AS the levees cracked open and ushered hell into New Orleans on Tuesday,
President Bush once again chose to fly away from Washington, not toward it,
while disaster struck. We can all enumerate the many differences between a
natural catastrophe and a terrorist attack. But character doesn't change: it is
immutable, and it is destiny.

As always, the president's first priority, the one that sped him from
Crawford toward California, was saving himself: he had to combat the flood of
record-low poll numbers that was as uncontrollable as the surging of Lake
Pontchartrain. It was time, therefore, for another disingenuous pep talk, in
which he would exploit the cataclysm that defined his first term, 9/11, even at
the price of failing to recognize the emerging fiasco likely to engulf Term
2.

After dispatching Katrina with a few sentences of sanctimonious boilerplate
("our hearts and prayers are with our fellow citizens"), he turned to his more
important task. The war in Iraq is World War II. George W. Bush is F.D.R. And
anyone who refuses to stay his course is soft on terrorism and guilty of a
pre-9/11 "mind-set of isolation and retreat." Yet even as Mr. Bush promised
"victory" (a word used nine times in this speech on Tuesday), he was standing at
the totemic scene of his failure. It was along this same San Diego coastline
that he declared "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq on the aircraft carrier Abraham
Lincoln more than two years ago.

For this return engagement, The Washington Post reported, the president's stage managers made sure he was positioned so that another hulking aircraft carrier nearby would stay off-camera, lest anyone be reminded of that premature end of "major combat operations."...

Though history is supposed to occur first as tragedy, then as farce, even
at this early stage we can see that tragedy is being repeated once more as
tragedy. From the president's administration's inattention to threats before
9/11 to his disappearing act on the day itself to the reckless blundering in the
ill-planned war of choice that was 9/11's bastard offspring, Katrina is déjà vu
with a vengeance.

The president's declaration that "I don't think anyone anticipated the
breach of the levees" has instantly achieved the notoriety of Condoleezza Rice's
"I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an
airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center." The administration's complete
obliviousness to the possibilities for energy failures, food and water
deprivation, and civil disorder in a major city under siege needs only the
Donald Rumsfeld punch line of "Stuff happens" for a coup de grâce. How about
shared sacrifice, so that this time we might get the job done right? After Mr.
Bush's visit on "Good Morning America" on Thursday, Diane Sawyer reported on a
postinterview conversation in which he said, "There won't have to be tax
increases."

But on a second go-round, even the right isn't so easily fooled by this
drill (with the reliable exception of Peggy Noonan, who found much reassurance
in Mr. Bush's initial autopilot statement about the hurricane, with its laundry
list of tarps and blankets). This time the fecklessness and deceit were all too
familiar. They couldn't be obliterated by a bullhorn or by the inspiring initial
post-9/11 national unity that bolstered the president until he betrayed it. This
time the heartlessness beneath the surface of his actions was more pronounced.

You could almost see Mr. Bush's political base starting to crumble at its
very epicenter, Fox News, by Thursday night. Even there it was impossible to
ignore that the administration was no more successful at securing New Orleans
than it had been at pacifying Falluja. A visibly exasperated Shepard Smith,
covering the story on the ground in Louisiana, went further still, tossing hand
grenades of harsh reality into Bill O'Reilly's usually spin-shellacked "No Spin
Zone." Among other hard facts, Mr. Smith noted "that the haves of this city, the
movers and shakers of this city, evacuated the city either immediately before or
immediately after the storm." What he didn't have to say, since it was visible
to the entire world, was that it was the poor who were left behind to drown.

In that sense, the inequality of the suffering has not only exposed the
sham of the relentless photo-ops with black schoolchildren whom the president
trots out at campaign time to sell his "compassionate conservatism"; it has also
positioned Katrina before a rapt late-summer audience as a replay of the sinking
of the Titanic. New Orleans's first-class passengers made it safely into
lifeboats; for those in steerage, it was a horrifying spectacle of every man,
woman and child for himself.

