This Was a Long Time in Coming

There's enough screwups in Louisiana for a lot of people to hang. One of the truly amazing things about what has happened is that Katrina didn't strike in the worst way possible. What we are witnessing in New Orleans is not the worst-case scenario. It's a bad situation compounded by utter idiocy by elected officials up the ladder.

Four years ago, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) report argued that the odds of a catastrophic New Orleans hurricane are similar in likelihood and in tragedy to a major terrorist attack on New York. History repeats itself. We've got a bureaucracy doing its job, identifying risks, and being ignored by the rest of the country.

So there's screw-up number one: simply ignore the reports coming out of FEMA.

After that, we entered Iraq, which is now looking increasingly like a stupid idea, but the impact on New Orleans is two-fold. First, the War in Iraq has required large numbers of reservists and National Guard soldiers. Those are frontline, first responders who have advantages that other first responders (police, fire, medical) lack, like military-grade communications systems. As I've noted earlier, Gary Hart and The Heritage Foundation both agreed initially that Guard's proper role is as homeland defender. Instead, we depleted Louisiana's ability to cope with emergency. Second, the focus on the war has diverted resources from local emergency management. Hell, even Jonah Goldberg is saying that Democrats maybe have had a good point on first responder funding. The fact is that the calls for first responder funding weren't simply politics aimed at getting pork. There's also a good reason to believe that in emergencies, having well-trained boots on the ground makes a difference.

Of course, there's not a lot of indication that not entering Iraq would have prevented the mayhem we are currently witnessing and reading about simply because it doesn't appear that state authorities would have a damn clue what to do with more assets if they had them. With two days advance notice, and with at least four years planning time, the city of New Orleans failed to have an evacuation plan that accounted for the poor, the elderly, and the otherwise less mobile members of the city.

The Governor of Louisiana apparently chose to not mobilize the Guard that was available either before the emergency or in the very early stages of the problem. And while it appears that she requested federal emergency status two days before the hurricane, the state and the Pentagon are only now coming close to deploying enough troops to handle the situation that has exploded.

Beyond that, the head of FEMA now is a man so incompetent that he got fired from his last job running a Horse Association. (OK, he was actually asked to resign.)

This entire situation is embarassing, infuriating, and sickening. The factors that allowed for it have been falling into place year-after-year as we've left ourselves less safe at home. Some conservatives have been criticizing liberals for being to quick to point the finger on this issue. Frankly, we actually owe the people of New Orleans an apology, too. If we'd been halfway competent these last few years, we could have actually helped avoid these worst elements of this tragedy.

--Matt Singer

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