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The day after Hurricane Katrina slammed New Orleans and the Gulf Coast with her terrible fury, President Bush interrupted his vacation - not to take immediate command of federal disaster relief efforts but to fly off to California to make yet another speech defending his Iraq policy. He has been playing catchup ever since on the disaster front.
Before leaving Washington to tour the devastation on Friday - four days after Katrina paid her call on the area - the president acknowledged that the initial federal relief efforts, sluggish and in places dysfunctional, "are not acceptable" and promised to "get on top of the situation." It's not fair to just criticize Bush, as some Democrats are doing. It was clear early on that the governor of Louisiana and the mayor of New Orleans - both Democrats - dropped the ball in their emergency planning.
It took Bush several days to find his voice and regain his presidential footing after the 9/11 attacks. And when he did, his approval ratings soared. His post-Katrina performance, however, has drawn more criticism than praise. Whatever the death toll turns out to be, Katrina was nature's equivalent of 9/11. In some ways it was even worse. So how is it that government was better prepared to deal with an unexpected terror attack than it was to respond to a monster hurricane we saw coming for days out? When the storm was finished with the Gulf Coast, government at every level - local, state and federal - was overwhelmed by the humanitarian disaster and the disintegration of law and order in New Orleans.
By the time Bush cut short his vacation and headed back to Washington to take charge of the federal response - two days after Katrina struck - New Orleans resembled Baghdad more than a fabled tourist destination as privation, desperation and despair gave way to looting and lawlessness and chaos. From the Big Easy came desperate pleas for food and water and National Guard troops, all of which finally began pouring in on Friday, before Bush's planned visit to the city.
As the nation awoke to images of one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history, Bush left his Texas ranch to speak at a naval base in Coronado, Calif., marking the 60th anniversary of the U.S. victory over Japan. Katrina had left scenes along the Mississippi coast some said were reminiscent of Hiroshima, the Japanese city leveled by the world's first atomic bomb.
While things were going from bad to worse in New Orleans, Bush was invoking the spirit of Franklin D. Roosevelt's wartime leadership and casting the Iraq war as the moral equivalent of World War II, the good war. He compared the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington to Japan's sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. And just as Roosevelt had to contend with pre-Pearl Harbor isolationism, Bush said he is trying to keep the nation from returning to the "pre-9/11 mind-set of isolation and retreat."
Bush, of course, did not mention that Roosevelt asked Americans to sacrifice to support the war effort, and sacrifice they did, at home and on foreign battlefields. So far, the closest Bush has come to an appeal for sacrifice was to urge Americans to conserve power and gasoline until the Gulf Coast's crippled energy infrastructure can be repaired. "Don't buy gas if you don't need it," the president said.
Bush's V-J speech was all but ignored by the news media. The nation's attention was riveted on the horror show unfolding in New Orleans, a city suddenly rendered uninhabitable by the worst of nature and man. The president said nobody "anticipated the breach of the levees" that left most of New Orleans under water.
Where has he been? For years experts inside and outside of government have been warning of the city's vulnerability to hurricanes. It was a no-brainer. Even the Federal Emergency Management Agency, in a 2001 report, called New Orleans a major disaster waiting to happen. This apparently comes as news to the president, who in his last budget cut more than $71-million for hurricane and flood protection projects in the New Orleans district.
So Americans are now left to wonder if their government can handle the next Big One, whether it's a terrorist attack or a hurricane.
Philip Gailey's e-mail address is gailey@sptimes.com