Katrina's latest victims

Sometime this afternoon, Michael D. Brown jumped off the roof of the headquarters of the Federal Emergency Management Agency in Washington, D.C. There was no blood splatter for the CSI squad to investigate; no police cars roared up to the building at 500 C Street S.W. But he jumped, all right. For the good of the agency, the country and, oh yeah, the president, Brown took that figurative header three days after being publicly gutted by his boss, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, and resigned from the agency he directed, lately with disastrous results.

Michael Brown is one of the latest victims of Hurricane Katrina. At least his pain is done with. Brown goes away and does penance in the netherworld of anonymity, in our culture a fate worse than death. Then a year or two later, he'll re-emerge smarter, sharper, more personable and quicker on his feet. And he'll get a talk show and be set for life.

George Bush's pain is another matter entirely. The second term he coveted so dearly has barely started and he's facing the kind of challenges a three-term president would be hard-pressed to resolve. The first is the Real War on Terrorism, in Afghanistan, and its inevitable coupling with the War of Convenience, underway in Iraq. The second challenge, still-emerging in so many ways, is the Katrina War, the domestic struggle to rescue three states and perhaps one million human beings from the ravages of the worst natural disaster in American history -- and to do it with resources that, protestations by the Secretary of Defense notwithstanding, are stretched razorwire thin.

The third challenge is pursuit of the Image War, simply put, the battle to prove to the American people he can balance these two monstrously expensive undertakings, one of them unnecessary, and not lose credibility at home.

Malcolm Gladwell's marvelous book "The Tipping Point" explores what happens when some exigent factor ushers something -- an idea, an image, a product -- from relative anonymity to the wildfire status of a Phenomenon, for better or worse. Katrina was George Bush's tipping point: the precarious balance of foreign entanglements, global animosity, domestic racial and ethnic friction, and relative economic stasis was thrown over by a storm that blew in from the Gulf Coast and immediately assumed the center stage of his presidency for the next year. At least.

By all indications, Bush is badly losing the Image War: a succession of new polls show support for the president cratering across the board, including among Republicans. African Americans, the bloc that some say made the difference for Bush in the 2004 election -- with a turnout thought to have linked to traditional family values and support for the monogamous, heterosexual family structure -- have lately soured on Bush again, largely on his performance in the Katrina tragedy.

Sen. Barack Obama, on ABC's "This Week," found it "puzzling" that, given Bush's quick appearance at the scene of the Sept. 11 attacks in New York City, his initial on-scene response to the devastation in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast was a flyover view from Air Force One. That image of detachment, overlooking the carnage from the air-conditioned confines of the presidential jet, fails to reinforce the idea that he cared very much.

There's no doubt that the Katrina War and the Image War are intertwined in the short-term mind of the public. The shooting wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, have lately taken a back seat to domestic issues; it may be hard to strategize a foreign war with total concentration when you can't see over the water in your own backyard. Such is the focus on the Katrina War that Condoleezza Rice, the nation's top diplomat, spent time handing out bottled water to survivors in her native state of Alabama.

And it's the shooting wars that are likely to return to full view between now and October, with the forthcoming elections in Iraq.

It's been said that for presidents of the United States fortunate enough to get two terms in office that the first of those terms is about policy, the political praxis of the office; the second term is about legacy, the perception of the officeholder by the public and, by extension, history.

By this yardstick, George Bush is in deep shit. With so much of the capital of his first term exhausted by Iraq, international frictions and terroristic distractions real and conjured, Bush's first term of policy was a relative disaster, with Bush presiding over a country increasingly polarized, increasingly doubtful of the mission that defines this nation and its global standing.

And then came Katrina.

American Tsunami

It was the imperfect storm of the year, for sure, and maybe the decade: a collision of economic and sociological forces with a meteorological event almost apocalyptic in scale. As it approached the southeastern United States, and the achingly vulnerable Gulf Coast, you saw it in the infrared satellite photos: a white-hot pinwheel of raw energy streaming toward landfall, its motion so regular as to almost resemble breathing.

Katrina.



