First things first. On behalf of all Hurricane Katrina survivors, I want to apologize to Vice President Cheney for being a "distraction" to the mission in Iraq. The last thing any catastrophe victim wants to do is interfere with their leaders' appetite for foreign wars and far-flung "nation-building". The second to last thing a catastrophe victim wants to do is stand between Cheney and whatever he's aiming at (in this case, Iraq). Yet, according to the Veep, that's precisely what happened. Back in January, Cheney complained that "the whole exercise with Katrina and the hurricanes and disaster relief and so forth [was], I suppose, a bit of a distraction. But it is important to try to maintain public support for what we're doing [in Iraq]."

So: a thousand pardons to the Cheney administration for being an "exercise" and a "distraction" to the Iraq agenda. Actually, let's offer 1836 pardons. But who's counting?

I think New Orleanians in particular failed the Vice President. See, during the summer prior to Katrina, Cheney visited our city and made an important foreign policy speech. It was 2004, and he encouraged his audience to take pride in the rebuilding of Afghanistan, and explained that we must engage terrorists in Iraq "so that we do not have to face them with armies of medical personnel, police, and firefighters on the streets of our own cities." That made sense. If Baghdad isn't secure, how can Indianapolis be secure?

It's clear now that immediately after the hurricane, New Orleans missed a golden opportunity to help Cheney redirect the national debate back to the war in Iraq. We should have used our mostly-destroyed city as a warning to the rest of the country: Be vigilant, America! This could happen to you, too!

So, fourteen months after his prescient 2004 speech, Cheney returned to New Orleans, and toured our devastated city with "armies" of medical personnel and police. He applauded the progress his administration had made in cutting through bureaucratic red tape, and making good things happen. He said "the performance, in general, was... definitely very impressive." Now I understand that this was his way of declaring "Hurricane Accomplished", and attempting to move the news cycle along to other priorities. New Orleans should have taken his cue. But we were still stunned, and weren't ready to seize the opportunity within the crisis. If we were really on the ball after the Katastrophe, some resourceful New Orleanians would have rowed a pirogue over to the levee breaches and sprayed Islamist grafitti near the burst floodwalls before the news cameras arrived. I mean, the country was still at war, and we had the opportunity to re-unify the nation in righteous anger. If the flooding looked like the work of terrorists, nobody would've cared about looters or the cost of rebuilding-- instead, all of the outrage generated by those televised images of human suffering could have been channelled into Cheney's foreign policy objectives. Sadly, though, New Orleanians had a failure of imagination after the storm. A sharper-thinking city would have made sure the levee design failures were rigged to look like a terrorist attack.

Nonetheless, I'll submit that the distracting aftermath of Hurricane Katrina wasn't totally New Orleans' fault. Shortly after Cheney visited and pronounced things to be going well, President Bush came to Jackson Square and read a speech chock-full of grand, sweeping commitments to the region. It seemed like very bold stuff. He emphasized that the rebuilding of the Gulfcoast was a "great national enterprise"-- one that was just getting started! Bush even uttered a few Great Society words about confronting poverty and racism. In retrospect, it's obviously over-the-top fluff, but at the time it seemed like whole new vistas of opportunity were opening before us: world class flood protection, an entrepreneurial renaissance in the GulfSouth, smarter coastal rebuilding plans and methods, a shared national "duty" to confront poverty... perhaps even real governmental accountability. Bush's promises to displaced New Orleanians were the most hopeful news we'd heard in weeks. It was intoxicating to think that some of these ideas could become reality, and we indulged in those pretty thoughts. We made the classic mistake of taking Bush seriously. Even now, some are still hoping that Bush will make the Gulfsouth's recovery part of his presidential legacy. So, clearly the President's primetime speech was far too hopeful-- perhaps even "distracting". Many of us wanted to believe it. We held out hope that the president would honor his commitments, and remained selfishly focused on ourselves in the months after the storm. Soon our hopes were dashed, and this led to discontent.

Helpfully, Cheney was there to snap us out of our blue funk and remind us that Katrina "disaster relief" had become a distraction to the administration's Iraq agenda. A needy, devastated city can't be permitted to weaken the terror-fighting resolve of all the other un-devastated cities. To drive the point home, Bush mentioned Iraq 14 times in his State of the Union, and New Orleans twice and the Gulf Coast once. After that, most of us finally understood that the speech in Jackson Square wasn't to be taken literally. It was just feel-good rhetoric.

Just think: what if the Katastrophe occurred in 2002 instead of 2005? What then? Is it possible that, if such a costly "distraction" occurred, the campaign to Invade Iraq might have been postponed (if not rejected) due to lack of public support? It's a disturbing thought.

Once again, then, let me apologize for New Orleans being so slow on the uptake. We didn't want to be a distraction, nor did we want to miss an opportunity to help the war effort. When New Orleans fails Bush and Cheney, we fail the country as a whole. Perhaps, after a future disaster, we'll have the opportunity to make amends.

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In case all that wasn't bad enough, there's more. Not only did New Orleans' selfish focus on the Katastrophe distract the nation from Iraq, but we also distracted many right wing blogs from noticing an important Washington Post article on Cheney's $2.67 million vacation home. (He purchased it in early September after the storm.) Had they noticed that piece, a lot of unretracted, unhinged outrage might have been avoided last month.