THE captain in this case, Michael Chertoff, the homeland security
secretary, was so oblivious to those on the lower decks that on Thursday he
applauded the federal response to the still rampaging nightmare as "really
exceptional." He told NPR that he had "not heard a report of thousands of people
in the convention center who don't have food and water" - even though every
television viewer in the country had been hearing of those 25,000 stranded
refugees for at least a day. This Titanic syndrome, too, precisely echoes the
post-9/11 wartime history of an administration that has rewarded the haves at
home with economic goodies while leaving the have-nots to fight in Iraq without
proper support in manpower or armor. Surely it's only a matter of time before
Mr. Chertoff and the equally at sea FEMA director, Michael Brown (who also was
among the last to hear about the convention center), are each awarded a
Presidential Medal of Freedom in line with past architects of lethal
administration calamity like George Tenet and Paul Bremer.

On Thursday morning, the president told Diane Sawyer that he hoped "people
don't play politics during this period of time." Presumably that means that the
photos of him wistfully surveying the Katrina damage from Air Force One won't be
sold to campaign donors as the equivalent 9/11 photos were. Maybe he'll even
call off the right-wing attack machine so it won't Swift-boat the Katrina
survivors who emerge to ask tough questions as it has Cindy Sheehan and those
New Jersey widows who had the gall to demand a formal 9/11 inquiry.

But a president who flew from Crawford to Washington in a heartbeat to
intervene in the medical case of a single patient, Terri Schiavo, has no
business lecturing anyone about playing politics with tragedy. Eventually we're
going to have to examine the administration's behavior before, during and after
this storm as closely as its history before, during and after 9/11. We're going
to have to ask if troops and matériel of all kinds could have arrived faster
without the drain of national resources into a quagmire. We're going to have to
ask why it took almost two days of people being without food, shelter and water
for Mr. Bush to get back to Washington.

Most of all, we're going to have to face the reality that with this
disaster, the administration has again increased our vulnerability to the
terrorists we were supposed to be fighting after 9/11. As Richard Clarke, the
former counterterrorism czar, pointed out to The Washington Post last week in
talking about the fallout from the war in Iraq, there have been twice as many
terrorist attacks outside Iraq in the three years after 9/11 than in the three
years before. Now, thanks to Mr. Bush's variously incompetent, diffident and
hubristic mismanagement of the attack by Katrina, he has sent the entire world a
simple and unambiguous message: whatever the explanation, the United States is
unable to fight its current war and protect homeland security at the same
time.

New Orleans had long known it was highly vulnerable to flooding and a
direct hit from a hurricane. In fact, the federal government has been working
with state and local officials in the region since the late 1960s on major
hurricane and flood relief efforts. When flooding from a massive rainstorm in
May 1995 killed six people, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban
Flood Control Project, or SELA.

Over the next 10 years, the Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with carrying
out SELA, spent $430 million on shoring up levees and building pumping stations,
with $50 million in local aid. But at least $250 million in crucial projects
remained, even as hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin increased
dramatically and the levees surrounding New Orleans continued to subside

Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a
trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of
the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as
federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the
Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason
for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.

Newhouse News Service, in an article posted late Tuesday night at The
Times-Picayune Web site, reported: "No one can say they didn't see it coming.
... Now in the wake of one of the worst storms ever, serious questions are being
asked about the lack of preparation."

In early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush
proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for
Lake Pontchartrain, according to a Feb. 16, 2004, article, in New Orleans
CityBusiness.

On June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson
Parish, Louisiana; told 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."

In July 2004, just over one year ago, FEMA held a five-day exercise at the
State Emergency Operations Center in Baton Rouge to develop joint response plans
for a catastrophic hurricane in Louisiana.

In the staged scenario developed by FEMA, a fictitious “Hurricane Pam”
brought 120-mph winds and storms that “topped levees
in the New Orleans area.” “More than one million residents evacuated and
Hurricane Pam destroyed 500,000-600,000 buildings.”

