Blame
After 9/11, I read a comment on another blog (I forget which one) which covered the issue of who to blame for the attacks.  It said something to the effect of, “When it comes to the issue of who to blame for 9/11, the issue of blame is so widespread that trying to actually assign blame is in itself an exercise in futility.” I feel much the same about New Orleans.  We can quibble all we like about who did what and when, but the one thing that is obvious to anyone is that our system failed, and failed miserably.  When I refer to the system I don’t just mean FEMA, I mean everyone, from the local first response units to the mayor to the governor to FEMA to Bush.  Nobody comes out of this smelling like guest room soap. 

Since the hurricane first hit, the left has been going apoplectic trying to find any way it can to blame Bush for the disaster even taking place at all.  “If only the evil fascist Bush hadn’t diverted crucial funds away from levee projects to finance his illegal war for oil against the peace-loving citizens of Iraq!” The problem here, as I stated in a post a few days ago, is that no matter what Bush did, the left will always look at the opposite and claim that it was what he should have done.  For example, after 9/11 the focus was on response to terrorism, and in that respect money for disaster relief was indeed given with more of a terrorism interest attached to it.  In hindsight, this might not have been the most appropriate thing to do.  However, the last time I checked it was still the Congress who controlled the purse strings, and if money was diverted to the wrong area then it is their hands who have blood on them, not Bush.  But let’s, for the sake of argument, assume that Bush had made levee reinforcement a top priority, and then a terrorist had released a biological agent on Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras.  The next day, Michael Moore and MoveOn and the rest of the left wing would have been wailing that Bush didn’t do enough to protect us from terrorism, choosing instead to focus on levee reinforcement, which undoubtedly was done to enrich his big-time donors in the construction and shipping industries.  Right now our government spends a miniscule amount of money searching the sky for dangerous asteroids.  If a massive asteroid were found tomorrow to be on a collision course with Earth, Michael Moore would claim that it was Bush’s war on terrorism that caused the government to lose focus on interplanetary debris.  Conversely, if Bush made asteroid protection a priority, then his detractors would show that he was wasting money on something that had a relatively low chance of actually occurring. 

In a system like ours, where we have scarce resources which have alternative uses, you have to make your best guess as to where those resources will be needed, and then legislatively disburse them accordingly.  Our focus on terrorism was probably misguided, but we only say that now because we’re dealing with the aftermath of a hurricane and not a low-yield nuclear detonation.  If our focus on terrorism had prevented or mitigated a terrorist attack, then Bush and the Congress would be getting praise for their foresight (from everyone except the left, of course).  So as far as blame for the flooding goes, trying to lay this entirely at Bush’s feet is totally irresponsible and nothing more than rank partisan idiocy.

Local Government
The first response for a disaster is, and should continue to be, the local government: the city emergency organizations, the police, the first department, the medical system, and so on.  Every city can and should have a solid, cohesive disaster response plan.  It seems at this point that while New Orleans undoubtedly had some kind of plan, its implementation when it counted was sorely inept.  One of the main examples of this is the behavior of so many of the New Orleans police.  Not to smear the entire organization, which undoubtedly has many heroes and truly selfless individuals, but with images of some police looting a Wal-Mart, and reports of others abandoning their posts, the failure of the police to maintain order is a huge factor which contributed to turning New Orleans into the island from Lord of the Flies. 

Then there is Mayor Nagin.  Of all the people involved, I truly feel the sorriest for him.  Politically inexperienced, I think he was thrown head-first into the kind of catastrophic situation that he, like most residents, never thought would ever actually arrive.  They called Katrina the “doomsday scenario” with good reason.  While a direct hit from a Katrina-like storm was a statistical inevitability, nobody truly anticipated, even just a few months ago, that doomsday was about to take place.  Then, when it did appear as if it might happen, I think there was a large degree of reticence on his part to honestly recognize and deal with it.  Why?  For exactly the same reasons I described above with Bush, criticism with the benefit of hindsight.  If Nagin had evacuated the city days before the hurricane was due to arrive, and then the hurricane had subsequently taken a turn and made landfall in Texas, his political detractors would then claim that he made the wrong decision.  By waiting until the last minute, when an evacuation was really too late, he took a gamble that turned out wrong.  If he waited until the last minute, then the hurricane totally missed New Orleans, he would be being praised for his calm demeanor and for not throwing the citizens of New Orleans into a panic with an unnecessary evacuation.  It’s all hindsight.

