[inglor]

And why its destruction is scary on a global scale

I recieved this in an email. It is quite long but very detailed. Unedited

Subject: For Your Edification: Concerning New Orleans
Maybe you knew this about the importance of New Orleans to our economy, but I didn't. I find this article most interesting, and now I understand why New Orleans was there and why it needs to be rebuilt. (I'd originally been thinking that it would be good to clean up the area, put soil on top of everything, build a memorial to the people who lived and died there, and make the rest a huge park.) I'd appreciate your comments on this article. Thanks. Kay

America's Secret War.........................

George Friedman is the chairman and founder of Stratfor, the world’s leading private intelligence company. Established in 1996, Stratfor has pioneered the field of private intelligence. As chief intelligence officer, Dr. Friedman guides the strategic vision of the Stratfor intelligence group, helping shape the long-range forecasts as well as overseeing its tactical intelligence operations. His analyses guide high-level business, government, and military decisions worldwide. Dr. Friedman is the author of numerous articles on national security, information warfare, and computer security. He also is the author of four books including The Intelligence Edge, a guide for businesses implementing their own intelligence system, and The Future of War, an examination of new military technologies. Dr. Friedman has appeared as a national security and intelligence expert on all of the major networks and news channels, and he and Stratfor have been featured in Barron’s, Time, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times Magazine, among many others. He has been a keynote speaker at innumerable meetings and conferences for private organizations and government agencies. Friedman holds a B.A. from CUNY’s City College and a Ph.D. in Government from Cornell University. Before entering the private sector he was a professor of political science for nearly 20 years. He worked extensively with the military and intelligence communities, gathering and analyzing intelligence, and was an early designer of computerized war games for the U.S. military. He was the founder and Director of the Center for Geopolitical Studies at Louisiana State University.

New Orleans: A Geopolitical Prize

By George Friedman
The American political system was founded in Philadelphia, but the American nation was built on the vast farmlands that stretch from the Alleghenies to the Rockies. That farmland produced the wealth that funded American industrialization: It permitted the formation of a class of small landholders who, amazingly, could produce more than they could consume. They could sell their excess crops in the east and in Europe and save that money, which eventually became the founding capital of American industry.

But it was not the extraordinary land nor the farmers and ranchers who alone set the process in motion. Rather, it was geography -- the extraordinary system of rivers that flowed through the Midwest and allowed them to ship their surplus to the rest of the world. All of the rivers flowed into one -- the Mississippi -- and the Mississippi flowed to the ports in and around one city: New Orleans. It was in New Orleans that the barges from upstream were unloaded and their cargos stored, sold and reloaded on ocean-going vessels. Until last Sunday, New Orleans was, in many ways, the pivot of the American economy.

For that reason, the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815 was a key moment in American history. Even though the battle occurred after the War of 1812 was over, had the British taken New Orleans, we suspect they wouldn't have given it back. Without New Orleans, the entire Louisiana Purchase would have been valueless to the United States. Or, to state it more precisely, the British would control the region because, at the end of the day, the value of the Purchase was the land and the rivers - which all converged on the Mississippi and the ultimate port of New Orleans. The hero of the battle was Andrew Jackson, and when he became president, his obsession with Texas had much to do with keeping the Mexicans away from New Orleans.

During the Cold War, a macabre topic of discussion among bored graduate students who studied such things was this: If the Soviets could destroy one city with a large nuclear device, which would it be? The usual answers were Washington or New York. For me, the answer was simple: New Orleans. If the Mississippi River was shut to traffic, then the foundations of the economy would be shattered. The industrial minerals needed in the factories wouldn't come in, and the agricultural wealth wouldn't flow out. Alternative routes really weren't available. The Germans knew it too: A U-boat campaign occurred near the mouth of the Mississippi during World War II. Both the Germans and Stratfor have stood with Andy Jackson: New Orleans was the prize.

