Nobody could have anticipated the breaching of the Mississippi levees

George W. Bush – Good Morning America, September ‘05

Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States..

National Geographic – October ‘04


“Anticipated” or “accepted”?

Certainly the New Orleans Engineering Corps who, only two months ago, lost 44% of their funding as Bush redirected $71m to Iraq anticipated such an event. The local newspapers of course were all too aware of what their fate might be as well as many other news networks including American RadioWorks.

Let it not be said that the warnings came only from the provinces either. Months before even 9/11, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report detailing, amongst other things, the three most likely disasters in the US. One was a terrorist strike in New York and another was a category five hurricane strike to New Orleans. Let's not even mention the National Geographic article I opened with which reads so frighteningly accurately despite it’s yearling maturity.

Perhaps more concerned with legacy than legitimacy, a vote-centric administration now reaps its tragic harvest. Policies that have been shockingly unilateral and awesomely arrogant now swallow pill after pill of bitter, cruel irony.

Money requested for the flood defences of New Orleans has now long been spent helplessly fighting the flood of lawlessness in Iraq. a domestic relief effort limps unprotected into a town terrorised by desperate drug addicts as 35% of the area's National Guard fight their own battles abroad. A once-in-the-history-books storm tosses SUVs around like toys after a never-in-the-history-books period of oil consumption and weeks after the repeated rejection of the Kyoto treaty.

Two years ago, my country and America announced that they were going to liberate a small impoverished and politically fragmented country from its dictatorial leadership. In so doing we promised to protect the world from terrorism and weapons of mass destruction and to release its citizens from fear.

Two years on and not a single weapon of mass destruction has been found. Two years on and hundreds of thousands of civilians turn to dust in the wasteland that will now host the civil war of liberated-Iraq.

Two years on and over fifty of my townsmen and women are buried after the retaliation attacks of 7th July and over two hundred men and women, torn apart in Madrid rest in cemeteries after the attacks on Spain.

Thousands of Americans are dead or die even as I write in the preventable tragedy that is the submergence of New Orleans. The poorest residents of a poor town drown, pressed against the roofs of their attics, gulping down sewage as they drown.

The waters that drown them are there because their taxes were spent ‘protecting’ them in a far-off land where the young men who could come and save them now live and work. Some of the drowning will never even leave a legacy, their sons already dead from war.

For any of the good work you may have done, this is your legacy Mr Bush. This is what you will be remembered for, the slaughter of innocents on foreign soil, the terrorism that it precipitated and the tragedy that your single-policy administration and vote-chasing complacency has wrought in your south.

Paul Graham advises us to stand back from society and understand which of the issues of the day are based on substance and which are merely fashion. Graham observes that those issues which are the most contentious are often the most transient.

Let us look this way on the War on Terror. Terrorism is an expression of hatred and desperation. It is not done for fun. It is done by individuals who feel they have no other way of expressing themselves and individuals who are at an extreme end of a range of opinion.

Such communal opinion must itself be passionate and desperate though. As superficially feasible as it might sound, we never see suicide-Slashdotters blowing up labs at Microsoft or the British middle class car-bombing immigration centres. I’ve no doubt that there are Slashdotters capable of terrorism but even Microsoft is not sufficient motivation for that.

Terrorists and violence are the consequences of a suppressed and desperate community. To create those communities you must push them to the edge as Israel has Palestine, we did Northern Ireland and we now do in Iraq.

In stating the following, one can’t help but feel like the little boy telling the emperor he is naked and yet, we as nations have waged war on the causes of hatred by killing tens of thousands of people's family members. We have stamped out extremism by crushing a nation's infrastructure and placing it under martial law

How have we established that nation's link with terrorism? We have done so using the tried and tested model that says that those who have the same skin colour, the same religion and speak similar languages think the same thing. We have established a model for peace and capitalism in the Middle East by creating a civil war.

And we thought 1930’s Germany was naïve.

How do good people harbour such terrible thoughts? We afford this ideology because we are not forced to empathise. We are arrogant enough to assume that we should never have to face another country deciding to “liberate” ours and are never forced to experience how that feels.

Terrible things happen when communities cease to empathise. Without the subliminal image of how others feel we act ruthlessly only on our own selfish desires and respond without consideration to those 'leaders' who seek to influence and terrify us.

The events of the last week will have many consequences in both America and the world as a whole. One may be that both Bush and Blair will be forced to imagine a range of new scenarios, scenarios in which they are no longer omnipotent. They will be forced to empathise with the consequences of V12 Chevy Suburbans and forced to empathise with the lawlessness, murder and terror that follows when towns are forcibly ripped apart.

We went to war because we didn't empathise with the people of Iraq and they paid the consequences for that with their lives. We in London paid in a very small way with this Summer's bombings. Americans are now paying in an indirect but enormous way with the disaster that is New Orleans.

If something feels wrong, it probably is and ultimately we will make the world a worse place by doing it. If we can't say that we'd be happy for the same foreign policy to be applied to us then it probably isn't a good policy. We're taught this throughout history but again and again we forget.

The optimum strategy for playing prisoners dilemma is tit for two tats - I punish you for cheating on me only when you do so twice in succession. Tit for tat creates an inescapable cycle - an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.

The events of 9/11 were awful but let's be absolutely clear about this - two eyes for an eye makes the world blind very, very quickly. Afghanistan was a huge and probably disproportionate retaliation. Ultimately we invaded and destroyed Iraq for no better reason than that we could.

We have to take more responsibility for what we do and for those who we threaten to kill. We also need to take responsibility for those we don't save. America needs everyone's help and support right now, don't lets punish the people of yet another country for a callous and misguided leadership.

The American Red Cross