The storm first made itself felt a week or more before, killing eleven people in Florida as it perambulated around the Gulf of Mexico, seemingly gaining no momentum, destined to be another midlevel noisemaker with more bark than bite. Perhaps it was that complacency, or comfort, or the latent rise of the soul of a riverboat gambler that led many residents of the probable hot zone to stay put. Betsy was bad and they lived through it, they reasoned; Camille was bad, in some ways worse than Betsy, but they got through that too.

Or maybe it was the storied Southern sense of independence and fidelity to the land, so hard come by for many of its citizens. If it was worth dying for to acquire it, they figured, how can it not be worth dying for to hold it? Many did pull up stakes and leave, gassing up the SUVs, taking the advice of the weather professionals on the networks, the people who were calling Katrina a “catastrophic event” when it was more than a day from landfall. But others went into hunkerdown mode and stayed behind in Mississippi and Alabama.

And they stayed behind in New Orleans, black, thirty-per-cent-poor New Orleans. They lingered often with no choice, ore believing they had no choice, no options beyond the government check at the end of the month, no way out of town except in the pine box they’d already resigned themselves to. They hunkered down with no alternatives in the birthplace of jazz, a city technically seven feet under water on a dry day, and hoped like hell the levees would deliver them from evil again.

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Hurricane Katrina managed to combine the biblical force of the Asian tsunami disaster and the riveting human after-spectacle of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. For the sheer scope of the disaster, still unfolding at this writing and any writing for months to come; for the forces of chaos and rage unleashed shortly after the energies of the ocean were spent against the land; for the depth of the human suffering revealed; and for the bureaucratic thickets and farragos that have snarled even the most basic attempts to feed and water a sudden diaspora of human beings, Hurricane Katrina was America’s tsunami, as powerful, as wrenching and devastating in the longest terms to this country as the cataclysmic December 26th event was to southeast Asia.

In typical American fashion, the fingerpointing has already begun, with the agencies in charge, however nominally, being readied to take the blame. The Homeland Security Department, the agency previously charged with overseeing domestic security in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, has been ham-fistedly retrofitted to resolving a situation largely beyond the scope of its creation.

And FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency now under Homeland Security control, has come under intense scrutiny, with its director, Michael Brown, the former director of International Arabian Horse Association, a patronage appointee, a resume fabulist, a woeful incompetent ill-prepared for the still-evolving challenge at hand. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff more or less formally decapitated Brown at a Sept. 9 press conference, relieving him of overseeing the Katrina relief effort, leaving him if name only -- bet the ranch -- the director of FEMA.

Chertoff's General Patton-in-shirtsleeves act couldn't conceal the way things were coming undone, or appearing to. And administration protestations couldn't hide the rising edge of fear in the eyes of President Bush, the visible flopsweat on the brow of the commander-in-chief a day or two before, the day President Bush got a briefing from the soon-to-be-headless Mr. Brown and said, "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job," a Beltway valedictory if there ever was one.

For the increasingly ill-at-ease George Bush and his handlers, it’s altogether inescapable now and will be more so in the future: Whether they like it or not, the Bush administration has a new agenda, a new mission to parallel the military mission now under way halfway around the world. The drive to achieve democracy in Iraq will be – and must be – accompanied by an initiative to restore democracy in Louisiana.

This new mission will require much of the same expenditure of capital, material, manpower and energy as the war we’re fighting in Iraq. And like with the Iraq war, the stakes couldn’t be higher: the integrity of the country and its ability to function. Whether he wants to or not, George Bush is compelled to open a new front in the war on terrorism, a domestic front, a tweak of a global mission whose necessity on these shores right now isn’t offset at all by the terrorism’s climatological origins.

Think about it: Katrina ushered into America vast and impersonal death; untold billions of dollars in insured and uninsured property losses; billions in revenue from the Gulf Coast port infrastructure, now badly compromised; billions in oil revenue from the ten refineries that owned and managed rigs offshore until the hurricane; certainly tens of millions of dollars from vanished casino, gaming and leisure revenue from two of the three affected states; the unfathomable price of an environmental nightmare of human and chemical toxins, a "toxic gumbo" (thank you Aaron Neville) that will require billions of dollars to clean up; and a deep and uneradicated sense of confusion and dread among the region’s people.

