Imperfect Storm

In a way, it's fortunate that a holiday delayed our intended post(s) on Katrina, since it affords us a degree of objectivity that would not have been possible in the thick of the event and aftermath. Given the depths to which the "debate" (read: melee) stooped at various points, I'm kinda glad we weren't around to catch the worst of it. Not that we were able to escape it altogether; you could hear the barrel being scraped all the way from Hong Kong, as the usual suspects practically tore each other apart in the rush to press their axes to the grindstone.

Most recently, as confusion and hysteria gives way to cold, hard, rationality, journalists are beginning to realise that the quality of reporting during the crisis may not have met the highest standards of their profession.

So, to recap; in the course of this whole sorry debacle, we've seen and heard the following:

• Race-baiting. Probably the most notorious example was Kanye West's performance during an NBC telethon, which lurches from uncomfortable trainwreck to laugh-out-loud parody (I defy anyone not to chuckle at Mike Myer's exasperation when he hands back over to Kanye for the second time, only for him to clumsily blurt out that "George Bush doesn't care about black people!" Check out Chris Tucker as well; his eyes are bulging slightly further out of their sockets than normal). Comedy aside, his most serious accusations were that America is "set up" to help poor, black people as slowly as possible, in some ominous attempt to cull the lower classes, and that the military has been given permission to "go down and shoot us"; he makes the latter assertion immediately after blasting the administration for sending the military to Iraq instead of to New Orleans. It's never a pleasant sight when someone's memes start to contradict each other. One might observe that it's a little unfair to take a recording artist as a political spokesperson; I would counter that the thrust of Kanye's rant was rather ubiquitous among those who chose to play the race card (see entries below).

• An almost equally notorious instance of selective interpretation - apparently the source of some of Kanye's ire - concerning two near-identical photographs on Yahoo! News, one showing a black man carrying a bag full of groceries wading through the flooded streets, the other showing a white couple doing the same. The former's caption characterised the man as having "looted" the goods, the latter stated that the couple had "found" theirs. Despite the fact that the two photos came from totally different photographers and agencies (AP and AFP/Getty), the juxtaposition was simply too much for some to resist; a flurry of outraged blog entries, emails and telephone calls ensued. The revelation that the captions were one of the few examples of accurate reporting during Katrina - the man had been observed to enter a store and remove goods, whereas the couple were scooping floating items out of the floodwaters - did little to sway the more hardcore acolytes from their protest.

• Calls to withhold aid from Louisiana on the basis that it voted for Bush in 2004; apparently, the "red state maniacs" should only get aid if they subordinate themselves to the wishes of the political minority. This predictable, if chilling, attitude only lasted until someone noticed that the situation could be better exploited as a race/class issue; as a result, we had the pleasure of hearing the contention, by AA's Randi Rhodes and others, that Bush takes perverse pleasure in watching the poor, blacks, and Democrats die. Indeed. "Watch the poor die and jack off." It's right there in his daily schedule, after he holds his "orgies of carnal pleasure" with Cheney and Rumsfeld while reading the latest Iraq casualty lists. Jesus.

• Accusations that levees were blown up deliberately in a more direct example of the race/class culling Kanye mentioned earlier, according to Louis Farrakhan and his minions. I'm not sure if their particular brand of insanity is contagious, but you should probably sit a safe distance from the screen while viewing those clips. Watching the hapless spokesman being taken apart apart is pretty amusing, but when you've got ammunition like "The Mother Wheel", it does become something of a turkey shoot.

UPDATE: As so often happens in these cases, a series of inconvenient facts have emerged to disprove the above allegations even more comprehensively - this in spite of some victims' recent assertions that their ordeal was analogous to the Holocaust. A breakdown of Katrina fatalities by race and location shows that they were neither disproportionately black (52% in a 67% African-American city; 40% of the victims were white, in a 28% Caucasion population), nor disproportionately poor (42% in a city with a 39% poverty rate). The single most striking common feature among the dead was the fact that they were old (39% were older than 75, 64% were 61 or over). Will any of this kill the established "Katrina was genocide and/or class warfare" memes? Suffice it to say, I won't be holding my breath. (09/03/06)

• Daily Kos decide to just drop the pretense and offer a how-to guide on reaping maximum political advantage from the storm.

• Hurricane Katrina was due entirely to global warming, and would never have happened if Jimmy Carter had been re-elected in 1980. Seriously. This seems to be the product of a particular school of thought which teaches that, if it fits your pet topic, and holds a certain karmic irony, then it must be true. Johann Hari spends a few paragraphs bemoaning the difficulties of proving a relationship between global warming and various meteorological events, before eventually deciding that - surprise! - global warming is indeed the cause; he even manages to tie it into the class struggle and equate New Orleans looters with multinational oil companies.

  [Katrina] was a baby hurricane when she was first glanced off the coast of South Florida, blowing along at Category One. But then she hit the blistering fossil-fuel-warmed sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico and became supercharged to Category Three. Yet it’s hard to prove a definitive link... All we can do is point to a general pattern - and it’s some pattern. Check out, for example, at [sic] research by Professor Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute for [sic] Technology. He was a sceptic about the capacity of global warming to affect hurricanes when he began a detailed study of the data. He was shocked to discover that hurricanes have increased in length and strength by fifty percent since the mid-1970s - in line with rising sea temperatures. So take a good look at the pictures of New Orleans. Unless we change our petro-holic societies, they are pictures of our future.

