Friday, September 02, 2005
Negligence
Some foolish things have been said in the wake of Katrina, and in that category, one must cite the utterances of Germany's Minister of the Environment, Jurgen Trittin, who lay the blame for Katrina at the feet of the Bush administration in an article for the Frankfurter Rundschau without so much as a word of sympathy for the victims. Trittin's cold analysis has prompted outrage on both sides of the Atlantic; in the midst of the German election, his unfeeling remarks have elicited strong criticism from the press and the parties of the right. Americans seeing Trittin as the emblem of an unfeeling Europe should read Der Spiegel's reaction before coming to a conclusion about German schadenfreude.
Katrina offers reason to look anew at global warming as one more element that could be exacerbating weather patterns, but amateur meteorologists of the Trittin or Cindy Sheehan ilk embarrass only themselves when they blame Bush for the actual hurricane. The hurricane-global warming linkage is fairly speculative in nature; we already have ample cause to concern ourselves with climate change without making these wild assertions. Had Bush belatedly signed Kyoto, does anyone think that Katrina wouldn't have descended on the Gulf Coast?
That said, the administration deserves the fiercest of criticism for its negligence in this matter. Since 2001, it consistently refused to allocate the funds requested by the Army Corps of Engineers to shore up the levees above New Orleans. It did this in spite of a 2001 FEMA report that listed the flooding of New Orleans as one of the three likeliest disasters to hit an American city. The engineers working to hold back Lake Ponchartrain had to work with a bare fraction of the funds they requested.
Peaceniks will cite the war in Iraq as the reason for this shortfall, but the Bush administration was skimping on funds well before that. This shortfall has everything to do with the administration's insistence on cutting the budget before all else - before homeland security, before foreign aid, before social security, before ensuring that our military can fight and protect itself. As was commonly repeated last year, this is the first wartime presidency in which taxes were cut. The administration ignored a compelling packet of evidence that New Orleans needed protection.
Would the levee improvements have been enough? The answer is unknowable, but then so was the path of Katrina. It might have spend its fury on shored-up levees or on more vulnerable ones. Team Bush had an opportunity to at least lessen the odds of a catastrophic breach and they failed to do so.
More proximate to the calamity, one has to ask why the response has been so ineffectual. Bush's vacation in Texas has to be one factor, but it still begs the question of why FEMA has reverted to its early 90s inefficiency. It would seem that FEMA's reinvention as a branch of Homeland Security has hampered its ability to respond to natural calamities. And that is just ridiculous. Did the White House think that hurricanes would cease while we worked to stave off dirty bombs and the like? Bush had a responsibility - enhanced since 9/11 - to keep FEMA muscular, agile, prescient, and quick to react. He no longer has Clinton's FEMA; it is indubiously his own, and clearly a failure.
The consequences of all this has been the destruction of a cherished American city. Inattention, stinginess, and a genuine failure of vision are to blame. The best that can be said for the administration is that one can never know what would have worked. It is clear that they did not think seriously of their responsibilities beforehand and the carnage of Hurricane Katrina will forever be linked to the second Bush presidency.
Katrina offers reason to look anew at global warming as one more element that could be exacerbating weather patterns, but amateur meteorologists of the Trittin or Cindy Sheehan ilk embarrass only themselves when they blame Bush for the actual hurricane. The hurricane-global warming linkage is fairly speculative in nature; we already have ample cause to concern ourselves with climate change without making these wild assertions. Had Bush belatedly signed Kyoto, does anyone think that Katrina wouldn't have descended on the Gulf Coast?
That said, the administration deserves the fiercest of criticism for its negligence in this matter. Since 2001, it consistently refused to allocate the funds requested by the Army Corps of Engineers to shore up the levees above New Orleans. It did this in spite of a 2001 FEMA report that listed the flooding of New Orleans as one of the three likeliest disasters to hit an American city. The engineers working to hold back Lake Ponchartrain had to work with a bare fraction of the funds they requested.
Peaceniks will cite the war in Iraq as the reason for this shortfall, but the Bush administration was skimping on funds well before that. This shortfall has everything to do with the administration's insistence on cutting the budget before all else - before homeland security, before foreign aid, before social security, before ensuring that our military can fight and protect itself. As was commonly repeated last year, this is the first wartime presidency in which taxes were cut. The administration ignored a compelling packet of evidence that New Orleans needed protection.
Would the levee improvements have been enough? The answer is unknowable, but then so was the path of Katrina. It might have spend its fury on shored-up levees or on more vulnerable ones. Team Bush had an opportunity to at least lessen the odds of a catastrophic breach and they failed to do so.
More proximate to the calamity, one has to ask why the response has been so ineffectual. Bush's vacation in Texas has to be one factor, but it still begs the question of why FEMA has reverted to its early 90s inefficiency. It would seem that FEMA's reinvention as a branch of Homeland Security has hampered its ability to respond to natural calamities. And that is just ridiculous. Did the White House think that hurricanes would cease while we worked to stave off dirty bombs and the like? Bush had a responsibility - enhanced since 9/11 - to keep FEMA muscular, agile, prescient, and quick to react. He no longer has Clinton's FEMA; it is indubiously his own, and clearly a failure.
The consequences of all this has been the destruction of a cherished American city. Inattention, stinginess, and a genuine failure of vision are to blame. The best that can be said for the administration is that one can never know what would have worked. It is clear that they did not think seriously of their responsibilities beforehand and the carnage of Hurricane Katrina will forever be linked to the second Bush presidency.
