What was striking to me in Bush's early comments regarding Hurricane Katrina was the comment that the federal government needed to "get out of the way to let the private sector do its job." That's an odd way of looking at it, isn't it? Like some magical private sector fairy will descend from the heavens, waive a magic wand, and make all the flooding disappear.
The private sector has its place, to be sure, in a tragedy like this. But it's a support role. The private sector goes in behind the relief effort to support those who fall between the cracks. They're not designed to prop up the entire operation by themselves. Even the most rabid libertarian's would agree that if the federal government has any role, it's dealing with tragedies of this magnitude.
Normally when we say "Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it" we mean history from 20, 30, 50, or hundreds or years ago. Seldom do we mean "like last year," but that's where we are today. This is Baghdad all over again. "Don't worry about the looters...we've got other, more important things to do." In the case of Baghdad, the "more important" things were securing the oil fields and looking for fictional WMDs. In New Orleans the "more important" thing was more noble--rescuing people. But in both cases we've been forced to choose between walking and chewing gum because we don't have enough manpower to do both at the same time. We shouldn't have to do that! People are thirsty, hot, tired, hungry, and walking around waist deep in human feces and the dead. Oh, and they have guns, which they're using for either survival or revenge because they don't have water, food, toilets, or air conditioning.
So how do we deal with the problem? Send in the guns! National guardsmen just back from Iraq with orders to shoot to kill! Great idea! Truth be told, this needed to be done...about four DAYS ago, but still it needed to happen. It would've been nice if we could've found some guys who weren't quite as overworked as the returning reservists, but I guess you go into natural disasters with the guard you have, not the guard you want.
While necessary, it still sort of sends the wrong message--that we can't do the humanitarian work until we "put a stop to the insurgency." That we can't get them food, so let them eat lead. The overwhelming majority of people in New Orleans aren't armed or dangerous. They're just hungry. Harry Connick Jr. was on the Today show this morning saying it wasn't hard for him to get to the Convention Center in New Orleans. If he could do it he wondered why the government was having such a hard time. So do I.
The sad reality is this is just par for the course for the Bush administration. They've always put politics over experience when it comes to critical positions. Condi Rice was appointed as the National Security Advisor with no practical experience in national security. The Iraqi occupation was headed, not by the State Department who had been planning the occupation of Iraq for over a decade, but by the Pentagon who had never planned an occupation before. In fact, those members of the State Department who had been working on the Iraqi Freedom project were specifically excluded from the Pentagon's Iraq war plan (because the State Department didn't have the balls to do what it would take in Iraq). The Iraq reconstruction effort was being spearheaded by twenty-somethings with no foreign policy experience, who's only qualification seemed to be posting their resumes on the Bob Jones University server. Now we see the travails of horse farmer turned FEMA director Mike Brown, who's inexperience with actual disasters couldn't be more obvious.