Last Sunday, nature took out New Orleans almost as surely as a nuclear strike. Hurricane Katrina's geopolitical effect was not, in many ways, distinguishable from a mushroom cloud. The key exit from North America was closed. The petrochemical industry, which has become an added value to the region since Jackson's days, was at risk. The navigability of the Mississippi south of New Orleans was a question mark. New Orleans as a city and as a port complex had ceased to exist, and it was not clear that it could recover.

The Ports of South Louisiana and New Orleans, which run north and south of the city, are as important today as at any point during the history of the republic. On its own merit, POSL is the largest port in the United States by tonnage and the fifth-largest in the world. It exports more than 52 million tons a year, of which more than half are agricultural products -- corn, soybeans and so on. A large proportion of U.S. agriculture flows out of the port. Almost as much cargo, nearly 17 million tons, comes in through the port -- including not only crude oil, but chemicals and fertilizers, coal, concrete and so on.

A simple way to think about the New Orleans port complex is that it is where the bulk commodities of agriculture go out to the world and the bulk commodities of industrialism come in. The commodity chain of the global food industry starts here, as does that of American industrialism. If these facilities are gone, more than the price of goods shifts: The very physical structure of the global economy would have to be reshaped. Consider the impact to the U.S. auto industry if steel doesn't come up the river, or the effect on global food supplies if U.S. corn and soybeans don't get to the markets.

The problem is that there are no good shipping alternatives. River transport is cheap, and most of the commodities we are discussing have low value-to-weight ratios. The U.S. transport system was built on the assumption that these commodities would travel to and from New Orleans by barge, where they would be loaded on ships or offloaded. Apart from port capacity elsewhere in the United States, there aren't enough trucks or rail cars to handle the long-distance hauling of these enormous quantities -- assuming for the moment that the economics could be managed, which they can't be.

The focus in the media has been on the oil industry in Louisiana and Mississippi. This is not a trivial question, but in a certain sense, it is dwarfed by the shipping issue. First, Louisiana is the source of about 15 percent of U.S.-produced petroleum, much of it from the Gulf. The local refineries are critical to American infrastructure. Were all of these facilities to be lost, the effect on the price of oil worldwide would be extraordinarily painful. If the river itself became unnavigable or if the ports are no longer functioning, however, the impact to the wider economy would be significantly more severe. In a sense, there is more flexibility in oil than in the physical transport of these other commodities.

There is clearly good news as information comes in. By all accounts, the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, which services supertankers in the Gulf, is intact. Port Fourchon, which is the center of extraction operations in the Gulf, has sustained damage but is recoverable. The status of the oil platforms is unclear and it is not known what the underwater systems look like, but on the surface, the damage - though not trivial -- is manageable.

The news on the river is also far better than would have been expected on Sunday. The river has not changed its course. No major levees containing the river have burst. The Mississippi apparently has not silted up to such an extent that massive dredging would be required to render it navigable. Even the port facilities, although apparently damaged in many places and destroyed in few, are still there. The river, as transport corridor, has not been lost.

What has been lost is the city of New Orleans and many of the residential suburban areas around it. The population has fled, leaving behind a relatively small number of people in desperate straits. Some are dead, others are dying, and the magnitude of the situation dwarfs the resources required to ameliorate their condition. But it is not the population that is trapped in New Orleans that is of geopolitical significance: It is the population that has left and has nowhere to return to.

The oil fields, pipelines and ports required a skilled workforce in order to operate. That workforce requires homes. They require stores to buy food and other supplies. Hospitals and doctors. Schools for their children. In other words, in order to operate the facilities critical to the United States, you need a workforce to do it -- and that workforce is gone. Unlike in other disasters, that workforce cannot return to the region because they have no place to live. New Orleans is gone, and the metropolitan area surrounding New Orleans is either gone or so badly damaged that it will not be inhabitable for a long time.

It is possible to jury-rig around this problem for a short time. But the fact is that those who have left the area have gone to live with relatives and friends. Those who had the ability to leave also had networks of relationships and resources to manage their exile. But those resources are not infinite -- and as it becomes apparent that these people will not be returning to New Orleans any time soon, they will be enrolling their children in new schools, finding new jobs, finding new accommodations. If they have any insurance money coming, they will collect it. If they have none, then -- whatever emotional connections they may have to their home -- their economic connection to it has been severed. In a very short time, these people will be making decisions that will start to reshape population and workforce patterns in the region.

