Where's the National Guard?

This morning's breaking news is about gunfire and other mayhem following Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

The National Guard and police are trying to keep up, but are spread too thin. National Guard units are coming in from all over the country to restore order.

Just last July, a group of state governors expressed concern over the readiness of their national guard units to respond to natural disasters.

For Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana, the major concern was with hurricanes. She and three other states in the hurricane belt - Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi - have agreed to help one another in the case of the threat, hurricanes or other disasters, as they tried to adjust to tighter circumstances in their states.

"Jeb Bush already called me once this year to say, 'I'm just checking in,' " said Ms. Blanco, a Democrat, referring to Florida's governor. Mr. Bush, a Republican, did not attend the conference.

Yesterday the Washington Post revealed that more than 6000 National Guard troops from Louisiana and Mississippi who ought to be available to provide desperately needed help to their neighbors are instead overseas perusing the President's fantasy of eliminating terrorism and creating friendly western-style democracies by invading and occupying foreign countries.

In Louisiana, which took the brunt of Katrina, some 3,000 members of the 256th Combat Brigade are in Iraq, while 3,500 members of the Guard were deployed to help hurricane victims and another 3,000 were on standby.

In neighboring Mississippi, the Guard had 853 troops on hurricane duty _ a small slice of the more than 7,000 Guard troops in the state's ground and air components. Some 3,000 National Guard troops from Mississippi are in Iraq, another 300 in Afghanistan.

Instead of making us more secure, our foreign policy based on lies and deceptions is making our nation and people less secure by reducing our ability to respond to both man-made and natural disasters at home.