Lethal Incompetence
by J. Daniel Janzen
In one sense, the nightmarish aftermath of last week's hurricane could be seen as a collective failure, as government entities at every level showed themselves equally unprepared and ill-equipped to respond to the long-anticipated tragedy that was Katrina. Through one tabletop drill after another, New Orleans officials never did figure out a way to evacuate the city's most helpless citizens — nor did they persevere in the attempt. Neither Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco nor the state's congressional delegation could create a sense of urgency in Washington around levee improvement, coastal reconstruction and flood planning projects, even from a Congress willing to spend $223 million on a bridge from an unpopulated Alaskan island to a town of 8,000.
In a broader sense, though, the catastrophe of Katrina is only the latest manifestation of criminal ineptitude by President Bush and his administration. Just over four years ago, he ignored warning signs of a coming attack by Osama bin Laden on US soil; just under four years ago, we paid the price. More recently, his contrived war against Iraq, botched and bungled from day one, has turned a foe of Iran into a likely oil-rich ally, dramatically weakened our defensive posture and put another several thousand American lives on his account. Last week's body count is likely to be the highest yet.
Of course, it would be unfair to lay all of Katrina's thousands of victims at the president's feet. Given a natural disaster of this scale, unbearable casualties are to be expected. But the most heartbreaking figure of all — one we'll never know with any real accuracy — is how many of last week's casualties survived the storm itself, only to succumb to hunger, illness or homicide in the chaotic days that followed. In the hours and even days following the worst natural disaster in a century or more, decisive leadership was desperately needed. None was forthcoming.
It's easy to dismiss the photo of the president playing Mark Wills' guitar while New Orleans filled with water as inconsequential blog fodder, but the fact remains that it took President Bush two days to decide that the biggest hurricane in the history of New Orleans might be more important than his vacation. Finally scared into action by mounting criticism, he could muster little more than photo-ops, shopping lists, reminiscences of party days past and nostrums about good people working hard.
Instead of mobilizing immediate aid for the abandoned and dying, Bush let the Federal Emergency Management Agency sit around waiting for a request for assistance from a city with no phone service. Instead of mobilizing forces while there was still a chance to prevent the complete collapse of civil order, he let an offer of National Guard troops from New Mexico governor Bill Richardson from the day before the storm languish awaiting federal authorization until the following Thursday. A similar offer from British Columbia was declined, as were others from overseas, as unnecessary, an assessment few on the ground would have agreed with. (Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice quietly reversed this policy, once she'd finished her shoe shopping and Spamalot singalong). Instead of showing real compassion for the poor, sick and overwhelmingly black population left behind to die, Bush talked about looking forward to kicking back on Sen. Trent Lott's reconstructed porch.
Surely any president would have been overwhelmed by a crisis of this magnitude (though it's cruelly tantalizing to fantasize about how some of the others — Bill Clinton, Lyndon B. Johnson, even Ronald Reagan — might have handled it). But leading the nation through unprecedented emergencies is supposed to be right in Bush's wheelhouse. In fact, it's been the defining theme of his presidency.
As Bush likes to point out, the world changed on Sept. 11, 2001. From the events of that day, he took the lesson that America must act forcefully in the face of danger. The lesson he seemed to have missed the afternoon he stood on the rubble pile with his bullhorn in hand was the importance of emergency response here at home — and how many things could go wrong if they hadn't been thought through beforehand. "It can't happen here" was supposed to have become, "It can and will happen here, and we have to be ready." Instead, Katrina caught us with our pants down.
Worst of all, this is something we've always known was going to happen. You don't need a weatherman to know that a city below sea level in one of the world's foremost hurricane zones is living on borrowed time. Of course, the fatal vulnerability of New Orleans has been a work in progress for decades; even before Katrina, it would have taken decades more of costly civil engineering to restore even a semblance of security. But in the meantime, given the likely vast impact of such an event, shouldn't someone at the federal level have been preparing for the worst? Isn't there an agency in charge of that kind of thing?
After the Al Qaeda attacks in New York and Washington, President Bush charged the newly minted Department of Homeland Security with keeping us safe in a time of worst-case scenarios. Against the backdrop of a large-scale urban disaster characterized by a confused, poorly coordinated rescue effort, one of the many agencies absorbed into this vast bureaucracy was the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a body created in 1979 specifically to handle large-scale disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes and floods. The agency's creation had been called for to rectify what the National Governors Association's Emergency Preparedness Project called "the lack of a comprehensive national emergency policy, as well as the dispersion of federal responsibilities among numerous federal agencies, which has hampered states' ability to manage disaster situations." Sounds like a pretty good idea, doesn't it?
During the Clinton administration, FEMA had been led by James Lee Witt, a skilled professional widely admired on both sides of the aisle. In a time of danger, who did Bush have running the agency? The very definition of a political crony: Joe Allbaugh, National Campaign Manager for Bush-Cheney 2000. The president got another chance when Allbaugh left the agency in 2003 to cash in on Iraq reconstruction contracts. Instead, the job passed to Mike Brown, whose signal qualifications included having been Allbaugh's college roommate and having served as commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association (until being fired for incompetence). Meanwhile, the agency's mandate was being shifted from natural disasters to "homeland security." The day after Katrina struck, the Washington Post reported that FEMA had been slated to lose its disaster preparedness function entirely.
As it happens, Katrina didn't catch FEMA entirely by surprise. Back in early 2001 — before Witt's ouster — the agency issued a report listing the three catastrophes most likely to hit the United States: a terrorist attack on New York, an earthquake in San Francisco and a hurricane in New Orleans. With the first of their predecessor's predictions having been borne out, Allbaugh and Brown might have been expected to focus increased attention on the remaining two. (Memo to Brownie: there's still time to save San Francisco).
Instead, the disastrously incompetent response to Katrina only worsened the storm's already hideous human and economic toll. In the hours following the compromise of the levees, Black Hawk helicopters carrying sandbags to plug the breaches were diverted to rescue missions, a failure of coordination that immeasurably increased the volume of water that flooded the city. Those left behind faced five full days of anarchy, starvation and thirst before the arrival of significant numbers of National Guard troops, leaving psychic scars on survivors while raising troubling issues of race and class in an already divided nation. We've lost one of America's great cities and one of its most distinctive and enduring cultures. Regardless of whether a city rises again at the mouth of a rebuilt Mississippi Delta, the New Orleans we once knew will live on only in legend, an American Atlantis.
But wait — there's more. We've also shown the human forces dedicated to our destruction just how unprepared we are for the worst they can give us, and the bang for the buck they can hope for from their efforts. A terrorist strike of similar magnitude would presumably have been quicker to command the president's attention than Katrina, to elicit the "serious business" face that only began to emerge at week's end. But is there any reason to expect his execution to have been any crisper or more effective in the wake of a gas attack on Boston subways, or a dirty bomb in Seattle... or if the levees surrounding New Orleans had been bombed, not breached?
Meanwhile, our disgrace at failing to care for our most wretched citizens is complemented by a national weakness that has never been more evident. Already dangerously overextended by Bush's war of convenience, we've been forced to pull troops back from a teetering Afghanistan and a toppling Iraq to take belated care of needs left unattended at home. As the nuclear threats from North Korea and Iran grow by the day, our ability to project force is as feeble as our diplomatic leverage — unless we're game for launching a nuclear war, that is.
People voted for Bush in 2004 because they thought he'd be better able to keep us safe.
Do you feel safe?
E-mail J. Daniel Janzen at jdaniel at flakmag dot com.
