I don't think it can be said often enough.
Another Terrible Casualty of the Iraq War
How New Orleans was Lost
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
http://www.counterpunch.org <Distracted by its phony war on terrorism, the US government had made no preparations in the event Hurricane Katarina brought catastrophe to New Orleans. No contingency plan existed. Only now after the disaster are FEMA and the Corp of Engineers trying to assemble the material and equipment to save New Orleans from the fate of Atlantis.
Even worse, articles in the New Orleans Times-Picayune and public statements by emergency management chiefs in New Orleans make it clear that the Bush administration slashed the funding for the Corp of Engineers' projects to strengthen and raise the New Orleans levees and diverted the money to the Iraq war.
Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, told the New Orleans Times-Picayune (June 8, 2004): "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."
Why can't the US government focus on America's needs and leave other countries alone? Why are American troops in Iraq instead of protecting our own borders from a mass invasion by illegal immigrants? Why are American helicopters blowing up Iraqi homes instead of saving American homes in New Orleans?>
New Orleans after Katrina:Cockburn & St. Clair
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn08312005.html <As the war's unpopularity soars, there will be millions asking, Why is the National Guard in Iraq, instead of helping the afflicted along the Gulf in the first crucial hours, before New Orleans, Biloxi, and Mobile turn into toxic toilet bowls with thousands marooned on the tops of houses.
As thousands of trapped residents face the real prospect of perishing for lack of a way out of the flooding city, Bush's first response was to open the spigots of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve at the request of oil companies and to order the EPA to eliminate Clean Air standards at power plants and oil referiners across the nation, supposedly to increase fuel supplies--a goal long sought by his cronies at the big oil companies.
It didn't have to be this bad. The entire city of New Orleans needed have been lost. Hundreds of people need not have perished. Yet, it now seems clear that the Bush administration sacrificed New Orleans to pursue its mad war on Iraq.
As the New Orleans Times-Picayune has reported in a devastating series of articles over the last two years, city and state officials and the Corps of Enginners had repeatedly requested funding to strengthen the levees along Lake Pontchartrain that breeched in the wake of the flood. But the Bush administration rebuffed the requests repeatedly, reprograming the funding from levee enhancement to Homeland Security and the war on Iraq.
This year the Bush administration slashed funding for the New Orleans Corps of Engineers by $71.2 million, a stunning 44.2 percent reduction from its 2001 levels. A Corps report noted at the time that
"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.">
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