9-04-05, 9:31 am

EACH time that US President George W Bush opens his mouth on the situation in New Orleans, he displays his ignorance and his inability to rise above narrow-minded politicking.

After spouting platitudinous nonsense about the US emerging stronger from Hurricane Katrina, he belatedly admits that the utterly inadequate response to the disaster has been 'not acceptable.'

Yet, even in the midst of the shambles that pases for administration policy, his response is political rather than practical.

What kind of halfwit imagines that what the people of New Orleans need most of all is a helicopter visit from the president?

All available helicopters ought to have been mobilised from the outset to rescue survivors and deliver essential supplies of water, food and medical supplies.

They weren't, because so many military helicopters and National Guard personnel are stuck in the morass of the president's Iraq war and because the White House appeared to believe that the New Orleans population had quit the city.

Thousands of National Guardsmen have now arrived in Louisiana, but relief of hardship is not their foremost task.

They have been told to restore order and it is clear from the instructions given to them - and the manner of their giving - that we can expect an iron-fist response to those demeaned as 'looters.'

Most people will not resort to breaking into shops if they have adequate supplies of life's necessities.

Nor will they do so if normal policing continues, but the New Orleans police force was withdrawn in response to the calls by the White House and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco to evacuate the city.

The overwhelmingly poor and black population was abandoned, left to fend for themselves, defenceless before a minority of criminal elements and now likely to be shot down as looters.

Governor Blanco calls the looters 'hoodlums,' adding of the National Guardsmen: 'These troops know how to shoot and kill. They are more than willing to do so and I expect they will.'

Like the president, the governor is playing politics, attempting to focus on the breakdown of law and order instead of concentrating on the abject failure of the authorities to respond to human need.

President Bush is also intent on removing the spotlight from the responsibility of his administration for worsening the effects of the hurricane and for denying the resources to enable New Orleans to shore up its flood defences.

The Bush administration has allowed developers to build on the wetlands around New Orleans - a practice mirrored in south-east England and resulting equally in worse outbreaks of flooding.

It has also slashed funding to bodies charged with strengthening the levees that protect New Orleans, concentrating federal finance on the Iraq war.

Mr Bush cautions his critics against trying to make political capital over the hurricane, but what he fears most is a political reckoning for a series of his own disastrous judgements about war, global warming, environmental protection and federal responsibility to look after US citizens.

From Morning Star