Protecting the Homeland: Lessons from the Hurricane Katrina Response

Large numbers of Americans have been shocked and sickened at the handling of the aftermath of hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. We could not believe that so many fellow citizens could have been abandoned in such deadly misery for so long without our government effectively responding.

This hurricane did not come as a surprise. Once it crossed southern Florida, New Orleans was in its crosshairs and for at least two days forecasters were warning what its potential impact would be on that city below sea level. We also knew that the levees and canals would not withstand a hurricane higher than category three. Forecasters meanwhile were predicting Katrina would reach category four or five before it made landfall. So we had two days warning to get organized and prepared.

Some of that time was used to good effect. Most of the city’s population was able to evacuate once ordered to do so. But, as earlier New Orleans’s disaster simulations had predicted, a substantial part of the population was simply too poor, too incapacitated, or too confused to evacuate. Hundreds of thousands were trapped as floodwaters inundated most of the city and almost no assistance was available to either rescue them or supply them with basic necessities. Many days would pass before an effective rescue effort would be launched. As a result, we may be facing a death toll significantly higher than that associated with the 9-11 attacks.

What explains this appallingly slow response that found the President of the United States continuing his vacation and travels in sunny California while this disaster unfolded? It will take a full blown critical analysis over the next months to puzzle out the details, but part of the answer was known before Katrina headed for New Orleans.

The Bush Administration has been one of the most ideological in American history. Despite barely winning election, it has boldly set out to remake America to fit a radical minority’s image. Its domestic policies have aimed at dismantling public programs that most Americans have taken for granted, such as public schools and Social Security. They want to sweep away what they derisively describe as the “nanny state” that provides too many services for which individual citizens or, if necessary, local governments ought to be responsible. The Bush Administration’s domestic policy has been one of dismantling and retrenchment.

For the Bush Administration the primary legitimate function of the federal government is to project power through military dominance around the world. The idea is to seize this moment of American worldwide supremacy and cement it permanently in place. That will assure our continued access to the resources of the world on favorable terms. Strangely, this is not to be accomplished through our economic power tied to our higher levels of innovation and productivity. The Neocons in control of our government do not believe in economics. The have allowed the federal deficit to balloon, our trade deficit to continue to mushroom out of control, and our currency to teeter on the edge of collapse. The outsourcing of manufacturing and high tech service jobs has been shrugged off as unimportant. Apparently they believe we can be economically weak as long as we have the military wherewithal to bully the rest of the world.

These two elements of the Neocon vision of the United States have led them to dismantle the infrastructure that protects Americans at home in favor of an enormously expensive focus on protecting Americans against real and imagined external attack. They took us to war on a phony claim that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9-11 attacks and had deadly weapons aimed at us. They went to war without the army to win the peace and then haphazardly mobilized our National Guard and Reserve troops to deal with the insurgency that followed our occupation of Iraq.

At home, they saw the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, as the perfect example of an unnecessary and intrusive federal agency. FEMA has always been hated by the rightwing fringe that believes in sinister federal “black helicopters.” FEMA to them was a rogue federal agency that threatened citizens’ rights. The Bush Administration has been systematically scaling back its funding and responsibilities, even for a while, partially dismantling and renaming it.

With FEMA weakened and our National Guard and Reserve troops bogged down fighting an insurgency half way around the world, we simply were no longer equipped to quickly respond to a domestic disaster. The federal government’s Office of Homeland Security was focused on dealing with low probability, high consequence terrorist attacks rather than FEMA’s original focus on quick responses to regularly expected domestic natural disasters and accidents. Meanwhile, the National Guard’s primary function of assisting state and federal governments in meeting citizens’ needs in times of domestic crisis was severely compromised by our foreign military adventures.

The Bush Administration consciously refocused resources away from domestic needs towards doing battle with foreign enemies, real and imagined. The poor folks of New Orleans who waited in utter misery, surrounded by death, day after day to see some signs of assistance were the first domestic victims of these ideologically driven policies. But all of us are at risk in the same way when disaster strikes near us. Our capacity to take care of our fellow citizens has been significantly eroded in the pursuit of Neocon fantasies.