When Is A Disaster Not a Disaster?

Katrina's devastation visited upon the citizens of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama is, first and foremost, a tragedy on a human scale. No matter what we may think - and Lord there are a few people out there who are thinking, and chuckling - of the USA as a nation, with its forlorn political leadership, Katrina's aftermath is about people, poverty and recovery. May the people of the southern US recover quickly....

But if I whip out my Cynic's Hat, I notice that this huge task of reconstruction is going to cost somebody a shedload of money - and that somebody is probably going to be the US Government.

But hang on a sec. Aren't the Republicans the party of less-government-spending-is-good? Shouldn't they be whipping the private sector into action to get cracking on the rebuilding of New Orleans?

This huge reconstruction, no doubt to be paid for by the US Treasury, looks and even smells alarmingly similar to a public works project. And public works projects were, according to Wikipedia , "a major program of public spending designed to alleviate unemployment, and moreover to pump needed funds into the economy."

The New Deal, which is where public works policies made their debut in America, was devised by FD Roosevelt. A Democrat.

So what we are seeing here is a very conservative US administration reduced to cherry-picking ancient Democrat, suspiciously Socialist-sounding policies in order to rebuild New Orleans and its environs.

But wait! I'm not done yet! Let's go back further to the whole invasion of Iraq. As we all now know, there is no concrete proof that Iraq ever had weapons of mass destruction, which was the numero uno reason for invading that land in the first place. And when the US Administration cleverly "morphed" its reason for invading into the claim that Saddam was aiding and abetting terrorist organisations, nobody could prove that either.

Hmmm.... so why DID we invade Iraq?

Now, putting my Cynical Mathematician's Hat on, I add two and two to deduce that the invasion of Iraq the the subsequent morass of threatening civil war, constant attacks on westerners both civil and military and general unrest, could be nothing more than a king-size, titanic public works project!

Follow the logic here: the invasion costs massive amounts of money in terms of soldier time, materiel use, consumption of... well, everything from Right Guard to gasoline to bullets. In order to keep that supply chain going and to support the invasion, the US needs to pump money into the armed forces who have to buy those supplies.

So the armed forces go shopping throughout America, throwing money around like confetti and creating "a major program of public works spending designed to alleviate unemployment, and moreover to pump needed funds into the economy."

Forget Saddam's WMD. Forget his alleged support for terrorist organisations. The whole thing is George Bush's co-opting of, and tribute to, a supposedly outdated socialist economic policy.

I'm off before my irony-meter explodes.