State Government
Of all the people involved, the main share of the blame, I feel, should be directed towards Gov. Blanco.  It appears that her main concern in the days leading up to the hurricane’s arrival was her perception of being “in charge.” She wanted to be able to take the credit for her leadership, which explains her refusal to relinquish control of the rescue efforts to the federal government until it was largely too late.  After the devastation began, her leadership was totally incompetent.  Compare the amount of devastation and destruction in Louisiana with that in Mississippi.  The leadership of Mississippi governor Haley Barbour stands in stark contrast to that of Blanco.  Barbour was prepared, with a plan ready to go, and it shows.  While Mississippi took more damage than Louisiana, they didn’t have a fraction of Louisiana’s problems, and I attribute this entirely to leadership at the state level.

The President
Recently my detractors have accused me, repeatedly, of trying to “get” the president, despite my repeated—and consistent—statements to the contrary.  JimK made the observation that since the majority of my posts lately have concerned Bush, this was the impression people were getting, whether or not it had any factual basis.  I think that might be a fair assumption on his part.  My focus on Bush the past few days has been primarily a response to the immediate circle-the-wagons mentality of so many people on the right, trying to immediately insulate the president from any and all liability.  This in itself was a reaction to the immediate let’s-blame-Bush attitude of the radical left.  (Clearing up this misperception is one of the main reasons for this post.)

My main criticisms of Bush in this instance are simple.  First off, I think the record has shown that both FEMA head Michael Brown and DHS head Michael Chertoff are totally incompetent, and should have been immediately removed from their positions and replaced by someone with experience in managing disasters and/or coordinating massive, complicated efforts.  Putting as the head of FEMA someone like Giuliani or Tommy Franks would have inspired confidence in the people that Bush was on top of the game.  He did none of these things, instead relying on his same tired old good old boy Texas charm, referring to Michael Brown as “Brownie” and telling the world that he’s doing a “heck of a job,” despite all evidence being to the contrary. 

Some have suggested that there might be a hell of a lot more going on behind the scenes with “Brownie” that we don’t know a lot about, and I think that might indeed be the case.  But one of the jobs of a leader is to project leadership.  After 9/11 Bush did this admirably.  As far as I’m concerned, Bush’s ground zero bullhorn admonition that “the people who knocked these buildings down are going to hear all of us soon” ranks up there with FDR’s post-Pearl Harbor pledge to bring the Empire of Japan “to its knees.” In return, Bush was rewarded with the highest sustained approval ratings of any president in American history.  Leadership counts, and the public projection of leadership is vitally important.  In recent months or years, Bush has failed miserably at maintaining the public projection of leadership, and for it he has been rewarded with some of the lowest approval ratings ever.  As the storm barreled towards the Gulf Coast the president went to a fundraiser in San Diego.  Now, as a practical matter, who cares?  What else could he have done as far as the storm went?  But as a point of leadership it was an asinine thing to do, because it implies that he doesn’t care, and his critics subsequently use this against him. 

A strong projection of leadership and concern would mitigate so many of the president’s problems.  For example, rather than go to San Diego, what if Bush had gone to Houston, and set up a mobile command center of some kind, so he could be close to the storm and monitor things?  And what if Bush had held a press conference before the storm, stating that the areas about to be hit contained some of the poorest people in the country, and that he wanted to make sure that the federal government was on hand and ready to meet their emergency needs?  In real terms, this isn’t substantively different from what Bush did.  Air Force One is a mobile command center in and of itself, so it’s not like he was actually out of the loop.  But he didn’t project anything resembling an image of caring or compassion or leadership.  (Think Giuliani in the days after 9/11.) Bill Clinton, for all his faults, was a master at the projection of leadership.  Whether he had the leadership or not it always appeared as if he did, that he truly cared, and like it or not, this is what people want to see from their leaders.  Bush, I am sure, cares deeply, and has no idea how to express it.

Allow me to illustrate my point.  Say you are trying to get a girl to marry you.  In order to woo her you buy her little gifts, tell her you love her, pay attention to her, and so on.  Once she is convinced that you truly care about her, she accepts your proposal.  Now, in truth you might not care about her at all and seek only to marry her for her money, but your outward projection of caring is all she has to go on, and she bases her decision entirely on how you act and appear.  Conversely, say you truly did love and care for this woman, but were so uncomfortable and bumbling at expressing yourself that she found you distant and aloof, and thus chose not to marry you.  The fact that you truly did care about her mattered less because she did not get the outward expression of love and affection she craved.

