freedom, our way of life, our very civilization.

Well, this is in no way meant to downplay the suffering along the Gulf Coast tonight, or the immensity of this tragedy — but this is what we’ve been afraid of for the past four years, this level of destruction.

This is bad, really bad, probably much worse than we know — but civilization itself is not at risk.

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I’m not saying we should just roll over and let The Terrorists run willy nilly through the streets tossing dirty bombs every which way with gleeful abandon. I’m saying that even in a fairly worst-case scenario, another major terrorist attack which manages to inflict anything close to the destruction of Hurricane Katrina — even then, the the only real danger to our way of life, to democracy itself, comes from our own leaders deciding that a free society is just way too much damn trouble.

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It’s not the damage done to us, by whatever means — we can pick ourselves up and mourn our dead and rebuild. It’s the damage we do to ourselves that may be irreparable.

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Having said that…this really has been a disaster unfolding in slow motion. I was busy last week when Katrina first started making the news, and didn’t pay a lot of attention. The catastrophic warnings on Sunday finally made me sit up and take notice — but then on Monday, we were told that New Orleans had dodged the bullet. And then the water started pouring in. And now — I think we’re only starting to grasp the immensity of this. An entire major American city has been evacuated, and isn’t slated to have power or basic necessities for months. That’s a half million people homeless tonight, without even taking into account the rest of the coast. Add in the damage to the oil refineries, and I can’t even begin to imagine what the cumulative effect of all this will be on an already-shaky economy — but if I had to guess I’d say that that economy is about to take a nose dive straight into the crapper. And that would be the good scenario.

I really hate to be the first person to “go there”, but I’m a firm believer in the notion that it’s during the tough times that you find out who your real friends are. Not to draw too fine a parallel or anything, but the President sure has a knack for skipping out on a crisis until other people have the situation under control. For example, there’s this largely forgotten bit of trivia from a couple days after 9/11:

Over now familiar refrains of “that’s unreal,” and “I can’t believe it,” and pregnant moans of “wow,” a spectacle of a different kind captured unblinking New Yorkers yesterday afternoon. Out of Manhattan’s Union Square came a welcome and commanding sight: former President Bill Clinton, surrounded by a growing mass of people.
. . .
Clinton, who was in Australia when New York and Washington, D.C., were attacked, said he had spent the previous 24 hours flying to New York on an Air Force plane.
. . .
Many said Clinton’s short appearance both magnified and made up for what they called President George W. Bush’s shortcomings during this crisis. The White House announced that the president would visit New York, for the first time, today.

“So far he has not been a comforting presence,” said Emily Vacchiano, 26, who lives in SoHo. “He has not conveyed compassion or strength. Just the sight of him [Clinton] cheered everyone up today.”

At the same time, the recently departed Peter Jennings was taking flack from the right-wing for justifiably asking “Where is the President of the United States?”. It’s not that anyone expected him to jump into the rubble and start pulling out bodies, but it would be nice for our leaders to actually…y’know, lead every once in a while.

With that situation, of course, you could make the argument that Bush was being held back by the Secret Service or that there was enough uncertainty to make the case that traveling to New York or Washington might put the President in danger. (Besides, why rush back when Giuliani is doing a better job for him?) But this is a different matter entirely. The full potential of the levee breaks in New Orleans has been known for almost 24 hours now (3-4 days if you count the warnings over the weekend), yet the President has still been mostly M.I.A. Curious about how he’s been spending his day??

Speaking to a crowd of sailors and Marines near San Diego, Bush described the Iraq war and World War II as crucial tests of American resolve in the face of evil. He also painted a grim picture of the consequences of failure, warning that Iraq could turn into an oil-rich haven for international terrorists.
. . .
The president’s visit to Naval Air Station North Island was part of a White House effort to shore up support for the war. Recent polls show widespread unease over the war. An Aug. 5-7 Gallup Poll, for example, found that 54 percent of Americans thought the war was a mistake. Still, most Americans said they opposed a quick withdrawal.

And this was all after the levees broke. Thousands of people are missing or dead in what’s being called one of the worst natural disasters in the nation’s history, but the President is still worried about his poll numbers? Here’s one small example of what’s happening while the President tries to convince people that he’s FDR :

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said hundreds, if not thousands, of people may still be stuck on roofs and in attics, and so rescue boats were bypassing the dead.

“We’re not even dealing with dead bodies,” Nagin said. “They’re just pushing them on the side.”

And I haven’t even mentioned the declaration of martial law, the increased threat the flood will take as the waters become more polluted by toxic chemicals, the looming disease outbreak that will happen due to standing water and the rotting corpses of humans and animals, rampant looting, and the refugee situation in the Superdome. The news coming out of Louisiana has been growing steadily worse since last night and the country could really use a leader right now. Delaying your return to work for something as unimportant as a stump speech isn’t gonna cut it. I wonder if Rudy is doing anything today?