The New Orleans Times-Picayune covered the FEMA exercise and reported that
officials focused on six major issues. One of which was: “Removing
floodwater from New Orleans, Metairie and other bowl-like areas where levees
will capture and hold storm surge, possibly for days or weeks.” The
hypothetical specifically posited the following:

The water would be high enough in parts of New Orleans to top 17-foot
levees, including some along Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River-Gulf
Outlet, Zileski said. Some of the water pushed into Lake Pontchartrain would
flow through a gap in the hurricane levee in St. Charles Parish, flow across
land to the Mississippi River levee and be funneled south into Jefferson and
Orleans parishes.

It was a broiling August afternoon in New Orleans, Louisiana, the Big Easy,
the City That Care Forgot. Those who ventured outside moved as if they were
swimming in tupelo honey. Those inside paid silent homage to the man who
invented air-conditioning as they watched TV "storm teams" warn of a hurricane
in the Gulf of Mexico. Nothing surprising there: Hurricanes in August are as
much a part of life in this town as hangovers on Ash Wednesday.

But the next day the storm gathered steam and drew a bead on the city. As
the whirling maelstrom approached the coast, more than a million people
evacuated to higher ground. Some 200,000 remained, however--the car-less, the
homeless, the aged and infirm, and those die-hard New Orleanians who look for
any excuse to throw a party.

The storm hit Breton Sound with the fury of a nuclear warhead, pushing a
deadly storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain. The water crept to the top of the
massive berm that holds back the lake and then spilled over. Nearly 80 percent
of New Orleans lies below sea level--more than eight feet below in places--so
the water poured in. A liquid brown wall washed over the brick ranch homes of
Gentilly, over the clapboard houses of the Ninth Ward, over the white-columned
porches of the Garden District, until it raced through the bars and strip joints
on Bourbon Street like the pale rider of the Apocalypse. As it reached 25 feet
(eight meters) over parts of the city, people climbed onto roofs to escape
it.

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.

When did this calamity happen? It hasn't--yet. But the doomsday
scenario is not far-fetched. The Federal Emergency Management Agency lists a
hurricane strike on New Orleans as one of the most dire threats to the nation,
up there with a large earthquake in California or a terrorist attack on New York
City.

Before 9/11 the Federal Emergency Management Agency listed the three most
likely catastrophic disasters facing America: a terrorist attack on New York, a
major earthquake in San Francisco and a hurricane strike on New Orleans. "The
New Orleans hurricane scenario," The Houston Chronicle wrote in December 2001,
"may be the deadliest of all." It described a potential catastrophe very much
like the one now happening.

So why were New Orleans and the nation so unprepared? After 9/11, hard
questions were deferred in the name of national unity, then buried under a thick
coat of whitewash. This time, we need accountability.

First question: Why have aid and security taken so long to arrive?
Katrina hit five days ago - and it was already clear by last Friday that Katrina
could do immense damage along the Gulf Coast. Yet the response you'd expect from
an advanced country never happened. Thousands of Americans are dead or dying,
not because they refused to evacuate, but because they were too poor or too sick
to get out without help - and help wasn't provided. Many have yet to receive any
help at all.

There will and should be many questions about the response of state and
local governments; in particular, couldn't they have done more to help the poor
and sick escape? But the evidence points, above all, to a stunning lack of both
preparation and urgency in the federal government's response.

Even military resources in the right place weren't ordered into action.
"On Wednesday," said an editorial in The Sun Herald in Biloxi, Miss., "reporters
listening to horrific stories of death and survival at the Biloxi Junior High
School shelter looked north across Irish Hill Road and saw Air Force personnel
playing basketball and performing calisthenics. Playing basketball and
performing calisthenics!"

Maybe administration officials believed that the local National Guard
could keep order and deliver relief. But many members of the National Guard and
much of its equipment - including high-water vehicles - are in Iraq. "The
National Guard needs that equipment back home to support the homeland security
mission," a Louisiana Guard officer told reporters several weeks ago.

