Credibility
By Cicero | Related entries in Hurricane Katrina, The War On TerrorismI was a single-issue voter in the last election. I voted for President Bush because I felt he was right about Iraq, and more fundamentally, about our security. I overlooked just about everything else that I disliked about his presidency on that single issue.
Since 9/11, President Bush has made a compelling case that we need to rebuild our security mechanisms, at home and abroad. The Department of Homeland Security was formed here at home, and we were put on a war footing abroad. I believe that this is sensible given the levels of terror threats that we face. Unfortunately, I had to turn away from my own party to vote for someone who I believed took my nation’s security more seriously.
I think there were a lot of Ciceros at the 2004 polls — security-minded Democrats who voted for President Bush. As that kind of voter, I am having trouble with what I see going on in New Orleans.
After all the emphasis the Bush Administration has placed on this nation’s security, exporting freedom abroad to Iraq, and the dire warnings about WMDs on our soil, my expectation in the era of terror — the era of holding back chaos — is that the Bush Administration can thwart chaos effectively. On the Federal level. That’s what the game plan has been for the last five years: The Federal Government has stepped in with huge spending increases to prepare the United States for the chaos of terrorism. It has been a nationalized priority, costing billions.
New Orleans is devolving into anarchy, death, pillage and disease, nearly five days after Hurricane Katrina came ashore. Things appear to be improving only incrementally. Clearly, this is a crisis of unprecedented magnitude, with immense logistical challenges. It is reasonable to ask, however, if for the last five years the ‘anti-chaos’ mechanisms that have been put into place are as effective as advertised.
The Bush administration’s credibility is on the line. There is a direct correlation between managing the chaos of natural disasters, and the chaos of terror events. So far, the Federal Government’s management of Katrina’s aftermath is confused, unfocused, and uninspired. Seeing President Bush call the Federal response “unacceptible” does not absolve him of responsibility. He runs the country. His job is to run the Federal government. The buck stops at his desk.
There are debates going on about responsibility for this disaster — whether or not it lies with the Federal Government, state or local government. There’s an argument that New Orleans made its own fateful choices when moneys went into expensive projects like the Superdome, that might have been better spent on securing the city for a category five hurricane. Choices were made at the local level, and the people of New Orleans bear responsibility for this crisis.
But for five years, the Federal Government has adjusted its priorities in the era of terror by taking on more responsibility for managing calamity at home. This time around, cataclysm has come from tropical waters, not from an Islamic nuke; it is not unreasonable or unfair to judge the Federal Government’s management of Katrina as a test of its commitments over the last five years. There is Federal culpability that overarches state and local responsibility.
So now begins a new political era. People will reasonably ask if our commitment to Iraq comes at the expense of security at home. They will ask if the Bush Administration’s efforts at protecting the homeland are credible, using Katrina as a litmus test. These questions are fair, and reasonable. President Bush’s entire political strategy is being tested. Effectively, we got nuked. And now we see the response.
I am willing to see this as a dry run for a deliberate catastrophic attack. I am willing to admit that this crisis is unprecedented on our soil, and the Federal response is building. I hope that what is learned here can help buttress our long-term security against catastrophic terror. But rhetoric always has a fail safe point; it’s effectiveness lasts only as long as it is untested. Ultimately, New Orleans and the Gulf Coast is a test of President Bush’s credibility in the war against terror. If we lose credibility, we lose leadership in the war.
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September 2nd, 2005 at 11:08 am
Bingo.
September 2nd, 2005 at 11:34 am
“Federal disaster declarations covered 90,000 square miles (234,000 square kilometers) along the U.S. Gulf Coast, an area roughly the size of Britain. As many as 400,000 people have been forced to leave their homes.�
This is not a Hurricane. This is an atomic bomb. This was worse than 9/11, its worse than the Tsunami.
This is Katrina.
Katrina did not just wipe out New Orleans, it also did Biloxi, Gulfport and Pascagoula. This one storm has effected anarea roughly the size of Great Britain. These cities are not tourist havens, populated with taffy making retirees who can leave town at a moments notice, these are working towns, working ports where people made things and went about their life outside of the bright spotlight of the worlds attention.
We all are affected by what these port cities do, and now that they are gone, we are all going to be effected by their loss. We are all going to be covered by the debris spread by Katrina.