Was the effect of Sept. 11 any less deeply felt as a defining American experience? Is the devastation of that storm any less powerful than that in an act of human terrorism? Since there is no difference between the depth of the two tragedies, the current situation calls for at least the same intensity of response for this domestic tragedy as that which the nation took to fighting a foreign war -- a war that didn’t have to be fought in the first place.

But the intensity of the response to Katrina from this administration is up for debate, and a very uncertain thing. The same intensity of response to the terrors of Hurricane Katrina as our response to the tinpot tyranny of Saddam Hussein would mean having to repurpose billions and billions of dollars from an international purpose to a domestic one. That purpose would be fighting the effects of Katrina -- effects no less catastrophic, to the Gulf Coast, than the effects of Sept. 11, 2001, four years ago today, were to the City of New York and, by logical extension, the United States of America.

By choice or by demand, this will be George Bush’s new gulf war, fought not in the Persian Gulf but in the Gulf of Mexico. The shock and awe for this conflict will come from nature, the original superpower. And there won’t be any MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banners flying for many long months to come.

Great(ly lowered) expectations

The outcome of the erstwhile Iraq phase of the war on terrorism is now a forgone conclusion. It is over, and – since so many defense officials and analysts insist on framing that war’s prosecution in the context of winning and losing – the United States is in the process of losing, if not having already lost.

The language of that defeat can be found in the Aug. 13 edition of The Washington Post, in a story by Robin Wright and Ellen Knickmeyer. Quoting and paraphrasing U.S. officials – some of them the same people who insisted that the United States was Winning that war – Wright and Knickmeyer document the now-prevailing view at the White House: a need to abandon the “unreality” of pre-war assessments, and the goals that emerged from those pre-war assessments.

“The United States no longer expects to see a model new democracy, a self-supporting oil industry or a society where the majority of people are free from serious security or economic challenges,” the Post reported, based on comments from U.S. officials.

That statement, that concession speech on deep background, undercuts the very rationale, the bedrock and foundation for every action taken by the United States in Iraq from the moment the first bomb hit the ground in March 2003. It calls into question the need for the loss of more than 1,850 American lives, and thousands upon thousands of Iraqi lives; it directly calls into question the expenditure of billions of dollars in American money.

It reveals just how big a bill of bogus goods the American people were sold by an administration that, like any good salesman, first sold that bill of goods to itself.

The disconnect, the discontinuity in thinking within the administration is obvious in two succeeding quotes in the Post story. One “senior official” gets it right: “What we expected to achieve was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground,” the official says. “We are in a process of . . . shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning.”

In the very next graph, though, are comments from President Bush, statements that indicate a pointless cognitive dissonance about the national misadventure in Iraq, and the persistence of a lack of the vision thing, which happens when you’re wearing blinders.

“Iraqis are taking control of their country, building a free nation that can govern itself, sustain itself and defend itself. And we’re helping Iraqis succeed,” Bush said in an Aug. 12 radio address.

Implicit in the statement is the idea that the ends may yet justify the means, that this hard lesson will pay dividends down the road. But this exercise in post-9/11 national character-building has come at too high a price in lives, in dollars and loss of global goodwill.

There will still be talk, less and less as time goes on, of the good the United States has done since the invasion: the water purification stations up and running, the soccer fields repainted, the hydroelectric plants put on line. But such things, and the arguments of those who justify the war on these capital-constructionist grounds, miss the point. This was never a War on Iraqi Infrastructure Neglect; it was always held up as the pre-eminent theater of a War on Terrorism. But the porosity of the administration’s arguments for fighting that war in Iraq is finally obvious to the administration itself.

The White House is discovering late in its martial stewardship of the Iraqi people something it should have come to grips with long ago: the idea that a Western-style democracy could be imposed on a former dictatorship is no more acceptable to the Iraqis than the idea of bringing back the dictatorship itself.

Much of this failure has to do with the avarice and blustery cunning of the Bush administration. George Bush’s relentless penchant for timetables, and the neocons’ take-no-prisoners style led to the insane series of deadlines imposed on Iraqi leaders. Officials involved in the changeover to Iraqi control told The Post that “[I]n the race to meet a sequence of fall deadlines, the process of forging national unity behind the constitution is largely being scrapped.”