Second question: Why wasn't more preventive action taken? After 2003
the Army Corps of Engineers sharply slowed its flood-control work, including
work on sinking levees. "The corps," an Editor and Publisher article says,
citing a series of articles in The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, "never tried
to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as
homeland security - coming at the same time as federal tax cuts - was the reason
for the strain."
In 2002 the corps' chief resigned, reportedly under threat
of being fired, after he criticized the administration's proposed cuts in the
corps' budget, including flood-control spending.
Third question: Did the Bush
administration destroy FEMA's effectiveness? The administration has, by all
accounts, treated the emergency management agency like an unwanted stepchild,
leading to a mass exodus of experienced professionals.

Last year James Lee Witt, who won bipartisan praise for his leadership of
the agency during the Clinton years, said at a Congressional hearing: "I am
extremely concerned that the ability of our nation to prepare for and respond to
disasters has been sharply eroded. I hear from emergency managers, local and
state leaders, and first responders nearly every day that the FEMA they knew and
worked well with has now disappeared."

I don't think this is a simple tale of incompetence. The reason the
military wasn't rushed in to help along the Gulf Coast is, I believe, the same
reason nothing was done to stop looting after the fall of Baghdad. Flood control
was neglected for the same reason our troops in Iraq didn't get adequate armor.

At a fundamental level, I'd argue, our current leaders just aren't serious
about some of the essential functions of government. They like waging war, but
they don't like providing security, rescuing those in need or spending on
preventive measures. And they never, ever ask for shared sacrifice.

Yesterday Mr. Bush made an utterly fantastic claim: that nobody expected
the breach of the levees. In fact, there had been repeated warnings about
exactly that risk.

So America, once famous for its can-do attitude, now has a can't-do
government that makes excuses instead of doing its job. And while it makes those
excuses, Americans are dying.

In fiscal year 2006, the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers is bracing for a record $71.2 million reduction in federal
funding.

It would be the largest single-year funding loss ever for the New Orleans
district, Corps officials said.

I've been here over 30 years and I've never seen this level of reduction,
said Al Naomi, project manager for the New Orleans district. I think part of the
problem is it's not so much the reduction, it's the drastic reduction in one
fiscal year. It's the immediacy of the reduction that I think is the hardest
thing to adapt to.

There is an economic ripple effect, too. The cuts mean major hurricane and
flood protection projects will not be awarded to local engineering firms. Also,
a study to determine ways to protect the region from a Category 5 hurricane has
been shelved for now.

The House of Representatives wants to cut the New Orleans district budget
21 percent to $272.4 million in 2006, down from $343.5 million in 2005. The
House figure is about $20 million lower than the president's suggested $290.7
million budget.

It's now up to the Senate. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-New Orleans, is making no
promises.
It's going to be very tough, Landrieu said. The House was not able
to add back this money ... but hopefully we can rally in the Senate and get some
of this money back.

Landrieu said the Bush administration is not making Corps of Engineers
funding a priority.
I think it's extremely shortsighted, Landrieu said. When
the Corps of Engineers' budget is cut, Louisiana bleeds. These projects are
literally life-and-death projects to the people of south Louisiana and they are
(of) vital economic interest to the entire nation.

The Corps' budget could still be beefed up, as it is every year, through
congressional additions. Last year, Congress added $20 million to the overall
budget of the New Orleans district but a similar increase this year would still
leave a $50 million shortfall.

One of the hardest-hit areas of the New Orleans district's budget is the
Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, which was created after the May
1995 flood to improve drainage in Jefferson, Orleans and St. Tammany parishes.
SELA's budget is being drained from $36.5 million awarded in 2005 to $10.4
million suggested for 2006 by the House of Representatives and the president.
The project manager said there would be no contracts awarded with this $10.4
million, Demma said.

"By the '70s and into the '80s and '90s, the Democratic Party solidified its
gains in the African American community, and we Republicans did not effectively
reach out," Mehlman says in his prepared text. "Some Republicans gave up on
winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit
politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman
to tell you we were wrong."

Rep. Charles Rangel (D-Harlem) drew cheers when he hailed Clinton as "the last
elected president of the U.S." and said, "It is our job to say we're not getting
over Florida."