I can deal with the horror of it. I can get used to the word “refugee�, but I cannot sit back and abide the blame game that is going on. Everyone on the left is working double overtime to make Katrina into George W. Bush’s’ Frankenstein monster. To hear some on the left, it’s as if George himself created the Hurricane. And the people on the right are also working overtime blaming the Mayor and Governor of Louisiana. And for gods sake if I hear one more “Christian� blame the gays and Mardi Gras, I’m going to come apart at the seams.
It’s all crap, and it needs to stop.
Does it occur to those of you that are blaming the mayor and the New Orleans police department that the very people you are castigating for a “lack of leadership� also lost everything in the disaster? The people everyone counted on to have the plans and to be on the job afterwards were also wiped out in this disaster. This is not a simple high water mark on some rich folks barrier island vacation homes; this is the utter destruction of 4 major cities.
I don’t remember any of us walking around last week saying how much we knew about how this was going to play out.
We all sit miles away from the disaster ready to pass judgment, but can any of us have any idea what it must be like to be a low paid civil servant reporting to work, knowing that your house is underwater and your family is missing and there’s 100,000 angry, wet and hungry people staring at you for answers?
Should the Mayor of New Orleans have declared martial law and had a forced evacuation 24 hours prior to the landing of the hurricane? Maybe, but would you have supported him? Was 24 hours enough to move 400,000 people? What about 72? Were there any sort of facilities, any people to carry off such a plan? Could you even implement that today even with all the clear need in full light of day? Were not talking about a few office blocks, this is city after city that needed to be fully evacuated, and where exactly would you have evacuated to? It’s just as likely that Houston was going to be hit, as was New Orleans. We have no idea how to do this sort of mass migration, even today. We are now evacuating to Houston in full daylight outside of the storm and it still takes time to move people en masse that far away. And now, Houston is full – that’s how big this is.
Some of you say “ we should bring in the Military� and we are. But lets remember, the military isn’t just sitting at the airport in their cockpits ready to deploy at a moments notice, they have to get ready, it takes time to move men and material anywhere in the world. Now for comparison purposes, if it takes 4 days to organize a military group, trained and driven to take orders on command to go somewhere, how long will it take to move civilians who do not follow orders and cant even be compelled to leave in the face of a category 5 hurricane. How long does it take when to make matters even worse, the locals start shooting at the people trying to help?
And for those of you complaining about the lack of relief workers, remember, relief workers will not go into any area where their security is at risk, and the locals have decided that shooting at the people trying to help is good sport.
Stop thinking of this as a Hurricane and start thinking of this as an atomic bombing and you can start to see what happened here was just beyond anyone local to have the ability to deal with it. The hurricane didn’t just destroy the buildings; it destroyed the authority and the infrastructure of local government as well.
The lesson here is that in true large scale disasters, you can’t count on the locals to even be there to take the lead. The assumption has to be that the locals are gone and cannot take part in their own rescue. That is not an assumption we make today in our planning, all disaster planning says the locals “drive the show�. Katrina showed the weakness in that idea. Katrina changed the paradigm of disasters in our memory. I always wondered what would take the place of 9/11 in my nightmares, and now I know what it is.
I have my issues with the way this was handled, but for now I’m keeping it to my self. None of this half assed Monday morning quarterbacking is going to do a damn thing to get those people out of there but the corrosive effect it will have on our government serves no one. There must be authority and if the left or the right continues on this game of political gamesmanship, the effect is will end in anarchy for all of us.
It must stop, and it must stop now.
We all learned from this disaster, and none of us is going to get out of it without some of it on us. We’ve all learned a valuable lesson that modern man doesn’t like to admit very often but its true nonetheless – there are things in the world that you don’t have control over that are much, much bigger than you, and on occasion they can and often do reach out and bite your ass. Modern man is pretty comfortable in his certainty and has lots of nice toys, like satellites and telecommunications but nature is much bigger than man and in the end, nature will always win.
We are not out of this yet. Things are possibly going to get worse.
Much, Much worse
When you have large numbers of people in that kind of water, Cholera is not far from the future. We Western people have no idea what a cholera epidemic is like, but I fear we are about to learn. Its not funny, its death inside of a day for thousands of people, the young and the infirmed will go even faster. Based on the current conditions, we are probably within 24 hours of a cholera outbreak in this area. Ladies and gentleman, if that occurs and God help us all if it does, you will look back on these last 4 days as “when things weren’t quite so bad�.
Stop looking for someone to blame and start looking for a way to help, were full up on critics at the moment we could use a few more “backs� in the process of getting these people out.
