More victims of the war?
By Tom Hennessy
Staff columnist
People saw it coming.
They did not know the hour, the day, the year. But they knew it was coming. New Orleans, a city much like Long Beach in population (484,000 in the city proper) had an almost inevitable date with disaster.
When it was founded in 1718 by Jean Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, he was warned that he was picking the wrong place. Six feet below sea level on average, the city grew in a bowl bordered by the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain.
Nearly 300 years later, Jay Grimes, Louisiana's climatologist, also saw it coming. Under certain circumstances, he said, "the flooding may be more severe coming from the lake than coming from the Gulf (of Mexico)."
He was proved right this week. The water that has brought havoc to New Orleans came not so much from the sky, but from the massive lake.
Some in Congress saw it coming. After flooding from a rainstorm killed six people in 1995, they authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project SELA. Over the next decade, $430 million was spent to shore up levees and build pumping stations. But $250 million in SELA projects still awaited funding.
The money never came.
Vanishing dollars
When SELA funds began drying up in 2003, the Army Corps of Engineers, responsible for the project, did not hesitate to explain why. It blamed the cut-off on the diversion of money to the Iraq War and to homeland security, combined with simultaneous federal tax cuts.
The New Orleans newspaper, the Times-Picayune, also saw it coming. In its online issue Tuesday, Editor and Publisher, the magazine of the newspaper industry, connects the flooding caused by Katrina to the warnings from the Times-Picayune:
"At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cited the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane-and flood-control dollars."
Whose homeland?
Walter Maestri also saw it coming. On June 8, 2004, the head of public emergencies for neighboring Jefferson Parish, the region's largest suburb, said this to the Times-Picayune:
"It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."
Only days ago, Maestri ran an exercise in which a fictitious hurricane hit New Orleans. He later said, "When the exercise was completed, it was evident we were going to lose a lot of people."
For those of us who oppose the war, there is a temptation to blame all our national ills on it. In this case, however, the connection is clear cut. Over the next few days, you are apt to hear more about this from the media.
The administration will ignore criticism or spin it into something else. In the White House, seemingly incapable of admitting error, no one will concede that money which might have eased the devastation in New Orleans has gone to ground in the sands of the desert.
Most of us understand that the country's needs come first. But which country?