This was the problem built-in to an attempt to abide by deadlines set by a military power with only the smallest foreign interest, but every domestic political interest, in the outcome. Any hope of welding the disparate factions of modern Iraq into a cohesive unified population goes out the window for the sake of domestic politics, and the train-station-timetable tendencies of an administration obsessed with those politics.

In all probability, this is likely to be a stealth defeat. There’ll be no bugging out of the zone, no frantic embassy evacuations, no Hueys veering near-vertically off the ground with refugees hanging from the struts. This defeat will be more orchestrated, happening by degrees, an incremental withdrawal less likely to jar the psyche of the American people, and less likely, at least in the short term, to reawaken the spectre of Vietnam.

This defeat will be well-laced between the inevitable breaking-news events; the administration’s already doing what it can to have a withdrawal well under way, and therefore off the front page, by the midterm elections in November 2006. But to anyone watching – certainly to even casual students of history, and to the relatives and friends of the 2,000 probable American fatalities in Iraq – what’s happening will be painfully obvious.

In his days as a lightning rod for the anti-war movement, testifying before a Senate subcommittee in 1971, future Massachusetts senator John Kerry famously posed a hypothetical question for the architects of the U.S.-led war in Vietnam. “How do you ask someone to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

Someone in Washington, probably one of those officials who can’t be quoted by name, must be asking the very same question right now.

Bolton from the blue

Yesterday, President Bush, exercising his constitutional prerogative, used his recess appointment powers to name John Bolton, conservative Presa Canario and vicious ideologue, to be the United States ambassador to the United Nations, to the howls of moderates and Democrats and the deep consternation of much of the international community Bolton will sit with in the General Assembly.

His first day on the job didn't have an auspicious start; people outside the U.N. booed him as he arrived for work. What's yet to be seen is how well Bolton can function under the cloud of his very appointment, and what propensity he has, after all the noise and outrage that attended his confirmation hearings, for seeking progress -- if not always consensus -- in the world body.

Bolton has long been known as something of an ideological attack dog, a street fighter with the personality of a shark going after chum. His appointment was a forgone conclusion, despite the howls of the people who opposed him, in Congress, the media and on the street. But until his appointment, the United States was faced with the embarrassing prospect of continuing to have an empty chair at the world forum -- as symbolic a snapshot of the U.S./international relations as one could ask for.

Bolton got the gig. And come on, we knew he would. But John Bolton will learn a relatively new game from a range of global players, countries and envoys and governments that will not dance the American tune. Right about now, John Bolton is a lot like the tough white guy in a foreign country in one of those Warner Bros. movies from the '40s. Strolling through the bazaar with a cigar clenched between his teeth, he thinks he knows where he's going, but it's not his turf. And he's surrounded by people for whom visitors are, for the most part, a distraction to the way they have done things in their countries for hundreds of years, sometimes hundreds of years longer than the country he's from.

John Bolton can't come into the United Nations like Indiana Jones. He's got too much to learn and too little time. And his classmates there at the General Assembly know it, all too well, that when global friends and rivals, or global friends and enemies sit side by side in a conference room, the size of the world collapses, the enormity of the philosophical differences is distilled. And suddenly, personality is everything.

'This ... is London'

What a difference a few days makes. Flush with pride as the host nation for the G8 summit, flush with a victory as the site for the 2012 Summer Olympic games, London awoke to horror on the morning of July 7. That day, three suicide bombers exploded themselves in subway trains in the London Underground, killing at least 52 people and injuring many more. The authorities are very much on the case and expect to soon have the identities of those involved, in no small part because of the relentless, almost Orwellian surveillance that is a fundamental part of living in London.

At first the authorities were adamnt that this not be characterized as a suicide bombing -- the very phrase conjures up scenarios of Baghdad and the West Bank, not Hyde Park and Piccadilly, and it's safe to say the British people would have preferred to maintain the distinction. But the stereotypically stiff British upper lip is suddenly forced to come to grips with fundamentalist-style terrorism in a way it hasn't had to deal with since the harrowing heyday of the IRA, assuming, as we must, that we haven't seen the last of such attacks.

In one day, with one event, the stakes are suddenly different. In a trice the notion of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism as an "over there" phenomenon has been soundly kicked to the kerb. In a moment the Muslims that walked the streets and worked the shops of London in relative peace and quiet became the Enemy. What happens now, what happens next will be a true test of British character. How will the authorities react? They're obligated to go into crackdown mode; how discerning will they be?

