Light On Dark Water

No Doubt A Richly Deserved Indictment

The law seems to have caught up with former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin. Good. 

Ordinarily this is not something I would write about here, but the success of the effort to blame then-President Bush for everything that went wrong after (and maybe before) Hurricane Katrina was one of the most egregious recent examples of the media crafting a "narrative" that stuck, regardless of its tenuous connection to the facts. And it still irritates me. Not that the federal response didn't have its share of problems and mistakes, but the "narrative" had room for little else. And from what I've read Nagin deserved more criticism than Bush.

Maclin Horton

19 responses to “No Doubt A Richly Deserved Indictment”

  1. Marianne

    I agree.
    In addition to the horribly unfair treatment of Bush, one of the worst results of the media’s coverage of Katrina is that it helped cement the view held by many that the U.S. is irredeemably racist. I know since I’ve been here in New Zealand, I’ve heard and read several comments to this effect.
    Popular Mechanics did some good work in 2006, “Debunking the Myths of Hurricane Katrina,” trying to correct a lot of the misinformation, but I’m afraid the image first put out is what will forever remain in most minds.

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  2. Mac

    Yep, that’s the way it works. And it’s maddening. Some very large number of people whose awareness of events consists of vague impressions will have absorbed as a fact that the mess was Bush’s fault, and that racism played a large part in it.

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  3. Art Deco

    What you could hold the President responsible for was the appointment of Michael D. Brown as director of FEMA. The President himself likely could not have picked the man out of a police lineup, but the President does bear responsibility for the personnel system that produced that appointment.
    1. The man had previously been general counsel to the agency. He had been appointed bureau chief on the recommendation of the previous director and had received the position of general counsel due to some sort of connection.
    2. He had previously been director of a trade association which graded arabian horses and had quit practicing law some 15 years earlier.
    3. He did not know civil defense from apple butter, so the agency’s professional staff was left to carry on as best in could under the direction of someone who could provide no value added.
    4. The agency was housed in the friggin’ Department of Homeland Security. The Administration was using the bureaucratic architecture of its signature issue as a dumping ground for political patronage. They could have found a schedule C position in the Department of Agriculture for him, but noooooo.
    5. All of which was an indication of the degree to which the Administration was willing to forego administrative competence to achieve other goals.

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  4. Mac

    No argument with that. And the Department of Homeland Security is creepy, as well as an admission that the Department of Defense is now simply the Department of War For Whatever Reasons. Still, New Orleans would have been a mess after Katrina no matter who was in charge of the federal effort–which no doubt could have been managed a lot better, but wasn’t the main problem. I expect that if a Republican were in the White House now we would have heard a lot more criticism of the federal role in the aftermath of “superstorm” Sandy.

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  5. Art Deco

    And the Department of Homeland Security is creepy
    For the most part, it is an assemblage of agencies previously located in other departments (or free standing). The Transportation Security Administration was new (and its seminal institutional culture defective), but the functions of that agency were not new. One odd thing was that the administration went to the trouble of assembling something very like a federal police department while leaving some components of the federal police scattered elsewhere (while at the same time adding some foreign intelligence and civil defense functions). I can see separating the military police from civil police and I can see why some departments and agencies might use in-house security services; I cannot see why the Department of Justice and the Department of the Interior retained their police services but the Department of the Treasury did not. The whole clanking business looks like a deal with Congressmen who wanted to retain jurisdiction over this that and the next thing allied with mutinous bureau chiefs with their own ends.
    A county government will have a sheriff, a county attorney, and a civil defense co-ordinator or emergency dispatch center. A municipal government will have a police and fire department. A state government will have a police department, a prisons department, devolved public prosecutors’ corps, and an attorney-general. Not sure why this pattern is deemed inapplicable at the federal level.

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  6. Art Deco

    Department of Defense is now simply the Department of War For Whatever Reasons
    N.B., the complaints of the commissioner of customs ca. 1988 about ambient proposals to use the military to interdict the drug trade and guard the border: the characteristics of military training do not make for an institutional culture with the necessary deft touch. The Coast Guard manages to combine military, police, and rescue functions and the military has been used for some disaster relief missions and has a civil affairs wing, but I would not conflate policing with soldiery.
    Recall also that the Department of Defense was assembled in 1947 from antecedent departments, the Department of War and the Department of the Navy. I think many foreign militaries (Denmark’s???) are more analogous to our National Guard than to our Army and Navy and Air Force, but militaries of great powers go on the offense as well. The terminology used to be forthright about this.

