"2, 3, Many IEDs"

As the agonizing similarities between the Bush administration's failures in both gulfs continue piling up here's one more to consider: the devastating toll of IEDs.

In Iraq, the story is well-known: Rumsfeld et al's failure to respond to early information about the insurgency's use of IEDs, not to mention pleas for armored Humvees, has taken a huge toll on U.S. troops, potentially causing hundreds of preventable deaths and thousands of lost limbs.

In the U.S., the devastation caused by Katrina forces us to confront not only the domestic costs of a diversion of resources to imperialistic adventurism, but also a harbinger of the devastating consequences to come from Bush's denial of global warming and oil-industry-friendly energy policies: Irreversible Ecological Decline.

Iraq first:

In November 2003, Scott Ritter reported that UN inspectors looking for WMDs before the war instead found an "organization that specialized in the construction and employment of 'improvised explosive devices' -- the same IEDs that are now killing Americans daily in Iraq. ...When we entered the compound, three Iraqis tried to escape over a wall with documents, but they were caught...these papers dealt with IEDs. ... The sophisticated plans -- albeit with crude drawings -- showed how to take out a convoy by disguising an IED and when and where to detonate it for maximum damage."

At another facility the UN discovered "classrooms for training all Iraqi covert agents in the black art of making and using IEDs." As Christian Parenti recalls in The Freedom, the image described by Ritter is of a "profoundly determined foe that, even prior to the invasion, anticipated and accepted a long period of guerrilla warfare."

Did the CIA and DoD intelligence know all this? If so, why did they take so long to respond?

It reminds me of one of Henry Kissinger's lessons from Vietnam: "We lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla warfare: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win."

In 2004, IEDs accounted for 189 of the 720 combat deaths among U.S. troops -- about 26 percent.

After much embarrassment, Rummy eventually dispatched newly armored Humvees, and Army engineers began a yearlong program to clear vegetation and debris along major transportation routes, while military technicians have equipped vehicles with devices that jam cell phones and garage-door openers, which are used to trigger the explosives.

But in spite of those efforts, deaths due to IEDs rose by more than 41 percent in the first five months of this year, compared with the same period last year, and account for nearly 51 percent of the 255 U.S. combat deaths up to that point. In August, 40 allied troops died from IEDs, the highest of any month since July 2003, according to statistics assembled by Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, an Internet site that assembles statistics based on official U.S. casualty reports.

So what's the IED analogy to the other gulf, you might ask?

Again, the forseeable damage. The hurricane should force us to understand that we face a bigger IED, with many more explosive events to come, with consequences not just for the U.S., but the entire planet.

In this case the risk is even greater: Irreversible Ecological Decline.

The New Yorker's Elizabeth Kolbert describes many of the risks and the evidence that they are increasingly upon us, in her excellent three-part series, "Climate of Man."

This IED (my term, not hers) can be seen in the potential that humankind will reach a point where we have triggered a self-perpetuating and irreversible release of increasing amounts of global warming gases as certain factors kick in, such as the melting of the northern permafrost:

"One of the risks of rising temperatures is that this storage process can start to run in reverse. Under the right conditions, organic material that has been frozen for millennia will break down, giving off carbon dioxide or methane, which is an even more powerful greenhouse gas. In parts of the Arctic, this is already happening. Researchers in Sweden, for example, have been measuring the methane output of a bog known as the Stordalen mire, near the town of Abisko, for almost thirty-five years. As the permafrost in the area has warmed, methane releases have increased, in some spots by up to sixty per cent. Thawing permafrost could make the active layer more hospitable to plants, which are a sink for carbon. Even this, though, probably wouldn’t offset the release of greenhouse gases. No one knows exactly how much carbon is stored in the world’s permafrost, but estimates run as high as four hundred and fifty billion metric tons."

The consequences of global warming are well known, including Infectious Environmental Diseases, Irreversible Ecological Decline, species Invasions, Extinctions and Death, forced Indigenous Emigration and Displacement, a shift in the oceans thermohaline "conveyor belt," etc.

We've been warned that global warming may be approaching the point of no return by the world's leading scientists, nature itself, and even the Pentagon.

And despite the Bush administration's priorities, the current UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix has declared that global warming dwarfs both war and terrorism as an international security risk.

For Americans, teachable moments like this almost always come about as a result of major economic damage or death and disaster. Katrina is not America's first wake up call to global warming, but it is surely the biggest and most painful one yet. And if the zeitgeist and politics don't shift as a result of this one, we could be cooked.

It's clear that Washington won't lead. Bush/Cheney are bunkered down in total denial. As Sydney Blumenthal has pointed out, Bush can be blamed for his administration's assault on the science of climate change, not to mention the gutting of programs that might have mitigated the disaster, and a costly Energy Bill that largely follows the recommendations of Dick Cheney's (and Enron/Exxon's) energy strategy.

Moreover, who can be confident that we're not close to triggering another IED: Irreparable Economic Damage? Is it possible that the current series of events, including the damage that rising fuel costs to the economy, could trigger a series of events that bring forth the underlying structural weaknesses in our economy, described by many, including James Fallows?

At this point it's worth recalling Barry Commoner's description of the first law of ecology: that "everything is related to everything else."

In the weeks ahead, if Bush wanted to keep chants of "Impeach: Elect a Democrat" from breaking out all over, he'd be wise to hold the Republicans in Congress back from making his estate taxes permanent, and recognize that consumers and other businesses paying out at the pump are seething about reports that the top five oil companies have raked in well over $250 billion in profits since 2001, and therefore pass an executive order putting controls on gas prices, while scrapping the current energy strategy.