Heartbreaking

A bad news day for sure. While the number of dead from Hurricane Katrina seems set to climb into the thousands, it also now seems that the number of dead in the Baghdad stampede will be over 1,000.

It is clear that in both cases there will be a backlash (delayed by shock, but it's coming) against the governments involved. And that's not just a case of cheap partisan poiliticking.

The Iraq stampede occured during a Shi'a religious festival and followed a number of mortar attacks on the Shi'a crowd by Sunni forces. It is simply not possible to de-link this from the failed constitutional process of recent days: Sunnis were disenfrachised from the start, and this disaster is only likely to inflame further sectarian violence.

In the USA, the government department responsible for natural disasters like Katrina is the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Kevin Drum has some analysis of FEMA under Bush Snr, Clinton and then Bush Jnr:

The advent of the Bush administration in January 2001 signaled the beginning of the end for FEMA. The newly appointed leadership of the agency showed little interest in its work or in the missions pursued by the departed [James Lee] Witt. Then came the Sept. 11 attacks and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Soon FEMA was being absorbed into the "homeland security borg."

This year it was announced that FEMA is to "officially" lose the disaster preparedness function that it has had since its creation. The move is a death blow to an agency that was already on life support. In fact, FEMA employees have been directed not to become involved in disaster preparedness functions, since a new directorate (yet to be established) will have that mission.

There is also a development/pollution versus conservation aspect to this tragedy:

Years of flood control engineering, inspired by the need for a major city and port in the oil and gas-rich Mississippi delta, have altered the natural landscape of the region beyond recognition.

The levee system meant that the Mississippi, a vast river that drains the whole of the eastern US, was tamed by man.

Without regular river floods to feed the swampy delta with precious silt and nutrients, vast swathes of Louisiana's coastal wetlands have disappeared in the past 75 years.

Sprawling coastal wetlands can bear the brunt of a hurricane better than the concrete passageways of a modern city.

The US Geological Survey calls the wetlands a "natural buffer" in a high-risk area. Plans to stop further erosion have run aground in Congress.

Erosion meant that instead of falling on the delta, Katrina's rains swelled the Mississippi and filled Lake Pontchartrain.

Now nobody is going to blame Bush for a full 75 years or more of over-development. But his policies in that regard are hardly very enlightened. When you consistently place money and development and corporatiuons ahead of people and the natural environment, you are courting disaster.

UPDATE: From Editor & Publisher:

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.

Read the full article, it's pretty damning. This at a time when up to 40% of the local National Guard are not avilable to help because they are in Iraq.