And hell, never mind the police -- how will the citizens react? Will the proper Anglo-Saxon burghers grab pitchforks and build tumbrels to roll down Piccadilly, screaming "Bring back Enoch Powell!"

As I said, a true test of British character. Many a Londoner walks the streets today remembering Britain's last big test, when a foreign power buzzbombed the city with more silent airborne ordnance in a day then terrorists have in the last ten years, With today's potential of the enemy within, rather than the World War II-era certainty of the enemy from outside, the storied British resolve -- the stiff upper lip from Ealing Studios' central casting department -- faces its greatest challenge since Hitler ran roughshod over Europe.

"This ... is London," Edward R. Murrow said back then from a perch somewhere in the beleagured city. And Britain rose to the occasion and steeled itself against the invader, and stood on its principles rather than its fears, and became an example to the world.

One longs for that Britain again. You hope that, short of ruling the waves, Britannia will at least rule its emotions.

Fit of Olympique

"LONDON," the man said, and you could hear the screams of joy and surprise around the world, or at least across the Channel. Just that fast, London had won the right to host the 2012 Olympic Summer Games, the only city to have earned the honor three times. It had come down to London, Moscow, Madrid, New York, Singapore ... and Paris, city of lights, jewel of Europe, thought by many to have a lock on the Games. Cherchez le presidente.

There's no separating politics from these events; every announcement of an Olympic Games site is shot through with international intrigues, to say nothing of the Games themselves, as near a perfect distillation of military and political scenarios as you could ask for. The contenders were formidable but fell by the wayside for a variety of reasons (or speculations). Moscow? Too hot in the summer, infrastructure issues, the ever-smoldering mess with the Chechens. Madrid would have been a nice choice, and a worthy response to the March 11 train bombings. Who knows?

Singapore presented its own issues. Oh, the trains run on time like you wouldn't believe, but there may have been a suspicion that the potential for some global incident might well be made worse in one of the most stringent cities in the world. When spitting or chewing gum are imprisonable offenses, there's a high risk of the most innocent of actions making its way into the evening news -- the newscasts of every country on earth.

And then there's New York. Now and forever, the greatest and most indelible city on the planet. But also, at the end of the day, a city with huge infrastructure issues, the need for stadiums where they ain't, and the political and budgetary squabbling and infighting that's a reflection of how things get done in New York, however long it takes. There may have been some lingering sentiment to go with New York, as a gesture supporting the city's economic rebound since 9/11. But only some of that sentiment, and ultimately not enough to carry the day. (Let the fingerpointing begin.)

No, the sense was it really came down to London or Paris, and both British Prime Minister Tony Blair and French President Jacques Chirac had been hustling hard to close the sale. For the most part the battle had been above board -- a few cheap shots here and there, but the kind of thing you'd expect from two countries with six hundred years of bad blood between them.

But then Chirac stepped up to the plate at the eleventh hour and offered an ill-timed faux pas. With a comment meant to be a jibe at the legendarily mundane British way of cooking, Chirac likened British food to gustatory indelicacies coming from Finland. The president of France took a shot at British food by way of Helsinki, a jibe that would have been otherwise unremarkable, if not for the toweringly inconvenient fact that Finnish judges were part of the site-selection process just days away.

When the votes were tallied, London won and Paris lost, and it's anyone's guess as to how the Finnish judges decided to go. But if it was a legitimate tossup between the two cities before Chirac opened his mouth ... well, something tipped the scales to the Brits. What it was is pure conjecture. Jacques Chirac may have a lot of time in which to engage in conjecture if the howls for his head gain any momentum. Opposition to Chirac has been moutning for some time, largely on the issue of the faltering French economy and the erosion of France's health benefits for citizens. The rightists -- most notably Jean Marie le Pen, the arch and ardent nationalism and anti-immigrant firebrand -- are circling for a kill.

How it all pans out for London remains to be seen. It's a city with its own challenges of infrastructure and culture; who knows who'll be running the U.K. by then? But London will serve. It looks great on postcards and you don't need a foreign language to get around. What's not to like?