George Bush's Iraq Obsession

I wrote this short piece as a response to The West’s post equating The War to Katrina. This logic is accurate. In fact, in early 2001, before 9/11, the Federal Emergency Management Agency warned the newly appointed president George W. Bush that the three most dangerous disasters facing America were: 1) a terrorist attack in New York City, 2) a flood in New Orleans, and 3) an earthquake in San Francisco. Incompetence, negligence, and a fetishistic infatuation with Iraq have realized and exacerbated all but one of FEMA’s three fears. Here are some of the tragic costs of George Bush’s fixation with Iraq.

If George Bush wasn't obsessed with Iraq…

• The United States could have focus on Al Queada pre-9/11 like the FEMA and the CIA advised, not only would it have been potentially preventable, but first responders would have been swifter and more communicative. In fact, many top analysts in Washington feel that the response to September 11th, the invasion of Afghanistan, was warped by The Obsession with Iraq to such an extent that troops were being withheld from deployment to preserve resources for future Iraqi invation.
  
• Two wars would not have occurred simultaneously; Afghanistan could have been pacified while Saddam could have been contained through sanctions.
  
• Border control funding would not have been sacrificed, and the nearly 500,000 illegal immigrants last year would not have been able to blithely pass into our country (a growing number from the Middle East).
  
• National Guard units in Louisiana would have been more numerous by nearly ten thousand, swifter, and more effective after Katrina.
  
• And, finally, over 40 million dollars in funding, between the denied 2005 request by the US Army Corps of Engineers to the slashed flood funds, would not have been diverted from the levees, and New Orleans wouldn't be the gravesite cesspool which it is right now.
  

As Michael Lind of The Financial Times noted, the dominoes aren’t falling in the Middle East, they’re falling in America.