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COMMENTARY
September 24, 2005
Lovely Rita
I am writing the night before the morning after, about Hurricane Rita, and what she will do. Gentle reader already knows more than I do. From the track I last saw, the wave heights measured, the breadth of the eye wall, and the wind speeds inside, she will certainly do great damage to an economically significant part of the United States.I leave to other writers the compassion stuff. If you want to sound womanly, you should be a woman. Most of what I hear from public figures rings so false, and is so contorted by political self-interest, as to make one ill. Which is not to discount that side of this latest meteorological catastrophe. A couple of weeks ago, the American journalist, Peggy Noonan, who is a real woman, wrote some paragraphs about Katrina that began, “The stories that pierce my heart involve the terror of children. And the one that hit me the most was the story of the 6-year-old boy found wandering over a bridge with six younger children. Most of the kids were too young even to know their names. The 6-year-old was carrying a 15-month-old infant.” Houston is oil and chemicals, yet the port of Galveston, the ship channel, the refineries and the tanks, are only an aspect of an extraordinary productive capacity, integrated with that of the whole U.S. economy. The facilities at the mouth of the Mississippi, which were recently hit by Katrina, are the principal conduit for the world’s largest and most reliable supply of grain. Such commodities may be transported in bulk, but there is nothing lumpen about the technology and skills, the vast infrastructure and logistical enterprise that realize such goods, and carry them to market. Those who enjoy watching Americans suffer, should look to what is on their own plates. Yet we should also smile at catastrophe, for seriousness and a light heart mix in the consummation of sanity. To form our mental picture of the geopolitical impact, we need a unit of currency large enough to approximate the public costs incurred by various natural and human disasters. Let us name such a unit after Iraq. It would be equal to the cost of invading that country, and managing the fallout, clean-up, and rebuilding for a full year -- minus the usual carrying costs of the military, and other public overheads, which would be incurred with or without the invasion. This "Iraq" unit could be denominated as a piece-of-eight, consisting as it were of eight "Afghanistans" (the cost of invading, then supporting Afghanistan for one year). To avoid confusion, we will call them "Iraqers" and "Afgharoons". One Iraqer = 8 Afgharoons. Katrina, on this scale, would appear to cost about three Afgharoons; maybe four if the Democrats keep screaming, "Racist!" The U.S. budget can handle that. But Rita's beginning to look like at least a full Iraqer. Factor in sundry recent windstorms in places like Florida, and I think the Americans are already in it up to 1-1/2 Iraqers. Moreover, the damage to U.S. trading and commercial interests, spreading viciously through the re-insurance markets, is also beginning to look significant. So that with the subtraction of lost production, we're well past 2 Iraqers. This strikes me as a scale of expenditure at which tax levels unavoidably rise; with the compounded economic damage from that. The U.S. alone takes this punch, since contributions from other countries -- even in aggregate to Mission Iraq -- are nominal compared to the U.S. undertaking. And the U.S. was already the pole that supports the whole Tent of the West. There is usually a silver lining, in the form of jobs and investments, that comes from the rebuilding; together with the leapfrogging effect as more efficient new technology is installed to replace the less efficient that was destroyed. A recovery is a recovery, after all. But these gains involve painful dislocations, and are accomplished only gradually. From the morning after the hit, a nation is also exposed to “infection”, both literally and metaphorically. We cannot guess what else may fall apart. We now have, therefore, something that is politically and economically "interesting", in the proverbial Chinese sense. For all the U.S. is despised, by the clever people of the world, the rival sources of power and persuasion are much less savoury. The chief beneficiaries of the moment being an increasingly unstable and aggressive China, a psychopathic North Korea, and a soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. Around the planet, the rats can only flourish, when the American terrier is hurt. * (Saturday morning update: We see that Rita, earlier Cat-5 & aimed squarely for Galveston, but now Cat-3 & fading, went ashore just east of Sabine Pass near the Louisiana border, & is soaking out Port Arthur while leaving Houston mostly alone. Well, if you were in Houston just now hearing the winds howl & watching the debris scuttering about, you might not agree with this characterization; but the gusts are mere gale-force. Galveston got a nasty fire & will take a lot more water, but isn't flattened. I don't think we'll lose a single refinery. The biggest cost might be from the evacuation. Hey, blame Bush, he was pro-evacuation. ... Max Mayfield, director, U.S. National Hurricane Centre: "Looks like the Houston & Galveston area has really lucked out.") David Warren
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