If we must blame, blame Bush

Like everyone else, I've been glued to the news this week, weeping and feeling helpless at the unthinkable horrors in the post-hurricane South. I haven't said anything about it on the blog because it's so overwhelming, and what could I say that hasn't been said anyway? However, I just saw a poll that indicates that the blame everyone's looking for is shifting away from Bush and toward local government, and that makes me mad. I can write mad a lot more easily than I can write depressed.

I'm not saying this is the appropriate point in this crisis for blame to be laid anywhere, but people are pointing fingers with or without my input, so I may as well add my two cents. In the midst of my despair and rage earlier this week, when it seemed that aid was awfully slow in coming to New Orleans, I did have moments of relief - a feeling almost like camaraderie with my fellow Americans - when I saw and heard people from both parties united in their frustration and anger at the poorly organized response. It almost seemed that the silver lining of this crisis might be that it could unite a sharply divided citizenry and focus everyone's attention on helping each other instead of on ideological differences.

Now that the last evacuee has finally been removed from the squalid conditions at the Superdome and the New Orleans convention center, it seems that people are already returning to their pre-hurricane corners. The poll I just saw indicates that people agree that the federal and local governments were both unprepared for this kind of emergency, but that most people are not blaming Bush. I do understand that there were failures across the board, but with great power comes great responsibility, and Bush has made some really bad, really big decisions that directly contributed to this week's failures.

1) Bush created a Department of Homeland Security to cover emergencies of this scope, whether natural or man-made - he diverted money and resources to the new department, was reelected largely because of the sense of security it gave the public, and encouraged a meek legislature to suspend many of our civil rights to give it teeth - yet when the acid test came last week, the DHS proved to be woefully unprepared. Four years and huge piles of dollars later, we deserve better than this. This article is pretty slanted, though appears to have facts straight, and its last line is one of its best - "Homeland security should begin at home."

2) Bush sent National Guardsmen to fight wars in Iraq and Afghanistan under false pretenses. Whether or not one supports the war in Iraq (and I agree that we can't just leave now that we've so badly destabilized the region), even the administration now admits that the reasons they gave for pressing this fight were invalid and ultimately proved completely baseless. The National Guard has long been the most truly defensive branch of the armed forces, aiding and protecting citizens in times of natural or man-made disaster. Unfortunately, our military has been stretched so thin with the war in Iraq that much of the National Guard has had to go to Iraq to supplement our strength there. There is no way of knowing how much more effective the rescue process in New Orleans would have been with a stronger National Guard presence, but it's a fair guess that their experience would have come in very handy.

3) Bush chose the war in Iraq and tax cuts over many necessary social and infrastructure programs, one of which was funding for the maintenance of the New Orleans levees that ultimately failed this week. Local governments warned of the possible failure of the levees and asked for sufficient funding for the Army Corps of Engineers to strengthen them, but Bush had other priorities. He owns a big part of the flooding that followed the levee failures.

4) The argument I'm hearing from the White House about why the slow response was not their fault is that the state has to request assistance before the federal government can come in. First of all, I think there's a case to be made that the local governments did request assistance days in advance of it arriving. However, my bigger complaint is that this is a very childish "I'm rubber and you're glue" type of defense. Their argument is, essentially, "but they didn't ASK for help." Okay, George. I guess we're meant to believe that the entire federal government is so incapable of evaluating a crisis and independently determining what needs to be done that it must wait for specific requests before acting. Sadly, I actually don't find that all that hard to believe.

I do understand that coordinating food and transportation for nearly half a million people must be an enormous logistical challenge, and that immediate aid was probably not even physically possible. My concern is not so much with the timing of aid as with the timing of security. You can not convince me that it would have taken four days to establish a meaningful military presence if one of our great cities had been invaded by a foreign enemy instead of by water and homegrown gangs. The atrocities committed by a subset of New Orleans citizens on the unprotected remainder should not have been possible. Stories of violence and lawlessness began coming from New Orleans last Tuesday, the day after the hurricane, but a strong military presence was not in place until Friday afternoon. That is simply unacceptable. The defense I have heard most is that people on the ground fired on the first responders, so the first responders just went away. Now, I'm not at all saying that it was okay for the people on the ground to shoot at anyone, least of all those providing aid - but wouldn't the logical response be to overwhelm those breaking the law, rather than just giving up and leaving the vast, defenseless majority to be preyed upon?

Okay, I think I'm finally winding down - thank you to anyone who stuck it out this far. I do think that helping the victims is the most important thing, but blame does have its place. If we do not learn from our mistakes (or identify people who persist in making them at others' expense), we really will keep repeating them. I hope that there really is a unifying silver lining here, and that the checks and balances built into our government begin applying to the president a little more effectively.