Christopher Hitchens on Katrina

"It was actually the weekend before the Katrina disaster that I received an e-mail from a brilliant friend, who asked if I realized what would happen to the Iraq debate if the hurricane really hit. And of course I could at once easily see what an apparent shortage of National Guardsmen, or any lack of preparation, would look like. And if this tiny thought can occur in my mind, then what can one say about the mind of the White House? The president could have seen that a major, historic American city was in danger of being lost and could have easily got there beforehand to ask all state and city officials if there was anything they might have overlooked. A few thousand pallets of bottled water, for example, might have come in handy for a moment when there would be too much water and also too little. And remember that some reliable predictions were that the disaster would be even worse than it was, or is. Remember, too, that the same president assumed a take-charge, back-from-vacation attitude when it was none of his business and when the already-dead Terri Schiavo was being hawked up and down the land by the religious wing-nuts, as if she had been resurrected on video. And then to get to the city late, after a casual fly-by, and to say that nobody had ever thought the levees might cave in …"

And this:

"The United States has a trillion-dollar economy and a massive and sophisticated military, which is quite capable in competent hands of combating rogue-state dictators and jihadist maniacs, while simultaneously ensuring the safety of all its citizens, at least against the more predictable acts of God or the more predictable attacks of the extremely godly. And there are billions left over after these expenditures, which we choose to waste (in my opinion) on the huge diversion of manpower and resources to the "Drug War" and to "Missile Defense." Let us by all means have a national debate on where the fat is and where the vulnerabilities are and decrease the gap between them. The administration used to argue that Saddam was an "imminent" threat. I must say that I preferred to state that he was a permanent one (which, by the way, is much more menacing and exhausting). The waters of Lake Pontchartrain were a permanent threat, understood long before the subject of Iraq came up, and more recently an imminent one. In neither case was there any alibi for being ill-prepared, or unwilling or unable to act. All state and local and federal authorities were on notice."