IT WILL not be easy for President Bush to look like a hero in trying to save New Orleans.

For a start, the nature of the disaster would diminish any President. September 11, 2001, elevated Bush, lifting him out of the tentative fragments of his first eight months in office. It became the clarifying moment of his presidency, as the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing was for President Clinton.

In Osama bin Laden there was an enemy to fight, easily pictured, like one of J.R.R. Tolkien’s villains, sitting in a cave with forefinger raised as he declared war on America.

But with a hurricane, even one cutely named Katrina, there is no one to fight (although jihadi websites yesterday claimed that “Private Katrina” had enlisted on their side). The spectacle would make any leader look impotent, as if he were, well, trying to hold back the waves.

To be the President of the world’s superpower and to lose an entire, world-famous city within hours is humbling. El Salvador’s offer last night of troops added inadvertent insult to injury.

Then there is the swirl of accusations against Bush now taking shape. Democrats in Congress have blamed him for diverting funds to homeland defence that should have been used to shore up New Orleans’s sinking levees. They say he reacted too slowly. They add that troops ordinarily available at home to help with disasters are tied up in Iraq.

More subtle is the complaint that Bush (and his predecessors) have allowed too much of the US oil industry to be concentrated in the west of the Gulf of Mexico, making it vulnerable to a single storm. Katrina has cost the US a fifth of its production and more than a tenth of its refining capacity.

Even if these grumbles never build to hurricane force, they are a real problem for Bush to tackle. He will be well aware of the risk, having seen the flak directed at his father 13 years ago, when he was preoccupied sending jets to fly over Iraq, even as Florida was struggling to recover after a hurricane.

Bush, who spent yesterday appearing across national television, will today visit the disaster zone on the ground. Some will say that it is already too late. And yes, his decision to return to Washington from his Texas ranch holiday two days after the disaster does leave him vulnerable. Image counts. But it is hardly the most damaging charge against him.

Similarly, he should be able to brush off the complaint that more should have been done to reinforce the levees. This is a long-standing grumble. It is hard to make a charge of unusual neglect stick on Bush.

But other accusations have more power to damage him. The charge that he has sent so many troops to Iraq that he has left the US unable to cope with natural disasters strikes at a very vulnerable point — the growing distaste of many Americans for the Iraq war.

The second is that he has mismanaged US energy interests. If there is one business that Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney are supposed to understand, it is oil.

Soaring petrol prices have led to petrol shortages across the southeast of the US. Bush’s move in releasing some of the national reserves — which are crude oil, not refined — will have little effect on petrol prices and may seem only a gesture. Nor does the mammoth Energy Bill he signed into law last month directly address the vulnerabilities exposed by Katrina.

He will be judged by how he responds to those charges. But above all, he will be judged by whether he manages to haul New Orleans back from the dead.

It won’t be entirely his choice. No doubt many in the city, receiving insurance money, will choose to go and build a house somewhere else, on higher land.

But to many, the obliteration of a city overnight, let alone one of such luminous reputation, will make the War on Terror seem a battle of lesser urgency, a long way from home.

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