GEORGIE ANNE GEYER Shallow thinking hurts Iraq, Big Easy

WASHINGTON -- Over the Labor Day weekend, along with all Americans, I watched with increasing horror the destruction in one of our greatest cities of purely American culture. I was haunted by the idea that there was some strange, yet abiding, connection between the mass suffering in New Orleans and the mass deaths of pilgrims in Iraq.
I kept wanting to deny it -- the two were far removed, and no one, especially a columnist, should reach too far, lest her attentive readers pull her back with a jerk. Yet the idea persisted.
There, in beautiful New Orleans, despite persistent and recent warnings of this long-anticipated and long-feared hurricane and flood, the scale of the misery of its people was surpassed only by the lassitude of federal, state and local officials.
Halfway across the world -- but now relegated to the inner pages of the newspapers -- two events took place in Iraq that we ignore at our peril. First, up to 1,000 Shiite pilgrims were killed the Wednesday before Labor Day during a march to a beloved shrine when someone shouted the fearful words "suicide bomber" and the crowd panicked. Second, in a story that would have made the front page in any other week, it was reported that radical Islamic insurgents had moved back into the city of Tal Afar in Iraq, which American officials believed they had pacified over the last year; as well, all but a few dozen local police officers quit, with many going to side with the radicals.
So what was it about these two deeply disturbing events, so far apart, so remote, that strangely connected them?
Deliberate actions
Both find their genesis in deliberate American actions: one, the execrable incompetence in the war in Iraq; the other, the disorganization and chaotic nature of the response (if we could call it that, before the fifth day) to New Orleans. Both illustrate the extent to which our government (at least this administration) runs on hubris, on the spur of the moment, on shallow thinking and even shallower planning. These events reveal an unwillingness to stand up and be counted when policies are wrong, and a slavish unwillingness on the part of officials to speak out against the White House or the numerous bureaucracies that are busy checkmating one another rather than solving problems.
We know that our exotic, musical New Orleans, built in 1717 on land that was then at least 10 feet above sea level, was extraordinarily vulnerable. But over the years, engineering feats that controlled the flow of the Mississippi also eroded the marshes, swamps and barrier islands that acted as buffers to surging storm waters (in the last 75 years, enough to cover the state of Delaware, to be exact). More recently, each year since 2001, the Bush administration has slashed Louisiana's requests for flood control funds. Although a flooding of New Orleans was often listed as one of the three major threats to American cities, this year less than 2 percent of the Army Corps of Engineers' $4.7 billion budget was set aside for three crucial New Orleans levee projects.
Why? The Iraq war and war mind-set play a big role. In the Iraq war itself, much of the same casual arrogance, the same "don't bother me with cultural or janitorial problems" attitude, and the same win-in-the-short-run attitude on the part of these American "planners" has predominated.
Stench of sewage
It is becoming boring to say that the planning that was done by the State Department for after the war was studiously ignored -- worse, made fun of -- by the gung-ho Pentagon neocons. Meanwhile, the macho White House of George W., who dreams of the "grandeur" of war and not the stench of sewage, is simply not interested in the tedious business of conservation, preservation and prudent long-term planning that his father, all his life, exemplified. A total denial of global warming! No interest in conservation of resources, such as oil! None of his "hero" Teddy Roosevelt's husbanding of the environment!
In this case, the apple really did fall amazingly far from the tree.
So, in Iraq this last week, as in New Orleans, we could see the results of this short-term, self-indulgent, bureaucracy-choked thinking at work in America -- IN AMERICA, which has historically exemplified the opposite qualities: conserving and respecting what we were blessed to inherit, wisely husbanding the preservation of what we have, and building anew to last and to inspire the peoples of the world.
Universal Press Syndicate