[From the diaries -- Hunter]
According to a story just posted by the Washington Post, the chief of the National Guard, Lt. Gen Steven Blum, said that part of the reason for the slow response to Katrina was because much of the Louisiana and Mississippi national guard, and their equipment, were in Iraq:
The deployment of thousands of National Guard troops from Mississippi and Louisiana in Iraq when Hurricane Katrina struck hindered those states' initial storm response, military and civilian officials said Friday.
Lt. Gen. Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, said that "arguably" a day or so of response time was lost due to the absence of the Mississippi National Guard's 155th Infantry Brigade and Louisiana's 256th Infantry Brigade, each with thousands of troops in Iraq.
Who is Blum and what is he saying? See below.
Here's more of what Blum had to say:
"Had that brigade been at home and not in Iraq, their expertise and capabilities could have been brought to bear," said Blum.
Instead of being able to use people close by, who could get there quickly and who knew the territory, Blum had to call on troops from distant parts of the country:
Blum said that to replace those units' command and control equipment, he dispatched personnel from Guard division headquarters from Kansas and Minnesota shortly after the storm struck.
A Mississippi congressman (a Democrat, but still a Mississippian), had some observations along the same lines:
Rep. Gene Taylor, D-Miss., whose waterfront home here was washed away in the storm, told reporters that the absence of the deployed Mississippi Guard units made it harder for local officials to coordinate their initial response.
"What you lost was a lot of local knowledge," Taylor said, as well as equipment that could have been used in recovery operations.
"The best equipment went with them, for obvious reasons," especially communications equipment, he added.
The administration is not amused. Although it's not clear from the article if Rummy was responding to Blum's and Taylor's complaints, he was dismissive of such criticisms in general:
Asked on Tuesday about critics who said the commitment of large numbers of troops to the Iraq conflict hindered the military's response to Hurricane Katrina, Rumsfeld said, "Anyone who's saying that doesn't understand the situation."
Is Rummy saying the head of the National Guard doesn't understand the situation? Is Blum another Brown? And of course Taylor, being a Democrat, could not possibly be expected to comprehend military operations. </snark>
Blum didn't stray completely off the reservation, though. The Post story goes on to have him say this:
"Iraq and other overseas commitments do not inhibit our ability to sustain this effort here at home," Blum said in an interview with three reporters who flew here with him from Washington on Friday.
There is no explanation for the discrepancy in his statements.
Update [2005-9-9 23:51:29 by Dan K]: A couple of people have pointed this out, so let me empshaize their point: It's not just that the guard was below strength in Louisiana and Mississippi; they probably could have gotten by with a fraction of their complement. The point is that their essential emergency communications equipment was in Iraq.. So when the electricity went out, local officials couldn't turn use the guard's commnunications.
Also, several people have commented that Blum used the word "sustain" when quoted toward the end of the WaPo article saying that Iraq was not inhibiting our ability to handle the Katrina disaster. "Sustain" is of course of a different order from "respond," but it is, again as several have pointed out, a subtle distinction which might serve as the general's CYA when he gets called to the woodshed. I still think it's a bit of a weaseling, although less than we've come to expect from government officials in the Age of Bush. The key point is still that the initial response was slower than it should have been because the guard troops and equipment were not available when and where they should have been. Lives were lost because of that.