General to Katrina, which I wrote to my own email list yesterday as a preface to Bunch article: 

Some in the press are connecting the dots between the Gulf War and Gulf Coast disasters in terms of the transfer of $$$ from domestic security needs to the fantasm of "kill them there so they don't kill us here" (see Bunch article). Now hundreds of American civilian lives have been lost and hundreds of thousands more lives, livings, and futures have been devastated and blighted; resources that should have been put into repair and maintenance of infrastructure on the Gulf Coast have instead been channeled into Iraq where they have flooded into the stinking-sewer coffers of corporate bloodsuckers such as Halliburton. And, the destruction of the cultural asset that is/was New Orleans may be irreversible. Babylonian Blowback, for sure.

Plus there is this: the phenomenal lack of planning that characterized the Iraq War--in the current case traceable to the Bush devil-may-care attitude toward funding genuine domestic security requirements such as hurricane preparedness, in the face of pleas by local, regional, and national emergency managers. Does this remind you of what happened when military professionals warned of the predictable Iraq invasion consequences?

Not only were the levees allowed to sink and otherwise fall into disrepair, but, as a further example (just one), hospital generators have stopped because, though there is fuel available, no one planned for getting it from the fuel storage to the hospitals to run ventilators etc. in case of flooding... no plans seem to have been made for evacuating carless residents of New Orleans.  Etc. There was no federal money for personnel to carry out such planning and develop emergency infrastructure.

Can you imagine such a half-assed situation ever being allowed to develop in the Netherlands, much of it also below sea level? I don't think so. There, the Water Administration (Waterrat), charged with protecting the citizens and their homes from the sea, has the status of a military high command. The civilian population would never be exposed to such high-level--i.e., predictable--risk (or even low-level, for that matter).

When does this guy Bush get impeached for criminal negligence vis-a-vis the domestic population, clearly a by-product of his international war crimes ?

And how long will it take for our "Democratic" politicians to notice these gigantic breaches in the Republican levee and stop swimming expediently with the toxic Republican "red tide"?