A city is a complex and ongoing process - one that requires physical infrastructure to support the people who live in it and people to operate that physical infrastructure. We don't simply mean power plants or sewage treatment facilities, although they are critical. Someone has to be able to sell a bottle of milk or a new shirt. Someone has to be able to repair a car or do surgery. And the people who do those things, along with the infrastructure that supports them, are gone -- and they are not coming back anytime soon.

It is in this sense, then, that it seems almost as if a nuclear weapon went off in New Orleans. The people mostly have fled rather than died, but they are gone. Not all of the facilities are destroyed, but most are. It appears to us that New Orleans and its environs have passed the point of recoverability. The area can recover, to be sure, but only with the commitment of massive resources from outside -- and those resources would always be at risk to another Katrina.


The displacement of population is the crisis that New Orleans faces. It is also a national crisis, because the largest port in the United States cannot function without a city around it. The physical and business processes of a port cannot occur in a ghost town, and right now, that is what New Orleans is. It is not about the facilities, and it is not about the oil. It is about the loss of a city's population and the paralysis of the largest port in the United States.

Let's go back to the beginning. The United States historically has depended on the Mississippi and its tributaries for transport. Barges navigate the river. Ships go on the ocean. The barges must offload to the ships and vice versa. There must be a facility to empower this exchange. It is also the facility where goods are stored in transit. Without this port, the river can't be used. Protecting that port has been, from the time of the Louisiana Purchase, a fundamental national security issue for the United States.

Katrina has taken out the port -- not by destroying the facilities, but by rendering the area uninhabited and potentially uninhabitable. That means that even if the Mississippi remains navigable, the absence of a port near the mouth of the river makes the Mississippi enormously less useful than it was. For these reasons, the United States has lost not only its biggest port complex, but also the utility of its river transport system -- the foundation of the entire American transport system. There are some substitutes, but none with sufficient capacity to solve the problem.


It follows from this that the port will have to be revived and, one would assume, the city as well. The ports around New Orleans are located as far north as they can be and still be accessed by ocean-going vessels. The need for ships to be able to pass each other in the waterways, which narrow to the north, adds to the problem. Besides, the Highway 190 bridge in Baton Rouge blocks the river going north. New Orleans is where it is for a reason: The United States needs a city right there.

New Orleans is not optional for the United States' commercial infrastructure. It is a terrible place for a city to be located, but exactly the place where a city must exist. With that as a given, a city will return there because the alternatives are too devastating. The harvest is coming, and that means that the port will have to be opened soon. As in Iraq, premiums will be paid to people prepared to endure the hardships of working in New Orleans. But in the end, the city will return because it has to.

Geopolitics is the stuff of permanent geographical realities and the way they interact with political life. Geopolitics created New Orleans. Geopolitics caused American presidents to obsess over its safety. And geopolitics will force the city's resurrection, even if it is in the worst imaginable

ADDENDUM TO "FYE OF NEW ORLEANS." THIS IN FROM ONE OF MY READERS. C.

__________________________________________________________________

Now you see why Lincoln stressed taking the port of New Orleans as the most vital strategy

for the Union to win the war in what was called the “Anaconda Plan.” The Eastern Confederates totally underrated their largest city because it was in what they regarded as the west.


The United States effectively becomes a two-halved country such as Canada without a port at the mouth of the Mississippi. Even Mobile was founded as a temporary location until the Mississippi River could be secured and a permanent city established there. After New Orleans was founded, the order was given to abandon Mobile, but it wound up staying in existence because there had to be a trading post to deal with the Indians over in this area. Sorry, I'm a cultural anthropologist, trained at UNO.

