They're tryin' to wash us away, part II

There's a blood red circle
On the cold dark ground
And the rain is falling down
The church doors blown open
I can hear the organ's song
But the congregation's gone

My city of ruins
My city of ruins

Now the sweet veils of mercy
Drift through the evening trees
Young men on the corner
Like scattered leaves
The boarded up windows
The hustlers and thieves
While my brother's down on his knees

My city of ruins
My city of ruins

--Bruce Springsteen, "My City of Ruins"

One of the defining and saddest moments of New Orleans history was the yellow fever epidemic during the 19th century. Members of both high and low society had to step around or over corpses in the streets, and the city's love affair with alcohol deepened as a "live for the moment" mindset took hold.

I suspect that the era of "yellowjack" was midwife to another part of New Orleans, a acid honesty about the human condition that burns through any self-delusion or wishful thinking. New Orleans may have been home to generations of crooks and charlatans, but you'll find little sentimentality among its residents.

Let me then apply a little New Orleans-style honesty to a topic near and dear to this blog. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is an expensive, colossal farce that has made Americans less safe.

Two weeks ago, someone reading the previous statement might have dismissed it as the grumblings of a unhappy scribbler. Today, in the face of FEMA's globally-televised ineptitude—a government agency reduced to being worse than useless, since it has actively interfered with relief efforts—that statement seems banal.

For those of us who have been following the Bush Administration's lackluster and darkly comic effort to secure "the homeland," the DHS' calamitous, expensive failings were a frustratingly open secret. While we have seen the measure of its failing in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, far too few people demanded that DHS demonstrate any measurable successes—until now. Nowhere in the DHS' own press releases, its leaders' testimony to Congress, or the White House's annual reports on national security were there clear, compelling, and quantifiable indications that the DHS was doing anything more than changing part of the executive branch's org chart and issuing vague, nerve-wracking warnings about "chatter." (Click here for one of the silliest points in the recent history of FEMA and the DHS.)

By consolidating 22 agencies—such as Customs, the Coast Guard, and FEMA—into a single executive branch department, DHS was supposed to bring greater focus and efficiency to two critical tasks:

1. Contributing to the government-wide effort to prevent another 9/11-scale attack.
2. Ensuring a more rapid, effective response to any catastrophe, from terrorism to tornados.

In the din of current events, it's easy to forget those halcyon days of pre-Iraq war yore, when the Bush Administration clearly resisted the recommendation of a pre-9/11 commission to create the Department of Homeland Security. It's equally easy to forget how the Bush Administration, having failed to evade implementing this recommendation, finally caved into pressure from Congress (including many in the Republican Party, signed the Homeland Security Act into law, and outrageously claimed the idea had, all along, been its own.

Americans have a hard time understanding the difference between policy and execution. It's a blind spot in which politicians position themselves, issuing press conferences about "decisions" that they don't actually plan on enacting. This political reflex may be part of the reason why members of the Cabinet, the DHS, and Congress raced to the microphone after New Orleans sank to declare how sad they felt (as if anyone cared) and how willing they were to make important decisions. It's also why these same politicos seemed befuddled that the kind of pronouncement that used to work, even when the country was digging out from a terrorist attack or invading a foreign country, inspired anger, not acquiescence.

Katrina blew away any wishful thinking or benefit of the doubt people were willing to lend the Bush Administration about the DHS. Those who have argued in the last few days that the DHS has been too focused on possible terrorist attacks are missing an obvious point: the DHS is no more ready to respond to a terrorist attack as it is to a hurricane. Had terrorists bombed the levees, barricaded the roads with fallen trees, and attacked the port facilities in New Orleans, the DHS' response would not have been any more impressive.

Here's another point many Americans might have forgotten: incompatible and inadequate radio equipment hampered rescue efforts on September 11, 2001. Police, fire, paramedics, and other emergency responders lacked the most basic ability to communicate with one another. When Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast, almost four years after the 9/11 attacks, the same problem with incompatible radio equipment existed. In 2001, the country's leaders swore that this problem would never occur again. In 2005, it did.