This is not anyone’s fault; this is simply beyond comprehension. We might have talked about it in academic exercises, but no one in the United States has ever seen anything like this. It doesn’t help anyone get out of there to waste your time on that fruitless exercise of trying to blame anyone for this.
We have no time to waste on such fecklessness. People are dying and more are going to die soon if we don’t get those people out of there quickly.
September 2nd, 2005 at 11:37 am
Whether its in Iraq or NO, American want competence. We will withstand hardship if we know we’re doing our level best. Now, we seriously doubt our government’s competence. We’re witnessing a meltdown of bureaucratic ineptitude- as officials from city, county, state, federal, FEMA, DOD, US Corp of Engs, etc., scramble around, trying to figure out who’s in charge. Meanwhile, folks are in peril. It’s hard to claim competence when there’s not a centralized command and control center. Presumably, emergency responses of this magnitutde should be federalized- but like most Americans, I don’t really care- as long as our system works. It’s obvious it doesn’t- despite huge expenditures and outlays.
September 2nd, 2005 at 12:23 pm
There is some truth to the fact that there is a little too much finger pointing going on …. for now. The immediate problem needs to be resolved and the recriminations can start later. HOwever, for the sake of improving the system (FEMA, Nat. guard, etc) there will need to be some finger pointing and some “blame game”. Without it, things will not improve for the next time.
September 2nd, 2005 at 1:14 pm
In most corporations, the thinking is that it is most helpful to have a lessons learned meeting when a project ends. Blame is not helpful to anybody at any time…. Blame is responsible for hiding facts that need to be open and studied…. If you are too interested in assigning BLAME, you end up wasting resources just trying to get to the facts because you will have people trying to hide them from you. THIS IS NOT HELPFUL!!!
We need to have a meeting to list everything that went right and everything that went wrong so that we can prepare better for the next time something like this happens. That is what we need to focus on, how do we document this project so that it can be shared with all of the large metropolitan cities in the country.
September 2nd, 2005 at 1:39 pm
“And for gods sake if I hear one more “Christianâ€Â? blame the gays and Mardi Gras, I’m going to come apart at the seams.”
Michael, let us thank God for what may be the only silver lining around. These people are doing more to discredit themsleves than we could hope for. Starights are shaking their heads and gays are rejoicing up here in the Seattle area for this latest bit of poison from these Pharisees.
Jim Jones, I agree with your point. Assessing blame is the only way to make the structural changes we need. And we need some structural changes. But Debsay is right, actual blaming will only muddy the water further. The term I am familiar with is After Action Review. In this case, it won’t do just to fire all the people who failed, because that will not guarantee that the next crop won’t fail in some other way.
“Whether its in Iraq or NO, American want competence. We will withstand hardship if we know we’re doing our level best. Now, we seriously doubt our government’s competence. ”
This comment gets right to the point. Americans in fact don’t really want too much competence in the government at any level, and that is why we have built our government to be as fragmented as it is. That is a strength too, because bad decisions at the center or wherever else don’t cripple the whole effort, but it imposes a cost in efficiency.
September 2nd, 2005 at 1:39 pm
Some people are starting to get it, some aren’t.
Cicero at Donklephant is coming around.
Credibility
I was a single-issue voter in the last election. I voted for President Bush because I felt he was right about Iraq, and more fundamentally, about our security. I overlooked just about everything el…
September 2nd, 2005 at 2:24 pm
Jim, interesting perspective but I doubt that, in times of national emergency whether Americans yearn for want limited governmental competence.
September 2nd, 2005 at 2:33 pm
Sorry about the unedited sentence. But if you omit certain words & add others, you’ll get my drift.
September 2nd, 2005 at 3:09 pm
I also think too much of the “blame game” has entered way too early… there will no doubt be plenty of blame for everybody.
But to the author’s point: The envisioned troika: FEMA State Govenment Local authority, as a way of handling a large crisis, appears to be failing some people here in a significant way. The NO mayor did complain about too many chefs… And yes, the FEMA part is Bush’s responsibility, but the other two are not.
So yes, I agree that the credibility of the assurance that a major planned cataclysm can be dealt with succesfully is at stake.
On the other hand, even if indeed the deaths in NO number into the thousands that still means a >99% survival rate. Not to diminish those who died, just trying to get a perspective here on what to expect.
I for one don’t have a solution to guarantee a better survival rate. Really, I don’t. Not trying to be cold hearted here, just being very practical.
So here is the challenge: can anyone come up with a better way of dealing with great calamities, whether planned as an attack or a natural disaster? Remember, the scale here is very large, not just one community.
