BobHarris.com - New Orleans as a casualty of the war in Iraq

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New Orleans as a casualty of the war in Iraq

Tag it now -

Tuesday, 30 August 2005

Horrible. Unthinkable. But read the article. (I've added emphasis to a few lines below.)

When flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA.

Over the next 10 years, the Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with carrying out SELA, spent $430 million on shoring up levees and building pumping stations, with $50 million in local aid. But at least $250 million in crucial projects remained, even as hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin increased dramatically and the levees surrounding New Orleans continued to subside.

Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The [U.S. Army Corps of Engineers] never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain.

And this was reported at the time. Not as a partisan thing. Just as a public safety issue.

At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.

In early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for Lake Pontchartrain, according to a Feb. 16, 2004, article, in New Orleans CityBusiness.

On June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, told the Times-Picayune: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president’s budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that’s the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can’t be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."

This is not a left/right issue. The Army Corps of Engineers, who described the reasons for the money shift, are hardly a left-wing organization. This is not a partisan issue. Plenty of Democrats bought into the war wholesale, and plenty of them still do.

Here it is: the money to maintain the levees was yanked away for the same reason half the Louisiana National Guard was.

We may never know if the levees would have held if the funding hadn't been shifted to Iraq. If so, there would be only one conclusion:

New Orleans is a casualty of the war in Iraq.