When Cindy met Katrina     

Cindy couldn’t get the president out of his private vacation ranch, but Katrina did.  The president’s ill-advised refusal to meet the grieving mother of a fallen son in Iraq was very puzzling for the carefully crafted compassionate presidential image.  Unlike the Cindy Sheehan demonstration, however, the devastation of hurricane Katrina was just too much to bear for the well rested president. Several days after the disaster hit; the president had to cut short his lengthy vacation and fly over to survey the embattled areas from the security and the comforts of his Air force One. In his address to the nation, the president sounded more like an accountant than a reassuring leader. He cavalierly read from a list of how many ice boxes and trucks were sent to the affected areas. “Help is on the way,” he said to comfort the thousands of dislocated in-house refugees. Was the hurricane a surprise to the Bush administration?  If not, so why our leaders seemed confused and unprepared for the biggest natural disaster in our history? People and experts have been talking about it for days before finally realizing the cost in lives and resources.  The Bush administration seems to manage our affairs by disaster, ignoring warnings of an Al Qaeda attack, and then hastily sending the troops to invade Iraq unprepared.  Now, they ignored the impending Hurricane Katrina, and after five sex days still thousands of people still stranded and feared dead, corpses floating in the streets with living, a whole community was completely whipped out, and thousands of people lost their livelihood and all we hear from the Louisiana governor and our attorney general is restoring law and order. We couldn’t protect the poor people of Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi but we are going to protect Wal-Mart and K-mart from looting. Our national guards are now fighting simultaneously in New Orleans and Faloja. If it took a hurricane of that much devastation to get the president out of his vacation ranch, imagine what it would take to get him out of Iraq… scary just to think about it.

AHMED THARWAT
Producer & Host of the Arab American TV show Belahdan
Airs Sundays on MN Public TV at 10:30pm
952-933-6825
www.belahdan.com