Katrina-Baghdad: Initial Iterations of a Strange Attractor: By Dion Dennis.
Intro: >On August 30, 2005, George W. Bush was sent to the wrong place, at the wrong time, to deliver, in his pseudo-folksy ham-handed way, the wrong script: Bush's political choreographers crafted a speech that was delivered at a 60th anniversary commemoration of the end of World War II, held at a California Naval Air station. As a salvo in the propaganda war over Iraq, Bush histrionically claimed the moral authority of World War II for the current U.S. occupation of Iraq. Besides the highly dubious claim of moral equivalence, the timing of the speech turned out to be inept. Unfolding events caught Bush and his handlers off-guard. Fifteen-hundred miles away, a concurrent event, the Category Five Hurricane Katrina, laid waste to a significant American city, New Orleans, and to a contiguous two-hundred mile swath of the Gulf Coast east of New Orleans. Mississippi's Governor, the former head of the Republican National Committee, Haley Barbour, unreflexively invoked another descriptive icon of World War II, as well. "It looks like Hiroshima is what it looks like," muttered a shocked Barbour, describing parts of a devastated county on the coast. Meanwhile, the Louisiana levees broke in at least three spots, unleashing the fury of the swollen waters of Lake Pontchartrain on New Orleans. Potable drinking water, electricity, and the other taken-for-granted basics of mundane life disappeared into a twenty foot high stew of sewage, toxic chemicals, Mississippi Delta mud, and Lake Pontchartrain spillage. Basic infrastructure was destroyed. Tens of thousands of houses were severely damaged or simply obliterated. Bloated bodies floated in the water, as much of the coastal population became a large and instant group of internal U.S. refugees. Meanwhile, police looked on passively as looters raided both the upscale downtown shops such as the Bon Marche, and less status-conscious looters stripped the shelves of several outlying stores of the behemoth proletarian vendor, Wal-Mart. On the night of August 30th, the CNN website described it this way: "New Orleans resembled a war zone more than a modern American metropolis on Tuesday." As Army Reservists and a remainder of National Guard troops rolled into New Orleans, they resembled nothing as much as their comrades-in-arms concurrently stationed in Iraq. Ironically, the shock and awe produced by Katrina's Gulf Coast invasion mirrored the effects of the Iraqi war, in novel and all-too-tragic ways. On Tuesday night, August 30, 2005, New Orleans became the de facto American Baghdad, as the contiguous Gulf Coast east of New Orleans became an analogue for the Iraqi countryside. It was no surprise, then, to see the juxtaposition of the following morning's (Wednesday, August 31st) split-screen front page headlines on MSNBC.com. A story on the "Nightmare" of Katrina refugees was paired with the "Baghdad Stampede" that killed 800 or more Iraqis. Panic, disaster, public disorder, the mass movement of refugees, tightening military occupation, combined with the key linkages between the disruption of oil production and refineries and long-term economic dislocation and debt accumulation; these are just the initial components of Katrina-Baghdad as a "strange attractor." This emergent strange attractor we now call Katrina-Baghdad will spin off and/or accelerate a series of complex economic, political and social iterations over the near and longer term.< Link [The Archives] 
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