Appearances count, often times much more than reality.  It’s a sad fact but it’s a fact nonetheless, and Bush simply does not realize it.  Clinton was a master.  Being seen as a leader is just as important as actually being one, and Bush’s lack of any real type of leadership skills caused him to totally drop the ball and lose any momentum whatsoever.  By firing Brown he would have shown that, in the face of an emergency, he wasn’t afraid to take the tough steps necessary to get the job done.  Instead we get told that Brownie is doing a heck of a job.

This is why I am so disgusted with Bush.  He had a chance to rally the country behind him, to be the face of everything that is great about America, and he was an abject failure at it to all but his most staunchly partisan supporters.

The Federal Government
What can I say about the federal government, by which I include FEMA, that I haven’t already said?  Rather than focus on the specifics of how the federal government failed, I want to discuss what I think its role should be.

The federal government cannot and should not be the first responder in times of emergency.  That responsibility should fall on the local and state governments.  That being said, there are certain times when only a body like the federal government has the power and ability to coordinate a massive relief effort.  This was one of those times.

Longtime readers of this blog know that I am a staunch federalist, a believer in the true separation of powers and the sovereign rights of states.  That notwithstanding, there are times when the federal government can and should step in and supersede this sovereignty.  This is well established in law.  The concept of martial law has been around since the beginning of government.  Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus.  Indeed, in New Orleans right now there is a standing shoot-to-kill order for looters.  In the legal sense looters are really only committing petty larceny or burglary, and would be subject only to a short prison sentence if arrested, tried, and convicted.  Right now they run the risk of an immediate death sentence carried out Judge Dredd-style.  “I am the law.” In a non-emergency situation I think the vast majority of us would have been horrified at the thought of empowering the state to immediately execute suspected petty criminals, but you’ll hear very few complaints of the shoot-to-kill order under these circumstances.

My point is that while laws are essential to order, and for maintaining protection from an all-too-powerful state, they should not be a death sentence.  This is the impression that I get from the Katrina disaster.  There were no clear lines delineating who was in control of what, or who had the responsibility for performing specific rescue tasks, and so on.  And while we can all quote various legal decisions and umpteen laws governing this sort of thing, it absolutely cannot be denied that the system, for the most part, failed.  And when the system fails, I expect the leadership to step in and get the job done, which in this case was saving lives and maintaining order.  When it became apparent that Blaco and Nagin were not up to the task, the federal government should have stepped in, assumed control, and began giving orders.

Which would you rather have, a president called before Congress to explain why he broke the law to save lives, or why he sat idly by while people died because he did not have the statutory power to do certain things?  As I’ve said many times over the past few days, George W. Bush is the President of the United States of America, the leader of the free world, the most powerful man on the planet.  Saying, “Well, I couldn’t do anything because the so-and-so act of 1964 did not give me the power to do anything” is a flaccid, pathetic excuse. 

Going Forward
We obviously cannot have a system were the president, at the drop of a hat, can assume these sorts of dictatorial powers.  This is exactly how Hitler came to power; he created an emergency, assumed emergency powers, then refused to relinquish them.  So I am not for a second in favor of simply granting the federal government the power to do as they please.  That notwithstanding, we need a major reform of the system that recently failed us so.

First off, we need to start from scratch.  There needs to be a clear, concise, easily-understood chain of command for dire emergency situations.  It needs to be exactly the same for all states, so that the procedure is exactly the same whether you’re dealing with a Louisiana hurricane or a California earthquake or a low-yield nuclear detonation in a major American city.  For example, we could implement a system by which disasters are assigned one of three ascending levels of severity.  At the lowest level, say a flooding or localized earthquake, the local government would be in control, with FEMA providing assistance as needed.  The middle level would be for a standard hurricane, like the kind that usually hit our shores.  In these instances FEMA and the state would be roughly parallel in their contributions.  The top level would be reserved for severe emergencies, like a major catastrophic earthquake or a terrorist strike or a Katrina-level hurricane.  In these the federal government would step in and use any and all powers at its disposal to get the job done.

This, I feel, should be implemented via a constitutional amendment.  This way there are no lawsuits or legal wrangling that can impede the process, as there would be if a law were simply passed by Congress.  The very process by which an amendment has to go through would show that there was broad support among both the federal and state legislatures.  Nobody can complain like they do now about the PATRIOT Act that a fascist cabal rammed the legislation through to enact some kind of hidden agenda to take over the country.

This type of reform is necessary, vital to national security, and should be pursued at the earliest opportunity.  Osama bin Laden is sitting in a cave somewhere watching CNN and laughing his evil ass off.  Because, as Newt Gingrich said, if this is the best the United States can do when we had over a week to prepare, just how well are we going to react when something unexpected happens?