My understanding is that there has been very little looting, which has largely been confined to downtown New Orleans. Most of the Uptown section was relatively untouched by the storm. It didn't flood from Canal Street all the way up river between Carondelet and the river. That's the natural levee and it's relatively high ground. The French Quarter didn't flood from Burgundy to the river for the same reason. The area around Baptist Hospital is under water because it always floods when it rains. From there to the Superdome and back toward the lake was a huge black swamp until the 1920s, when pumps of sufficient size were installed to drain that swamp and naturally they built houses on it.

[Alassante]

Wow. I had no idea.

[DarkElfChilde]

Interesting...

[VanatheEverYoung]

Thanks, inglor. That was a great article. As a student of Political Science, it makes me all warm and fuzzy to read something so scholarly . Would you happen to know the source for the article?

[inglor]

nope, sorry.
But I was told he has a weekly spot on a radio show in Austin, TX.

Inglor

[VanatheEverYoung]

Thanks anyway. I'll look around and see if I can find it. If not, the author's credentials should be enough to convince my PoliSci professor that it's a valid argument

[KhazarKhum]

New Orleans is where it is because of geography. No question.

But New York, Los Angeles, Houston & Oakland are also enormous ports. LA & Houston are artificial, yes, but they still handle a tremendous amount of cargo.

The biggest issue isn't whether to rebuild, but how. The city was barely functioning before Katrina. The murder rate would have to drop by 86% to equal that of New York (No, I am not making that up.) Corruption at every level of the city was so widespread that it was a joke even in a place like Chicago.

You can't have a functioning city where there is a huge welfare class. You can't have a city where the crime rate is so horrendous that the cops quit in despair. A mayor that can't be bothered to follow his own disaster guidelines is no asset.

Yes, there will be a New Orleans. But it can't be business as usual.

[Viv]

Dr. Friedman works for Stratfor.com. Since their profits come from folks subscribing and purchasing these kinds of reports, my guess is that it might be difficult to find a source for free, unless your school has an account with them. Best luck!

[VanatheEverYoung]

Thanks, Viv. I'll look into that. You're right, my best chance is through the campus computers.

[inglor]

Maybe Lexus-Nexus or whatever the newsie search thingie is. Sorry not much help but there is a profssional resource with a name like that.

RE: KK's comments:

Absolutely the most corrupt city. Not too long ago, folks said you had more to fear from the police than the criminals. Lotsa nasty rumors. But not all were corrupt but it was bad.

The Mob has to be licking its chops about the rebuild.

Lots of officials might end up in jail as a result of this hurricane.

Inglor

[Alassante]

They need a certain ex-mayor of New York to go down there and straighten them out. Yes, I am talking about the one, the only, Rudy Giuliani. Yes he is controversial as all hell but he cleaned up NY and he pulled them through their darkest hour. He earned my respect when he went to every funeral for the firefighters and police. If he were down in New Orleans when this happened, he would have gotten those people out of there in a day or two if he had to call in and rent every bus in the country and bill the President.

[Rhapsody]

[KhazarKhum]

Rhapsody

I'm sure this has been said before, but here goes.

The President can't do anything until he is asked by the governor of the state. That's the law. The Constitution limits the President's power so that he can't become a dictator(although FDR came awfully close).

IOW, until the governor of Louisiana asked for the feds to step in, their hands were tied. The Red Cross was initially barred from helping by the state officials, but that's a different issue.

And FEMA explicitly warns that it can take 72 to 96 hours for them to arrive.

So it is up to the local government to handle a crisis for the first couple of days--something that was clearly beyond their ability. Unfortunately you can't tell that they'll be useless until it's too late.

[ZeeDrippyVessel]

[Rhapsody]

I live in a country formed by 12 provinces and above that a national parliament, queen and administration. If an emergency, a mass one (and we had more of them you can imagine), occurs, it doesn't take our queen or prime minister 4 to 5 days to show up for sympathy's sake alone. It was not if key figures were somewhere across the globe or something.

I hope you can imagine that as a foreigner it makes me wonder that after a heart torn SOS from the mayor it takes days before people you elected show up. That allies of the US ignore diplomacy and help out anyway.

I have seen footage, read news coverage, that feels like horror to me... In that respect I am glad to have a queen like that.