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Page 3 of 3 When Katrina hit, he sat in Crawford; then (perhaps -- to have a thoroughly unkind thought -- continuing his flight from Cindy Sheehan), he boarded his plane and headed in the wrong direction, for San Diego where he stood against the backdrop of an aircraft carrier, the USS Ronald Reagan (don't these people ever learn?), and pretended it was actually World War II and we were occupying Japan. By this time, every excuse for his war in Iraq having peeled away (the al-Qaeda connection, the wmds, even "freedom"), he finally arrived at a new explanation for why we were there. It was... oil -- or to be more exact, an oil fantasy. ("If Zarqawi and bin Laden gain control of Iraq, they would create a new training ground for future terrorist attacks; they'd seize oil fields to fund their ambitions; they could recruit more terrorists by claiming an historic victory over the United States and our coalition.")  Maybe he should send David Kay, who headed his fruitless weapons-of-mass-destruction search team, back to Iraq to look for oil, since it's been in short supply there, and now is about to be here. Only then did our President get on a jet heading in the right direction -- towards Louisiana, where he had the pilot swoop down to 1,700 feet (as if that were something daring) for a close look -- on his way to Washington. Nobody in the administration, it seems, thought to put boot to the soil of Mississippi or Louisiana in the first crucial days of this crisis. (If you want the details -- Vice-President Cheney remained on vacation in Wyoming and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was in New York buying shoes by the scads while offers of aid poured in from such disparate countries as Australia, Israel, Sri Lanka, and Venezuela -- check out Maureen Dowd's latest New York Times blast, United States of Shame.) The one constant of this President and his administration is that their most essential impulse is never to head for the frontlines themselves -- not in war, not in disaster, not for our safety or our planet's safety, not even on the campaign trail. They are invariably at the front of nowhere at all, and more than happy to be there. The old "chickenhawk" label has a deeper meaning than we ever realized. In the meantime, what we know from Katrina is that, in George Bush's new America, we are no longer capable, as a civilian society, of rescuing ourselves. Even the more civilian part of our military is gone. The Louisiana and Mississippi National Guard, after all, are mainly in Iraq, feeling, I'm sure, mighty helpless right now, while chaos reigns in their home cities. Thank you, George. Mission Accomplished! Before the Iraq War, it was already evident that the State Department -- the foreign policy equivalent of a civilian effort -- was atrophying. (Administration officials were, after all, starving that beast too.) "Diplomacy," such as it was, was being conducted with other nations ever more regularly by our military proconsuls like our Centcom commander in the Middle East on a military-to-military basis. A grim wag suggested to me recently that the only way New Orleans would have gotten some quick action was if the administration had renamed Katrina "Osama," claimed it left behind weapons of mass destruction (as it may, in fact, have), and then invaded the city. When an administration which has long believed that the resort to force should be the initial impulse behind any policy finally acts, force is unsurprisingly all it knows. If what we've observed in the last week is the response of the Bush administration to an essentially predictable civilian catastrophe, then imagine how prepared it is, after these four years of "homeland security," for an unpredictable one. Or what about, for instance, just another massive hurricane in this age of Xtreme weather? After all, though you can't find a word in the papers about it at the moment, we are only halfway through the fiercest, longest hurricane season in memory. We should be scared. Very scared. In the end, this country remains in a powerful state of denial on two major matters which help explain why the elevation of George Bush and his cronies was no mistake. We are now a highly militarized society in all sorts of ways that any of us could see, but that is seldom recognized or discussed (except when the threat of base closings sends specific communities into a panic). Unrecognized and unconsidered, the militarized nature of our society is likely in the future to prove both dangerous and highly destructive. Right now, we are a weakened superpower wired for force and force alone -- and if Iraq has shown us one thing, it's that, when it comes to solving human problems of any sort, military force is highly overrated. And of course, we are as a society in denial over the toxic sludge pool where climate change (or global warming) meets Middle Eastern energy dependence. On this, our future rests. If someone doesn't get to the frontlines of planetary security soon, we may be living not just with one feral city, but on a feral continent, part of a feral world. Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War. [Note: Thanks, as ever, to the indefatigable Nick Turse for research aid. Make sure you go back and read the prophetic Mike Davis 2004 piece about New Orleans, "Poor, Black, and Left Behind." It will take your breath away. On Tuesday, environmental writer Bill McKibben will continue Tomdispatch's discussion of our post-Katrina world.] Copyright 2005 Tom Engelhardt Recommend this article...
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