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  7. Art Deco

    No doubt Katrina would have been a mess. You had the accumulated decisions at several levels which produced insufficient public works, the chronic problem of crafting viable actuarial pools and attendant underwriting standards for flood-prone areas, and defective planning and institutional cultures in the New Orleans city government. The thing is, the situation likely could have benefitted some from energetic and adaptable institutional leadership at FEMA as it was not a standard-issue disaster. Brown was out of his depth.

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  8. Art Deco

    And, again, no one like Brown should have been in charge of any sort of agency, much less one of consequence like FEMA. There are schedule c appointments and staff positions here, there, and the next place at the President’s discretion.

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  9. Mac

    No argument about Brown, or that the thing could have been handled better. My only point is that the level of blame put on GWB was far out of line with reality.
    “War” vs. “Defense”–there’s a great deal to be said for saying what one means. Would it not be correct to say that the transition to “Defense” also coincided with a huge increase in our military presence and activity all over the world? It makes “Defense” seem a little Orwellian.

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  10. Art Deco

    Martin Peretz used to complain that few countries were forthright enough to maintain a “Ministry of War”. The transition to “Ministry of Defense” was pretty much a global phenomenon.
    As to your question, no.
    We acquired overseas dependencies in stages over the period running from 1898 to 1945. We began to liquidate our portfolio in 1934 (with the abolition of treaties of protection over Panama and Cuba). The bulk went when the Philippines was cut loose in 1946.
    As for the re-armament and the military presence abroad, that dates from 1940. The name change was in 1947. Do wish they would change it to something at least neutrally descriptive, e.g. “Department of the Armed Services”.

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  11. Stu

    The important thing is that we can always rely on Popular Mechanics for fair and accurate reporting.

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  12. Mac

    The more important thing is that we can never rely on the major news outlets, whose whole reason for existence is, purportedly, fair and accurate reporting, for the same. (Actually of course their reason for existence is to sell advertising.) PM seems more or less apolitical and has an interest in facts not shared by CBS-ABC-NBC-CNN et.al.

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  13. Paul

    This will be the Danish National Guard at work.
    I think Mac might have been thinking of the adoption of “Defense” as coinciding with the long-term establishment of a worldwide network of American military bases, largely located in Europe, East Asia and the Indian Ocean, rather than overt imperialism (which was comparatively limited in geographical scope) and WWII (which was not a long-term commitment). That was quite a radical change in American foreign and defence policy.

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  14. Paul

    I seem to have cut off part of the link. One with English subtitles is at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIYEgDr_xPY

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  15. Mac

    Yes, thank you, that is exactly what I was thinking of. I don’t know the pre-WWII history well enough to defend the point, but that’s my broad idea of the change.
    Have to wait till later to watch the video.

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  16. Art Deco

    American military bases were an innovation. Roughly co-incident with the establishment of those bases was the liquidation of the British, French, and Dutch Empires and the extension of the Russian sphere of influence into Central Europe. We developed a large military and a network of patron-client relations, but actual governance of overseas territories ceased to be a modus operandi for occidental powers.

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  17. Marianne

    About changing the name from Department of War to Department of Defense.
    I always thought it had to do with the fact that the Nuremberg Trials brought charges for the first time for starting wars of aggression and that this led to everyone then wanting to be sure they distanced themselves from the term “war.”

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  18. Mac

    Make sense.
    Military presence was what I was thinking of, not direct governance.

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  19. Art Deco

    Given Denmark’s population, their commitment of troops in Afghanistan is considerable. They have deployed 750 troops, the equivalent of the United States deploying 41,000 troops. Their troops have a mortality rate higher than their American counterparts.
    Actually, the National Guard has contributed quite a bit to our expeditionary forces in Afghanistan and Iraq.
    The Danish military is a contributor to larger efforts. Countries seldom deploy their militaries for free-standing efforts and those which do are often regarded venomously by bien-pensants (the bizarre global hatred of Israel being the most prominent case of this).

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