Battle of New Orleans, 2005

Stratfor has posted this analysis: New Orleans: A Geopolitical Prize, By George Friedman. Excepts:

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 a port to operate, there must be places for river ships to unload, warehouses for intermediate storage, and places for ocean ships to load, and the reverse. That's why New Orleans is where it is.

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.

New Orleans has been such a national security issue for more than 170 years that U.S. president Andrew Jackson aided and abetted the detachment of a province (Texas) from a neighboring country (Mexico) in order to protect it.

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.

In 2005, we lost the Battle of New Orleans. Not to the British or the Mexicans; to our own incompetence.

It's not as if we didn't know it could happen:

The city is facing a series of issues--disappearing wetlands that protect from hurricanes, levees that are too low to hold back flood waters, rising water tables, to name a few--that if not addressed soon could have New Orleans suffering the same fate as Atlantis.
-- The Lost City of New Orleans? by Lori Widmer, ,em>Risk & Insurance, December 2000

That article goes on to predict 10,000 dead (the same number the mayor of New Orleans guessed the other day) and $10 billion in insurance claims. Nobody knows yet what the final insurance dollar number will be, but estimates are running in that range.

That was more than four years ago. Last year, National Geographic chimed in:

The storm hit Breton Sound with the fury of a nuclear warhead, pushing a deadly storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain. The water crept to the top of the massive berm that holds back the lake and then spilled over. Nearly 80 percent of New Orleans lies below sea level—more than eight feet below in places—so the water poured in. A liquid brown wall washed over the brick ranch homes of Gentilly, over the clapboard houses of the Ninth Ward, over the white-columned porches of the Garden District, until it raced through the bars and strip joints on Bourbon Street like the pale rider of the Apocalypse. As it reached 25 feet (eight meters) over parts of the city, people climbed onto roofs to escape it.

Remember, this is not a news report after the event; this was an article published almost a year before.

Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.
-- Gone With the Water, By Joel K. Bourne, Jr. Photographs by Robert Caputo and Tyrone Turner, National Geographic, October 2004

Temporarily higher gas prices are just the beginning of the economic consequences. Billions of dollars and a war to protect oil fields in the Middle East, and we lost the largest U.S. gateway for oil, the largest port by tonnage in the United States, and the fifth largest in the world, without firing a shot. Not just oil, either: corn out, steel in, but not now.

Some will be shifted to Houston and New York and Los Angeles. But none of those places are at the mouth of the Mississippi. Transport costs are much higher to any other port.

This is a temporary setback (I hope). Yet one that Al Qaeda would have killed to inflict, except it didn't have to. We let it happen ourselves.

Shipping through New Orleans will restart, because it has to, because it is shipping for a third of the U.S. Even though most of the people that used to staff the port and oilfields are out of town for a long time, and their support structure is destroyed. Phoenix Orleans will be a weird distorted hazard-pay future reflection of its old self, initially more like Basra than New Orleans.

-jsq