From an article by Paul Craig Roberts on CounterPunch:
Chalk up the city of New Orleans as a cost of Bush's Iraq war.
There were not enough helicopters to repair the breeched levees and rescue people trapped by rising water. Nor are there enough Louisiana National Guards available to help with rescue efforts and to patrol against looting... The National Guard and helicopters are off on a fools mission in Iraq...
Now the Guardsmen, trapped in the Iraqi quagmire, are watching on TV the families they left behind trapped by rising waters and wondering if the floating bodies are family members. None know where their dislocated families are, but, shades of Fallujah, they do see their destroyed homes...
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?...
All Bush has achieved by invading Iraq is to kill and wound thousands of people while destroying America's reputation. The only beneficiaries are oil companies capitalizing on a good excuse to jack up the price of gasoline and Osama bin Laden's recruitment.
What we have is a Republican war for oil company profits while New Orleans sinks beneath the waters.
Read the rest here.
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He's reaching, in this one. I get his point, but it's not necessarily a valid or logical one.
You'd have to support the war in the first place to accept that. While the National Guard has been used abroad, its principal role during peacetime is as a reserve force to prevent invasion, deal with insurrection, and address domestic emergencies. If this were peacetime, those soldiers would be home. But they're not, because the current US administration has sent them abroad, pointlessly, in a war of choice. They are not home looking after the people of Louisiana and Mississippi because they are in Iraq, a country which never attacked the United States.
No less a conservative source than USA Today states that:
The Pentagon said Wednesday that it will add 10,000 National Guard soldiers from around the country to areas of Louisiana and Mississippi ravaged by Hurricane Katrina.
And why? Because...
More than 5,900 Guard soldiers from the two states, about a third of the total, are deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In other words, ten thousand soldiers are being sent now to mop up what six thousand might have forestalled yesterday. How many people would be alive now if six thousand more troops had been available in the Gulf States from the outset, instead of ten thousand being sent in after the storm has already come and gone over Canada? We'll never know, but I'm reasonably confident it would have made a difference.
The United States has seen category 5 hurricanes before, three others them since the 1930s. Yet this one, tracked by satellite from the very start, emerges as the most devastating, likely to steal the crown from Camille. Despite the fact that the US Army was unequal to the task of subduing Iraq and told the president so, he sent them and the National Guard anyway. These are the results. Roberts is quite correct in pointing this out. Plainly: men and resources were not where they needed to be in time of national emergency. They were off working to secure the future of the petrodollar and controling access to a strategic asset.
Rather than focus on the Guard, how about on funding cuts? Levees that were minimally maintained, whose funds were greatly slashed, despite warnings for years over the potential impact?
What's the difference? These are both symptoms of the very same disease.
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