By now, we've all heard the litany of failure to adequately prepare for city-wrecking hurricane in Louisiana:

• Having demoted FEMA in the DHS reshuffle, the Administration also took exclusive responsibility for coordinating disaster relief away from FEMA. Unfortunately, it didn't clearly assign this responsibility to a different agency.
• The Administration froze the budget for the Army Corps of Engineers. Among other increases it had requested, the Administration denied ACE's request for more funds to strengthen the levees around New Orleans.
• Michael Brown, the current director of FEMA—not to mention a significant number of his immediate subordinates—has no disaster relief experience. In fact, Brown has a less than stellar resume by any measure.
• The Republican-controlled Congress and the Administration jointly approved measures that denuded the wetlands surrounding New Orleans, a critical bulwark against catastrophic hurricane damage. FEMA and its parent organization, the DHS, were notably silent on this question.
• Even though there were clear warnings that New Orleans would suffer unspeakable damage and casualties if a level 4 or 5 hurricane struck the city (click here and here for specifics), FEMA, the DHS, the White House, and Congress all failed to act on these warnings.
• Even a briefing from the head of the National Hurricane Center didn't spur DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff and FEMA Director Michael Brown into action.
• No amount of direct appeal from city, parish, or state representatives moved FEMA into swifter action.

Having retraced the by-now familiar points, let me highlight a few you may not have heard quite as much:

• The Gulf area contains two critical points of vulnerability for the US energy supply. The Henry Hub, a network of natural gas pipelines that spread out from Louisiana, is the major nexus for natural gas delivery across most of the continental United States. The LOOP, the transshipment point off the Gulf Coast for oil tankers, is the only facility in the United States capable of docking the very largest tankers from the Persian Gulf and other oil-producing regions. Had Katrina damaged one or both of these facilities, we would be facing an unimaginably worse energy crisis across the US. The vulnerability of both the Henry Hub and the LOOP was already a subject of concern, as this report on the LOOP demonstrates.
• The DHS exists in a pocket universe separate from the military and most other national security bureaucracies. For example, US Northern Command (NORCOM), the military's "combat command" covering North America, was preparing to assist disaster relief efforts before Katrina made landfall. However, the order for them to deploy did not come until days after the disaster—and, according to available evidence, the DHS was not lobbying the Administration to give the order.
• The already-broken Guard and Reserve component of the military's force structure is not factored into disaster relief calculations. Note, for example, how this news item from the National Guard's own periodical overlooks the non-combat responsibilities of the Guard.
• As the post-Katrina fiasco shows, there is no mechanism to ensure that replacements for police, EMTs, and other emergency responders cycle into a disaster area before they burn out. New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin reported on 60 Minutes that two police officers had committed suicide in response to the horrors they had witnessed for days on end.
• People willing to help the Gulf Coast recover are receiving no basic guidance on how to pitch in their own labor, which private agencies like the Red Cross most need donations, or how to directly assist families who need food, water, housing, or other forms of support. This failure extends to the people living within the disaster zone, such as a caller to NPR's All Things Considered this Saturday. A resident of Covington, Louisiana, the caller rightly criticized how a lack of fuel and water has stopped locals from helping each other. In contrast, FEMA's advice that, if citizens want to help, they can contribute money to FEMA has left many taxpayers apoplectic.
• So far, no federal official has made any mention of "lessons learned" from other countries' experiences handling hurricanes, typhoons, or floods. As in many other policy areas, Administration officials continue to speak as if the United States existed in vacuo.
• The United States has proved incapable of mobilizing resources in a time of national emergency on a scale it was once able to achieve. For example, tourists visiting the Normandy beaches can see the immense artificial harbors that the Allies constructed for D-Day. Nothing like that engineering feat has occurred to make Americans safer from terrorist attack or natural disaster since 9/11—all efforts of President Bush to compare the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism (GSAVE) to World War II, and himself to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, to the contrary.

These problems may seem insurmountable, but they're not. In the best of circumstances, a colossal national effort will be required to overcome them. Obviously, a country of our size, resources, and experience should be capable of making such an effort. However, any campaign to fix the problem will run immediately into another obstacle: the political ideology and style of the Bush Administration. In other words, we can't just speak of a bureaucratic breakdown, or a few unwise appointments to key federal posts. There is a political culture in the White House and Congress that will impede our nation's ability to clean up this mess.

Comments

[Matthew Shugart]

I wish I did not share your pessimism, but I do. And it is well worth remembering that warnings of institutional inadequacy of FEMA have been sounded at least twice before—as I reviewed at Fruits and Votes (http://laderafrutal.com/blog/?p=56)

For example:

1. After Hurricane Andrew, when congress heard testimony from disaster experts calling for greater coordination with the military;

2. During hearings over the creation of DHS, when James Lee Witt, who had upgraded FEMA's internal capacity under Clinton, warned that it would be a mistake to subordiante FEMA within this vast new agency.