Remembrance of Bush's fiascoes

As he travels the nation to commemorate Katrina and 9/11, the president is only highlighting the tragedy of his own incompetence.

By Sidney Blumenthal

Read more: New Orleans, Terrorism, Politics, Sidney Blumenthal, Saddam Hussein, Mississippi, Osama Bin Laden, Opinion, Donald Rumsfeld, al-qaida, Iraq War, Alberto Gonzales, Muqtada al-Sadr, Hurricane Katrina

Photo: AP/Evan Vucci

The New Birth Brass Band plays as President Bush walks to meet with local residents and volunteers on Tuesday in New Orleans.

Aug. 31, 2006 | President Bush declared a National Day of Remembrance on Aug. 29, the day of Hurricane Katrina's landfall -- not on Sept. 2, the day the federal government finally responded to the disaster. He has begun commemorating highlights of his presidency as though he were a guide leading visitors through the wonders of the George W. Bush Presidential Library. His dissociation is one element in the continuity of his methods.

The population of New Orleans is about half of the 455,000 it was when the storm hit, reduced to the size it was in 1880. Here the Bush administration has built a bridge to the 19th century. Along the Mississippi coast, fewer than 5 percent of the wrecked homes are being rebuilt. The $17 billion in federal community development block grants has only now slowly begun trickling in. Little of it will go to low-income homeowners and none to renters, who constitute about half of those displaced.

On his Remembrance tour, his 13th visit to the region since Katrina, Bush arrived first, on Monday, in Mississippi. "It's a sense of renewal here," he proclaimed, gesturing out at the beach. "You know, each visit, you see progress. I was struck by the beauty of the beaches. The beaches were pretty rough after the storm, as you know. Today they are pristine and they're beautiful. They reflect a hopeful future, as far as I'm concerned."

The next day he came to New Orleans to herald "progress." "We're addressing what went wrong," he declared in a voice that quickly trailed from bravado into passivity. Later he perked up, after calling the storm "biblical," offering his own King James version of Katrina rebuilding: "There will be a momentum, a momentum will be gathered. Houses will begat jobs, jobs will begat houses."

Katrina week is an ordeal he must weather before 9/11 week, which will begat the Republicans' midterm elections campaign. Even on the day Bush was obliged to stage what appears will be his annual Groundhog Day in New Orleans until the end of his term, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld previewed the fall season's political line. At the American Legion convention, he attacked "some who argue for tossing in the towel ... some seem not to have learned history's lessons ... quitters ... the Blame America First mentality." In Iraq, and everywhere else for that matter, "fascists" are the enemy, failure to support the administration is appeasement, and the press is subverting the struggle by reporting stories like those about torture at Abu Ghraib.

Rumsfeld did not mention the clash the day before between units of the Iraqi army and Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi army (Sadr is Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's most important political ally), in which 28 were killed, including an Iraqi general and more than a dozen soldiers, beheaded in a town square after they ran out of ammunition. In July, Rumsfeld had ridiculed the notion that sectarian strife in Iraq bears any resemblance to civil war. "If you think of our Civil War, this is really very different," he said. The metrics would seem to be satisfied when large-scale military units battle, but Rumsfeld retreated from bloody facts on the ground to higher rhetoric. "Can we truly afford to believe that, somehow or someway, vicious extremists could be appeased?" he charged, and went on without describing the "vicious extremists" (Muqtada al-Sadr?), except as "fascists."

Making his escape from New Orleans, Bush laid preparations for a Churchillian reenactment during the upcoming 9/11 week. In his press conference last week Bush had upset his past innuendoes by conceding that the relationship of Saddam Hussein to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 was "nothing." But in an interview with NBC News anchor Brian Williams on Tuesday, Bush scrambled to repackage his all-inclusive unified field theory. "They -- they weren't -- no, I agree, they weren't Iraqis, nor did I ever say Iraq ordered that attack, but they're a part of -- Iraq is part of the struggle against the terrorists ... I personally do not believe that Saddam Hussein picked up the phone and said, 'al-Qaida, attack America.'" Thus Bush remembered a story no one had ever suggested before he did in his interview; and in refuting his own concocted tale he hinted once again at dark liaisons between Saddam and al- Qaida.

Bush could hardly wait to put remembrance of Katrina behind him. He rushed to the American Legion convention on Thursday to begin a series of speeches on the stakes in the war on terror and Iraq that will climax with his commemoration of Sept. 11. Framed by the tragic date, Bush hopes to recapture his image as the president holding the bullhorn while standing on the rubble of the World Trade Center. His idea of memory is the erasure of almost everything that has followed his heroic moment. He wishes to remember the past so long as most of it is forgotten.

Bush's remembrances of 9/11 only point to the opportunities that he has squandered. When he stood on the ruins of the World Trade Center virtually the whole world had declared its solidarity with the United States, al-Qaida had lost almost all sympathy throughout Muslim communities, and even Syria and Iran offered to help the United States destroy the terrorist threat. Now Bush stands on the rubble of his policy and reminds us by his presence what he has not built.

Next page: The Day of Remembrance for Sept. 11 should properly begin on Aug. 6