Who's fault is all this?

So the last post was about relief efforts, and one way to change things up a little. This post is far less charitable.

As we already established, there seems to be near-universal agreement that the government botched this up big time. I'm not entirely sure, as I said, what our expectations were for the government's response to Katrina and her aftermath. Given that the government cannot magically create levees from thin air or order the Hand of God to reach down and pluck people from rooftops, I'm wondering whether our expectations weren't perhaps a bit out of line from the get-go.

But the government did some things wrong. Among the worst was the inability to plug a breach in the Lake Pontchartrain levy early in the day on Tuesday. Plans had been made to have concrete and sand dropped in by helicopters to plug the breach as early as 0700 that morning; yet nothing happened until sundown. Faster action here could have prevented a lot of water from getting into the city.

What caused that breakdown is a matter for other agencies to determine; I'm sure there will be plenty of blame to go around. Jump with me and we'll look at some other issues.


We'll start right off with this rabidly anti-Bush article in the Washington Post. The gist of the article is that Bush "repeatedly requested less money for programs to guard against catastrophic storms in New Orleans than many federal and state officials requested, decisions that are triggering a partisan debate over administration priorities at a time when the budget is strained by the Iraq war."

The article at least follows this up by saying that, even had all the money that every agency had requested been fully funded, new levees and the like still would not have been in place in time for Katrina. So why bother bringing it up at all? Ask the WaPo. This is just evidence that people are looking to attack and place blame, and any little thing is enough pretense for doing so. Should we blame the Prez for chincing on strengthening levees, when not chincing wouldn't have fixed the levees, either? I find it hard to take that complaint seriously, and I don't like Bush so I'd normally support any attack on him. This one's just too weak.

It is interesting, though; the Bush administration has shown no particular desire to avoid or limit deficit spending in the least. How much more money would levee repair have cost? Were the savings really worth anything in the long run? I'd have to say no.

Of course, this topic just leads into the next one, which is, how many of the National Guard troops that the states of Mississippi and Louisiana would ordinarily rely upon to react to disasters were busy fighting over in Iraq? This article also from the Post notes that there are 3700 Louisiana National Guard troops in Iraq, and at least a brigade from Mississippi. The article also claims that as many as a third of each state's Guardsmen are in Iraq presently. No plans are made to send these folks home; instead, other states are stepping in to help out.

The Guard is what it sounds like, the "National Guard." They are meant to be the front line of homeland defense, to be used as governors need to deal with crises as they strike each state. National Guard troops can, of course, be nationalized, as the president has done to fight his war in Iraq. This nationalization--most famously used by Dwight Eisenhower to integrate the Arkansas school system--has generally been done to move Guard troops from one state to another to handle emergent crises. Taking the Guard overseas is not really meant to be done except in extreme situations.

I think my disagreement with the Iraq war is well enough known. Among numerous other problems it's caused is, of course, the taxing and deployment of supposedly homeland based National Guard troops. The Guard has been overused in this war. Guard jobs are not as highly sought after as before; Guard recruiting failed to meet its goals for several months this year along with recruiting into the regular Army and Marines. This means that, when this is finally over the Guard comes home to do their regular job (both their regular civilian jobs, as individuals, and their unit's jobs as tools for the state governments), there will be trust problems and recruiting problems lingering, damaging readiness and limiting the Guard's usefulness to states.

Don't for a minute think that 3700 Guardsmen couldn't have been put to good use by the state of Louisiana. That is a very big hole that the federal government created and was then ill-equipped to fill. This is Bush's war, and that is Bush's hole.

Overall it seems people want to--and perhaps are forced to--lay the blame at the feet of the Bush administration. No less a GOP stalwart than Newt Gingrich had some unpleasant comments for the government's response to Katrina. Said Gingrich--a potential 2008 presidential candidate--the sluggish response to Katrina "puts into question all of the Homeland Security and Northern Command planning for the last four years, because if we can't respond faster than this to an event we saw coming across the Gulf for days, then why do we think we're prepared to respond to a nuclear or biological attack?"

Gingrich makes a strong point, but fails to follow it up with suggestions to fix the matter. He's a smart guy, maybe he's working on it. No matter; Gingrich's attack points out that it's not just Democrats who are critical of Bush and his administration's response.

FEMA director Mike Brown--who is a former commissioner of judges and stewards for the International Arabian Horse Association and had no emergency management experience at all when he was made deputy director of FEMA in 2001 as a plum for his active support of the Bush campaign in 2000--blamed local emergency management coordinators in Louisiana for not doing good job of telling FEMA what to do. Brown may not know what he's doing, but that's no excuse for FEMA sitting around with it's thumb up its rear waiting for Louisiana to give it orders.

Of course, what's sometimes overlooked in all this is, aren't we all somewhat at fault for the rampant development that created New Orleans and Biloxi? Who built New Orleans in the first place?

Turns out it was the French. That no one in the White House has yet criticized France for bequeathing a doomed city to us back in 1803 shows a remarkable restraint. But really, we have much more than the French to blame. The same philosophy that led us to drain the Everglades (which we're now paying $10B to restore) is also responsible for damming and diking the Mississippi river in such a way that we've essentially created Plaquemines Parish out of what was once raw Gulf of Mexico. By channelling the river and its silt out that narrow finger of land, we killed off the old bayou swamps that once protected New Orleans from southern floodwaters. The state of Louisiana has lost 700 square miles of wetlands since the Mississippi was diked, wetlands that could have absorbed much of the worst rising floodwaters in the aftermath of this storm.

Then there's Mississippi. When Camille came ashore with 210 mph winds in 1965, the Mississippi Gulf Coast was a sparsely populated stretch of shoreline with a few scattered small towns and hotels. Today it's the booming engine of Mississippi's (albeit limited) economic growth, the fastest growing region of the state and home to 9% of the population. I'm not saying Mississippi is to be blamed for encouraging growth on their seashore; after all, Mississippi is (along with Louisiana) one of the poorest states in the country, and much like North Dakota part of their problem is climate. The seacoast is just the nicest place to be. But why didn't the state do more to ensure that new residents with no memory of Camille understand the importance of heeding evacuation notices?

Loss of property was bound to happen. A lot of the loss of life could have been prevented, though, with better education and greater government assistance with mandatory evacuations. Sadly, a lot of people with ignore any evacuation warning, mandatory or not. Many of the poor simply can't leave, and many of the stubborn just plain won't.

Which brings me to my final point. Does it really matter who is at fault for the sluggish response and the magnitude of this disaster? In the long run, instead of placing blame, isn't it always better to figure out what went wrong--not who messed up--and fix it? And isn't it much more important now to support the recovery efforts to the greatest of our abilities and stop bickering over why those efforts didn't start earlier and work better? Once we've evacuated the refugees, cared for the sick ad wonded, cleaned up the area, and given people the green light to go back to what's left of their homes and start over, then we can start asking why the response wasn't better coordinated, faster, more efficient, and all that. And when we do, we need to remember that what matters is learning lessons and ensuring they don't happen again, not laying blame.