Katrina's troubled wake.

Byline: The Register-Guard

With Hurricane Katrina's desperate victims still hungry and homeless, bodies floating in flooded streets, and chaos ruling a ruined New Orleans, this is a time for outstretched hands, not pointed fingers.

But the time is coming - and coming soon - when there must be a full accounting for the perfect storm of governmental failures that combined forces with Katrina to cause the horror in New Orleans.

When it reconvenes after summer recess, Congress should appoint a bipartisan citizen commission, one similar in stature and scope to the Sept. 11 commission, to investigate those failures.

President Bush responded to criticism of the federal government's appallingly inadequate relief efforts this week by saying, "I hope people don't point - play politics - during this period."

Fine. In the critical days to come, Americans should focus every ounce of this nation's resources and energies on rescuing Katrina's desperate and still-dying victims. But let us not pretend for a presidential second that it's wrong to serve notice to the government and its chief executive that there is a long list of grave questions that must be answered,

For example, why did rescue workers, food, equipment, supplies, transportation not start arriving in meaningful quantities until four days after the storm? Why were hungry, dehydrated and sick elderly people still dying late last week on the street in front of the city's convention center? Why are there bloated bodies, hundreds of them, still drifting in the streets?

Why was New Orleans' angry, desperate mayor forced to resort to issuing a desperate "SOS" for emergency relief? Why are there thousands of people who still haven't been evacuated from a city that has become a boiling cauldron of violence and disease? Why have National Guard troops not prevented the city from descending into, in the words of one police officer who survived a three-day rooftop siege, into "anarchy and chaos"? Why are relief workers dropping food and water from hovering helicopters on crowds of desperate survivors as if they are Third World refugees?

Beyond questions regarding the inadequacy of the government's initial response, there are others that go to the heart of the administration's budgetary and policy priorities.

They include the debilitating impact of the Iraq war on the National Guard and its ability to bring aid and order to the Gulf Coast. As a result of the administration's reliance on Guard troops in Iraq, nearly 40 percent of the Guard units from Louisiana and Mississippi were unavailable for relief efforts, as was half their equipment. Federal officials say 30,000 Guard troops are headed for stricken region, but the absence of sufficient numbers of local troops and equipment surely undermined the government's ability respond with a swiftness and military presence that could have kept order and saved lives.

Other questions concern the Bush administration's systematic neglect of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, once regarded as a model of efficiency and responsiveness. However, FEMA's effectiveness was crippled when it was absorbed by the Homeland Security Department and its emphasis shifted from disaster preparedness to countering terrorism. On Bush's watch, FEMA has become a second-tier agency that lacks the stature, leadership and organizational focus necessary to respond effectively to disasters.

Meanwhile, there are questions about why the administration failed to push for funding an Army Corps of Engineers plan to rebuild and upgrade the levees that were breached by Katrina's surging waters. The corps had a plan to upgrade the levees to a level where they could have withstood a Category 4 storm such as Katrina, but the administration and Congress had other priorities, including massive tax cuts and record farm subsidies.

Hurricanes, of course, can't be blamed on governments. But governments are responsible for taking preventive measures such as levee repairs and for responding to disasters in a timely and effective fashion. On these and many other matters, many questions remain.

Congress should make certain they're answered.