Global Denial

As floodwaters recede and bodies emerge, Americans are belatedly making some terrible connections about the Bush administration, which has a contempt for public planning matched only by its habit of subordinating reality to public relations. One aspect, of course, is Iraq. The other is the needless tragedy in New Orleans.

The Hurricane Katrina disaster is also a curtain-raiser for the largest-ever challenge to public planning: the consequences of global warming. If the present complacency continues, we will see more flooding, more breakdown of democratic civil order, more loss of human life and dignity, and more vivid divisions between rich and poor.

The parallel with Iraq is worth a moment's further reflection. In spring of 2002, in anticipation of the invasion of Iraq, the State Department consulted with about 200 leaders of Iraqi civil society -- lawyers, engineers, businesspeople, and others, all of whom detested Saddam Hussein. The group warned Thomas Warrick, then a State Department adviser, that absent a well-conceived and carefully executed post-invasion plan, chaos would ensue, nullifying any stability the Americans hoped to establish.

With Warrick's guidance, the group worked out strategies to facilitate the least disruptive transition possible. When the State Department presented the plan to the White House, it was informed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that the president wanted no such plan. The Iraqis, according to the White House, would be so grateful to their liberators for the overthrow of the hated Hussein regime that they would establish their own democratic order and reconstruction program. Essentially, the State Department officials were told to take their plan and shove it.

Failing to Plan, Unwilling to Budget

Our latest national tragedy has been widely predicted for decades. With even a modest degree of planning, its impacts could have been drastically minimized. For years the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has warned that New Orleans could not withstand anything more than a relatively weak (Category 3) hurricane. Ten years ago, when an intense rainstorm killed six people in the city, the corps asked Congress to provide the $430 million it had authorized to shore up levees and pumping stations. Little of that money ever materialized.

Last year, The (New Orleans) Times-Picayune reported that the Corps of Engineers had determined that the Bush administration was spending less than 20 percent of what was needed to complete the fortification of the city's levees. While the massive destruction of Katrina left Americans in shock, it should have been no surprise to the federal government. In 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency cited a hurricane strike on New Orleans as one of the three most likely U.S. disasters. Nevertheless, by 2004 the Bush administration had cut funding to the corps' New Orleans district by more than 80 percent, as Sidney Blumenthal reported in a recent Salon article.

Earlier this year, the Louisiana congressional delegation got Congress to provide about $60 million for flood protection for the city. But the Bush administration reduced that figure to $10.4 million, according to Newhouse News Service.

While the Bush administration was cutting funding to strengthen protective dikes and levees, the state's bipartisan congressional delegation was also working to secure money for the restoration of its coastal wetlands to buffer the impacts of storm surges. Louisiana officials estimated this effort could cost $14 billion, but the lawmakers managed to secure only a tiny fraction -- $570 million over four years, according to The Times-Picayune. The requested multiyear, $14 billion, appropriation was all but erased from the administration's energy bill. So in order to save in the short term for disaster prevention, the administration's lack of planning has yielded what will likely top $100 billion in damages -- and most of it uninsured.