New Orleans should be rebuilt?

[jstnrgrs]

I just ran accross this, and in light of recent discussions in this form about weather or New Orleans should even be rebuilt, I thought I'd post it here.


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 place.

[handsome]

You expect us to read that essay?? Pfffffftttttttt