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Jewish World Review Sept. 9, 2005 / 5 Elul, 5765 Lessons from Katrina By Diana West
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
New Orleans is still underwater, and Hillary Clinton wants an
"independent" Katrina Commission to review the government's reaction
— never mind that the government is still reacting.
George W. Bush has decided to lead an investigation to examine "what
went wrong and what went right" — never mind that "what" is very
much still going wrong and right.
Question: How do you review or investigate something that hasn't
stopped happening? Maybe Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld knows the
secret. He's just ordered a "lessons learned" study of the military
response to Katrina — even, of course, as the military is still
responding. Not to be outdone, both houses of Congress have planned
Katrina "hearings." Hindsight may well be 20/20, but this has got to
be double vision. "What we don't want to happen is that the people
who are on the ground in the Gulf States have to come up here and
talk to 13 or 14 different groups," said House Speaker Dennis
Hastert. No, we don't.
On the other hand, maybe that's what government is for. There may be
some Darwinian explanation for this highly evolved, reflexive
tendency of national leaders to waste resources — survival of the
profligatest? — but it also reveals a strange hubris. In the
shocking, media-Left consensus that was coalescing even before
Katrina dissipated — namely, that George W. Bush is responsible for
all storm-wrought death and destruction — there is a deep blindness
to the, well, catastrophic nature of catastrophe that, by
definition, wreaks havoc. A Category Four storm with a Category Five
storm surge flattened the Gulf Coast on the last Monday in August.
The next day, two levees in New Orleans, built to withstand Category
Three waters, broke, ruinously flooding the city. What man, what
plan, what country, copes seamlessly with that? What commission,
what investigation, what hearings explain how?
This isn't to say that man — particularly in the person of the
governor of Louisiana and the mayor of New Orleans — couldn't have
better adapted to nature this extra-horrific time around. But
leaving aside the pre-storm dithering that failed to enact state and
local plans to evacuate populations in harms' way; and leaving aside
the years of state and local failures (laid out in an eye-opening
piece by Cybercast News Service) to take advantage of federal monies
to strengthen levees; and leaving aside the dysfunctional underclass
that turned New Orleans into an Iraqi-style theatre of battle
requiring military pacification before aid could flow; federal
responders were on the ground in force by Thursday. Frankly, that's
just not that bad.
As Richard Baehr pointed out in a piece debunking media myths about
Katrina at the Web site The American Thinker, the feds arrived 48
hours after the flooding began. We know that these were two days of
despair and suffering for the 20 percent of New Orleanians unable or
unwilling to heed the mayor's tardy but still pre-storm evacuation
order. We also know additional lives were lost in those terrible
hours, victims of both nature and predatory man. Yes, a shorter lag
time, if humanly possible, would have been better. The question is,
should these interim hours become the permanent Ground Zero of a
still-unfolding crisis?
Democrats seem to think so. Wading a few steps into the massive
disaster, Democratic leaders stop, clutching their political
footballs and hitting the president for being "on vacation" (Harry
Reid) and "oblivious" (Nancy Pelosi) to the earliest aftermath of
the hurricane. They seem to regard their attacks and hearings and
commissions as a fleet of lifeboats out of the whole mess. Such
sniping would be frivolous if the disaster weren't so serious.
Learning from the failures in pre-storm preparation and post-storm
reaction is instructive, but such lessons don't apply to the
enlarging crisis at hand. In other words, not even the president's
presence in the White House Situation Room — the Pelosi solution?
— would have prevented the 30-foot storm surge from making a fabled
city, not to mention the rest of the Gulf Coast, unlivable.
The ultimate arrival in New Orleans of "the cavalry" — federal aid
in Chinooks, on jet skis, on horses — didn't end this story. It
only closed the first chapter of a national tragedy. The problem
Katrina now poses isn't one of hindsight; it's the future of the
Gulf Coast. We don't need multimillion-dollar commissions to teach
the hurricane's lessons — for example, that state and local
evacuation plans should be carried out, not ignored, the next time a
massive storm threatens a major population center below sea level.
But even after these lessons are learned, the essential problem
remains: what to do next.
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JWR contributor Diana West is a columnist and editorial writer for the Washington Times. Comment by clicking here. © 2005, Diana West |
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