Just in case you haven’t seen the news since everyone was saying that New Orleans had dodged the worst case scenario, things have gone steadily to hell today.

The historic city of New Orleans was steadily filling with water from nearby Lake Ponchartrain on Tuesday after its defenses were breached by the ferocity of hurricane Katrina.

With the floodwaters rising in many areas, threatening the French Quarter, residents were plucked from the roofs of their homes, bodies were seen floating in the streets and rescuers searched the city in boats and helicopters.

“We probably have 80 percent of our city under water; with some sections of our city the water is as deep as 20 feet. Both airports are underwater,” Mayor Ray Nagin told a radio interviewer.

New Orleans, a city that usually throbs with the life of its carnivals and the sound of jazz and blues, was in a “state of devastation,” Nagin said.

In many residential areas TV pictures showed the water was up to roof level after the surge caused by Katrina breached a section of the levee along a canal leading from Lake Ponchartrain, which looms to the north of the city.

Much of New Orleans, a city of some 500,000, lies in a bowl below sea level, bounded by the lake and the Mississippi River, North America’s biggest river, which curves along the south of the city before discharging in the Gulf of Mexico.

“We always were afraid the bowl that is New Orleans would fill quickly,” Walter Maestri, emergency management coordinator for Jefferson Parish, said in a radio interview. “Now with the water rising today, it appears to be filling slowly,” he said.

Add to this the rest of the Gulf Coast devastation, and I don’t think we’ve even begun to comprehend what this means. We’re all going to be feeling the impact of this for a long time, one way or another. They’re saying that it will be months before the city of New Orleans is even marginally functional again. For all practical purposes, a major American city has just been wiped off the map.

(On a personal note, here’s hoping my friends from the Gambit Weekly are safe and well.)

I’m not the first person to point this out, but how is the deployment of so many Guardsmen to Iraq going to affect rescue operations in hurricane-devasted areas? Are people dying down there because so many of the men and women who thought they were volunteering to help out in just this sort of emergency ended up in Iraq instead?

I read a lot of commentary and analysis each day, but it’s rare that I read something as cogent as this:

The unbridgeable divide between the left and right’s approach to Iraq and the WoT is, among other things, a disagreement over the value of moral and material strength, with the left placing a premium on the former and the right on the latter. The right (broadly speaking) can’t fathom why the left is driven into fits of rage over every Abu Ghraib, every Gitmo, every secret rendition, every breach of civil liberties, every shifting rationale for war, every soldier and civilian killed in that war, every Bush platitude in support of it, every attempt to squelch dissent. They see the left’s protestations as appeasement of a ruthless enemy. For the left (broadly speaking), America’s moral strength is of paramount importance; without it, all the brute force in the world won’t keep us safe, defeat our enemies, and preserve our role as the world’s moral leader…..

War hawks squeal about America-haters and traitors, heaping scorn on the so-called “blame America first” crowd, but they fail to comprehend that the left reserves the deepest disdain for those who squander our moral authority. The scars of a terrorist attack heal and we are sadder but stronger for having lived through it. When our moral leadership is compromised by people draped in the American flag, America is weakened. The loss of our moral compass leaves us rudderless, open to attacks on our character and our basic decency. And nothing makes our enemies prouder. They can’t kill us all, but if they permanently stain our dignity, they’ve done irreparable harm to America.

The antiwar critique of Iraq is that it is an immoral war and every resulting death is a wrongful one. Opponents of the war view the invasion and occupation as a dangerous and shameful violation of international law. Iraq saps our moral strength and the sooner we leave the better. Opposing the invasion on the grounds that the administration lied its way into it, they see every subsequent death, American or foreign, as an ethical travesty and a stain on America’s good name.

They have held this view consistently since 2002. Millions marched down the streets of our cities before the invasion, believing that the administration’s claim that Saddam Hussein constituted a dire and imminent threat to the US was absurd on its face (whether or not the exact word ‘imminent’ was used is a semantic exercise, the implication was clear). Where the hawks screamed that Saddam gassed his own people, the war’s opponents countered that there is no shortage of murderous tyrants. Where the hawks said that Saddam wouldn’t hesitate to arm terrorists, the war’s opponents argued that there’s no lack of regimes that will help terrorists obtain lethal weapons.

For the less gullible among us, the administration’s alarmist rhetoric in 2002 was a grim farce, and the unfolding of the nightmare we see today was a foregone conclusion. Saddam was no greater or immediate a threat — and arguably a lesser one — than North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia. Hindsight has proven these war critics correct. Few dispute that the threat from Saddam was over-stated – to put it mildly. And evidence continues to mount that the invasion was a fait accompli by 2002 if not 2001. Calling for an immediate pullout from Iraq has nothing to do with capitulation and everything to do with righting a moral wrong and undoing the damage done to America’s moral standing.

As the kids say, read the whole thing.