Yes, I bet that in this particular instance, upon later review, a few things *might* jump out as simple methods that would have minimized the deaths in NO in particular. But if they are too particular to NO and hurricanes they might not apply to a different situation very well.
Dan
September 2nd, 2005 at 3:34 pm
I have to disagree.
This Administration has been allowed too many failures of due diligence. Too many people have died because of these mistakes. It is not true that “nobody was walking around last week” talking about what could happen-there were people doing exactly that, and they have been doing it for years.
I want to know why the flood-control project was defunded. Precisely because I know there were all kinds of warnings that something like this not only could happen, but was bound to happen, if we did not address the levees.
September 2nd, 2005 at 3:55 pm
“Jim, interesting perspective but I doubt that, in times of national emergency whether Americans yearn for want limited governmental competence. ‘
I agree completely. Unfortunately, what you get in a crisis is what you have prepared in advance. People have been thinking in a peacetime way and it is biting us now.. That is what I meant wen I agreed with Jim Jones about the usefulness of some kind of deep soul searchiing, blame game, whatever you want to call it. We need things a little more directive when it comes to evacuations in the future – power to round people up, power to commandeer private vehicles, numbers of personnel in place early enough to make it all happen, in this case, police personnel, since it takes hours at least for the NG to show up with long arms and real coercive power.
We need a frank review of the effectiveness of the various state governments. They have handled this with varying degrees of effectiveness. Louisiana was predictably Third World. In the past that was not a matter for anyone else to meddle in. That was then and this is now.
I also agree there have been failures at the federal level. Stopping the looting was obviously not one of them – it is flat illegal for federal troops to engage in police activity and that stupid law has so far withstood every challenge, and National Guard are state assets – but there are other failures. The flood control defunding comes instantly to mind. I live on the West Coast, and we really don’t have any illusions about the level of comprehension of our risk that we can expect from bureaucrats 3,000 miles away. We have noted how much more of a “disaster” floods in the Midwest are than are earthquakes on the West Coast. that is a structrural problem, not so much of organizational structure but of the demographics of the people in decision-making positions. If more of those came from the South and the West Coast, rather than the Mid-Atlantic and the Northeast, we might see a change in emphasis, maybe that federal law as to job requirements might address. That is for a political discussion.
September 2nd, 2005 at 4:15 pm
This is not a Hurricane. This is an atomic bomb. This was worse than 9/11, its worse than the Tsunami.
Yep, it’s also an atomic bomb that we had over 5 days preliminary warning, and three days dead-nuts “We’ve got a Cat 5 hurricane” about to hit NO warning, and the Federal Government was still caught with its collective pants down.
This administration has had four years to prepare for a catastrophe that would occur without warning. And they screwed this one up. Though I voted against Bush, I can see that some people could vote the other way. But If this is still true:
Unfortunately, I had to turn away from my own party to vote for someone who I believed took my nation’s security more seriously.
there is no hope for your cognitive abilities.
September 2nd, 2005 at 4:21 pm
We told you so. Over and over again we told you this president’s security measures were a smokescreen. We told you Iraq had no WMDs and no connection to Al Queda. We told you this administration was run by incompitent cronies. You didn’t believe us. You called us stupid and you called us traitors.
There’s hundreds of bodies floating in the sewage filled waters of Lake George and their blood is on your pathetic craven hands.
Scum.
September 2nd, 2005 at 4:28 pm
Tuttle, you’re banned.
September 2nd, 2005 at 4:58 pm
You’re a tool. A dumb stupid tool. An implement of Karl Rove. You are responsible for the deaths of 1800+ of our finest. You are responsible for massive deficits, unemployment. You are responsible for $6.00 gasoline caused by an Administration that didn’t know enough to ask and move Americans to conservation and getting off of oil as fast as possible. You are responsible for our giving up habeus corpus. You are responsible for Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, and for London. You are responsible for making America and the world more dangerous today than it has been in 50 years.
Frankly, I do not believe you are a single issue, security, democrat.
I believe you are a stupid greedy pig idiot.
oh, and f you. big time.
TIME TO SIGN UP, MOFO.
September 2nd, 2005 at 5:08 pm
Why on earth would you ban Tuttle for his remarkably tame, truthful, and polite remarks?
September 2nd, 2005 at 5:43 pm
Ban Tuttle for speaking the truth. What a blog this is. I should have known anything with Totten’s fingerprints on it would turn out to be a dud.
