Putting Blame Where it Belongs

After reading the post-Katrina rantings of Paul Krugman, Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd, and Bob Herbert—which were so strained and predictable that one wonders whether they were largely pre-written with the only name of the affected city and a few specific details left blank—it struck me that these were the sort of opinions one might expect to encounter during a famine in 19th century Russia: sincere belief that not only is one man personally responsible for an act of nature but also that, somehow, he alone could have made everything work out for the best. Although these authors have all made the obligatory concession of “stuff happens,” I have been dumbstruck at the opinion that President Bush could, by his own actions, have made one of the most powerful hurricanes ever seen in the Atlantic ocean a painless non-event.

Apart from the desperately needed realization that, try as we might, nature is our ultimate master, we also need to remember the character of the polity in which we live. In case we have all forgotten, we live in a federal republic, not an autocracy, and the responsibility for our proximate care and service is the responsibility of our elected local government, not George W. Bush. Even in an emergency, the immediate responsibility for civilian lives rests with local governments which are supposed to “hold the line” until help arrives. In Katrina’s case the local and state officials were completely, entirely, and irreversibly overwhelmed from the very start of the disaster, creating the power vacuum that was quickly filled by all of the darkest elements of human nature.

This is not to say that the federal government’s response has been exemplary; in fact, it has been far from it. Heads should roll at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Department of Homeland Security, and with any luck public outrage will compel the firing of the untalented hacks who were in charge during the destruction of New Orleans. However, the suggestion that without war (à la Michael Moore’s line of “all our helicopters are in Iraq”), or Bush’s budget cuts, or some other disagreeable government policy Katrina would not have been an enormous disaster is disingenuous to the point of being an outright lie. The idea that we, as a country, have the resources to immediately airlift 50,000-odd people out of what is tantamount to a war zone, when virtually all civic infrastructure in New Orleans and its suburbs was destroyed or inoperable, suggests a shocking disengagement from reality.

Yes, we should take the federal government to task for being somewhat slow and disorganized in its response, but even more we should demand a wholesale restructuring of the obviously dysfunctional governments of Louisiana and New Orleans. How, in a city almost entirely surrounded by water and built below sea level, there were not clear and unambiguous evacuation routes is a complete mystery. Why did the city not use its substantial public transit assets to aid in the mandatory evacuation of the city, instead of letting them sit idle only to be flooded and destroyed? According to one blog’s estimation, the city of New Orleans owned at least 569 buses capable of ferrying out 33,350 people in a single trip. Why did Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco not declare a state of emergency immediately after the hurricane hit, instead becoming embroiled in an administrative turf war with the federal government? Furthermore, why did she have to be compelled by President Bush to make the evacuation of New Orleans compulsory? What exactly has New Orleans homeland security director Colonel Terry Ebbert done since his appointment in February, and what, besides infantile whining, has he accomplished since the storm hit?

These are all questions that must be answered just as assuredly as questions about the federal government’s responsiveness. Question funding cuts to the Army Corps of Engineers in a period of unrestrained pork barrel spending. Ask why FEMA head Michael Brown seemed to know less about the unfolding disaster than the average viewer of Fox News or CNN. But, please, spare the outlandish rhetoric, demagoguery, unsubstantiated speculation, and race-based bile. It is true that the Louisiana National Guard does have troops in Iraq, but the Mississippi National Guard has an even larger percentage of its forces overseas, and looting was virtually non-existent in the latter state while epidemic in the former. It is true that the funding for levy projects in New Orleans was cut, but the actual levies that failed were recently reconstructed and perhaps the strongest in the entire system. It is also true that the federal response was botched, but we should not forget that the local response was a complete, total, catastrophic, and most of all, shameful failure.

This not about simply “passing the buck” away from Bush and towards the Democratic machine that runs New Orleans and much of Louisiana. If one thing has become clear in the wake of this tragedy, it is that there is more than enough blame to go around. It is exceedingly obvious, though, that a good share of the blame falls on local and state officials. The people that run New Orleans do not even seem to have read their own emergency response plan, which explicitly warned of thousands of poor residents that could be left behind, or learned anything from the experience of Hurricane Ivan in 2004, during which time the poor and sick were also abandoned in the city. Louisiana officials (Senator Mary Landrieu’s threat to literally “punch” their critics notwithstanding) should have to answer why, if levy repairs were so positively critical, they could not spare the few million dollars they say were necessary. Similarly, federal officials should have to answer why, given the complete state and local incompetence, they did not intercede more swiftly and simply take charge of affairs on the ground from the outset. A terrible human tragedy has unfolded; we would only be extending a shameful calamity if we let partisan hate blind our pursuit of those who have failed their fellow citizens.

Mark A. Adomanis ’07, a Crimson editorial editor, is a government concentrator in Eliot House.