Katrina fallout issues

But what is truly tragic about the devastation is how much of it could have been avoided or ameliorated. The first point to be made is that the abject failure of the Federal Emergency Management Agency did not occur by happenstance. The agency had been systematically neglected and disempowered by the Bush administration. The agency was headed by a political appointee, folded into the Department of Homeland Security, underfunded, and left to wither on the vine.

Disaster relief was made a low priority by the current administration. Money that was needed to shore up levees and provide emergency relief was diverted to tax cuts for the wealthy, and President Bush's selection of a crony with zero relevant experience to run the agency is evidence of his indifference to its mission.

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The hurricane has also laid bare the fact of poverty in the US and its effects. Most of the victims who were trapped in the city could not leave. They had no money, no transport, and nowhere to go. Plans to evacuate them before the city flooded, and to rescue them after, were incomplete and inefficient. The heavily African-American make-up of the victims only serves to highlight the racial underpinnings of such poverty. It was mostly poor blacks who were left behind and not taken care of by the government.

The administration is already in furious damage control, attempting to minimise the political fall-out with an intensity it conspicuously didn't bring to the actual crisis. President Bush's policies, his inaction, and his self-serving statements that "no one could have anticipated" the devastation, all underline how important it is that there must be a true investigation to get to the bottom of how such a catastrophe could have occurred. The dead and dispossessed deserve more than a 9/11 Commission style white-wash that holds no one accountable.

In Bangladesh, we understand only too well the destructive power of nature, and our hearts and prayers must go out to America in its hour of need. The Bangladesh government has pledged to send $1 million, which we applaud as a token of gesture, and it is indeed poignant to think that the US could perhaps have benefited in terms of logistical planning and rescue and relief operations from the lessons that we have learned through hard experience.