Go ahead and ban me too, asshole.
September 2nd, 2005 at 5:45 pm
I am Spartacus Tuttle, Ban Me Too.
September 2nd, 2005 at 5:47 pm
I voted for President Bush because I felt he was right about Iraq, and more fundamentally, about our security.
Let this be a lesson to you– actions have consequences. You did not vote for Bush because you thought he was a good president on Iraq. You voted for him because doing otherwise would have been a tacit admission that you were wrong about Iraq. Unfortunately, the events of the past week have spiraled out of control to the point where you can no longer convince yourself that you were right all along, and you are starting to face up to your failures in judgment and decision-making capacity. Because of this failure in judgment and discernment on your part, because of your inability to interpret failure after failure of the Bush administration as something to concern yourself about, and because of your failure to recognize that “tough talk” does not imply intelligent decisionmaking, the country finds ourself in the mess it is in today.
Many Democrats repeatedly pointed out that Bush appeared to put a larger priority on invading Iraq than on preventing and responding to terrorist attacks. They were right. However, the problem is that some voters simply believed that the sexiness and visceral appeal of fighting and invading another country was much more compelling than the mediocre, workaday process of disaster preparation and prevention.
September 2nd, 2005 at 7:06 pm
Seeing President Bush call the Federal response “unacceptible� does not absolve him of responsibility. He runs the country. His job is to run the Federal government. The buck stops at his desk.
Holy cow, really?
I don’t mean to bash, because I agree with you, but this is the first time I’ve ever heard a Republican even begin to concede that Bush has responsibility over the actions of his subordinates. Every single failure over the last 5 years has landed far short of the Oval Office. Like in Iraq, he says the generals would tell him if they needed more troops and that’s that. Nobody ever asks him what he thinks, because he does technically outrank the generals.
What, I ask you, do we pay this guy for? In Iraq he proudly admits that he does nothing more – and sometimes even less – than rubberstamp the decions made by those below him. On Wednesday he informed us of what we already knew federal agencies were doing, and oh yeah, send cash. He didn’t announce a place for people to volunteer their homes and bodies, he didn’t call for every seaworthy craft in range of New Orleans to report to the south end of the lake or the mouth of the river. He barely even tried to deviate from the bullet points that someone had handed him 20 seconds before he reached the podium; my god, his attempts at being extemporaneous were like a sixth-grader trying to paraphrase an encyclopedia article.
If we can’t do better than this at a time like this, I think we need to seriously reconsider our self-proclaimed status as the world’s greatest country.
September 3rd, 2005 at 2:26 pm
Wow! I absolutely agree. Do you think the slow response was race and/or class related?
September 5th, 2005 at 6:25 am
I saw this question a couple of days ago and tried to craft a response. In my view, the WH has become the Rove House, in the Machiavellian sense that all things are viewed through a political prism (not in the sense that Rove is an omnipotent evil one.) With that view, race and class become defintely factors. They are classic Dem constituencies of little interest to the GOP. Top that off with an uncooperative Dem governor and an uppity black Dem mayor, and there’s a temptation, even a recipe, to play politics.
Here’s why Rove, et al aren’t racist. If this happens to a black constiuency in FL, e.g., IN AN ELECTION YEAR, there’s a prompt and overwhelming fed response. Rove knows it’s too dicey to play politics then. 05 is an off-year, so it’s less compelling.
You can lose your soul with this kind of thinking.
September 5th, 2005 at 6:42 am
As evidence for the Machiavellian theory, charging rino reports this today from the NYT: instead of figuring out how to fix the muddled federal reponse to Katrina and make darn sure something like it never happens again, the Bush Administration has been working for the last few days on a “plan … to contain the political damage from the administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina.”
This supports the theory that EVERYTHING is viewed and weighed strictly as a political matter in the WH. [Makes me serious question the War effort, btw.]
September 5th, 2005 at 8:25 am
The Rovian view is like playing a board game. In Katrina’s case, the WH analysis became so focused on jockeying for position with Dem. state and local authorities that it lost sight of the human anguish in NO. The WH didn’t react until this unseemly reality became political relevant because of media coverage. Had the same situation involved the anguigh of middle class whites, the WH would’ve recognized its political relevance earlier, I think.
September 6th, 2005 at 3:40 pm
It appears that this thread has descended into loonsville….
September 6th, 2005 at 6:08 pm
If you ask to be banned, I’ll ban you. Consider it done.
August 7th, 2006 at 4:24 pm
Good job.