Evacuating Lebanon: the Katrina effect…

Caption courtesy of the Associated Press (AP): American citizens show their passports to U.S. Marines as they wait behind barricades in the sweltering heat in a coastal center near the U.S. embassy north of Beirut, Lebanon for their names to be called in order to be be processed for evacuation from the war torn country Wednesday, July 19, 2006. Hundreds of Americans wiped tears, hugged relatives and grumbled about delays in evacuation efforts as well as confusing directions as they were processed to be cleared to board a luxury cruise ship on Wednesday that was to evacuate them from war-torn Lebanon to Cyprus

In the midst of last year’s Hurricane Katrina crisis, I charged, in this article, that racist indifference contributed to the Bush administration’s failure to evacuate black Americans who were left stranded in flooded New Orleans after the city’s levees were breached.

But I'm constrained to reassess that charge after seeing the perennially-feckless French military evacuate its citizens from war-ravaged Lebanon - with remarkable dispatch, whilst (mostly white) Americans remain caught in the crossfire between Israeli bombs and Hezbollah rockets – no doubt wondering when their superpower-American military will finally arrive to rescue them.

And, even though I appreciate all of the factors which differentiate these two crises, I have no doubt that the Americans still hunkered down in Lebanon today feel just as abandoned by their government as blacks in New Orleans felt last year.

Although, I’m not sure whether it distresses me more that the Bush Administration might be racist or just congenitally incompetent….

NOTE: As of this post, only 1000 of the 25,000 Americans trapped in Lebanon had been evacuated. And, adding insult to their despair, the U.S. State Department has declared that those evacuated would have to pay the commercial cost for the trip.

Americans evacuating Lebanon