  Of course, you need to ignore the fact that "the peak strength of the strongest hurricanes has not changed and the mean maximum intensity of all hurricanes has decreased" since the 1940s, according to the UN's WMO Environment Programme, and that the consensus among experts emphasises the natural cycle of ocean temperature (syndicated here):

  Because hurricanes form over warm ocean water, it is easy to assume that the recent rise in their number and ferocity is because of global warming. But that is not the case, scientists say. Instead, the severity of hurricane seasons changes with cycles of temperatures of several decades in the Atlantic Ocean. The recent onslaught "is very much natural," said William M. Gray, a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University who issues forecasts for the hurricane season.

  And let's examine what Hari's quoted expert, Dr. Kerry Emanuel, had to say on the matter:

  In an article this month in the journal Nature, Kerry A. Emanuel, a hurricane expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote that global warming might have already had some effect. The total power dissipated by tropical cyclones in the North Atlantic and North Pacific increased 70 to 80 percent in the last 30 years, he wrote. But even that seemingly large jump is not what has been pushing the hurricanes of the last two years, Dr. Emanuel said, adding, "What we see in the Atlantic is mostly the natural swing."

  Indeed, Dr. Emanuel's own FAQ directly addresses the role of global warming in the Katrina disaster:
  

  Q: I gather... that it would be absurd to attribute the Katrina disaster to global warming?
  A: Yes, it would be absurd.

  So, to summarise: Hari, in support of his assertion that global warming played a predominant role in the Katrina disaster, quotes an expert who explicitly states that such assertions are "absurd." Hmmm. Although higher oceanic surface temperatures due to global warming could indeed increase the intensity or duration of hurricanes if left unchecked, the degree of potential anthropogenic influence simply cannot be determined at the present time. Attributing specific individual events to global warming is even more outlandish; as the WMO notes:
  

  "it is not possible to link any particular weather or climate event definitively to global warming. The causal linkage, if any, between the frequency of extreme events and global warming only can be etermined through statistical analyses of long- term data, because the natural climate system can produce weather and climate events that often appear to be uncharacteristic of the recent climate."

  Or, as anyone with a cursory knowledge of elementary statistics can tell you, "correlation does not imply causation." To state with unwavering certainty that Katrina is the bastard child of global warming and Ronald Reagan is so obscenely unscientific that it defies categorisation as an opinion, straying dangerously close to ideological opportunism. To go one step further and blame it on Bush's withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol, thereby implying that three years of minimal CO2 reductions would have had any appreciable impact on this storm, is beyond irrational. I don't doubt that the intensified greenhouse effect could be influencing, or may begin to influence, such phenomena to some degree - but I'll wait until some more substantive and reliable data is available before drawing my conclusions, if it's all the same with you. And even then, I'll refrain from using it to settle twenty-five-year-old grudges, because that would make me seem like a pathologically embittered loser.

• Allegations of widespread rape and murder, including that of children. Many of these stories, shamefully, were spread to the press by Mayor Nagin ("hundreds of armed gang members killing and raping people... an almost animalistic state") and recently-departed Police SI Eddie Compass ("little babies getting raped"); their endorsement of these fanciful rumours lent them the credence necessary to become hard-news fact. Gross miscalculations such as FEMA's procurement of 50,000 body bags and Nagin's estimate of 10,000 deaths didn't help matters. Other evacuees told of having to step over so many bodies "we couldn't count"; FEMA doctors arrived at the Superdome expecting to find something in the region of 200 corpses. After all the dust and hyperbole had settled, what was the final count?

  Six. Four due to natural causes, one overdose, and a suicide. No murders, and certainly none of children or babies. At the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, four further bodies were retrieved, one of whom is believed to have been murdered. In the city as a whole, only four murders were recorded during Katrina and the subsequent week - business as usual, for an area which sees 200 murders a year. No evidence was found to support the claims of roaming rape-gangs, of children whose throats were slit, of corpses stacked in the excrement, of dozens of bodies stored in freezer units. When such rumours prompted the National Guard to send a 1,000-man force in full battle gear to secure the Convention Centre, they took control in less than 20 minutes without meeting any resistance. In fact, the only confirmed shooting during the whole ordeal occurred when a National Guardsman was attacked with a metal rod and accidentally shot himself in the leg. Compass maintained that the SWAT team in the Convention centre recovered 30 weapons from criminals by following the muzzle-flash of their guns, but the story was flatly denied by the team's commander. As one officer eloquently put it,

  "I think 99 percent of it is bullshit," said Sgt. 1st Class Jason Lachney, who played a key role in security and humanitarian work inside the Dome. "Don't get me wrong, bad things happened, but I didn't see any killing and raping and cutting of throats or anything... Ninety-nine percent of the people in the Dome were very well-behaved."

• The international press, fuelled by these apocryphal reports, took the chance to get a few kicks in as well. With barely-disguised glee, this piece gathers together the musings of various individuals from around the world, in an example of what would no doubt be called "man-in-the-street" reporting.

  "I am absolutely disgusted. After the tsunami our people, even the ones who lost everything, wanted to help the others who were suffering," said Sajeewa Chinthaka, 36, as he watched a cricket match in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

  "Not a single tourist caught in the tsunami was mugged. Now with all this happening in the U.S. we can easily see where the civilized part of the world's population is."

  Rather animated, for a cricket fan. What really shines through, though, is the sense of warm appreciation that Mr. Chinthaka feels for the nation who responded most quickly and most decisively to Sri Lanka in their hour of need, his sincere desire to express solidarity as they struggle with their own natural disaster, and his absolute refusal to capitalise on a moment of weakness to bust out that old feel-good favourite, "The Yanks Got Money, But They Ain't Got Our Class (Apart From the Child Sex Tourism Thing)."

  Meanwhile, Liberation, France's enlightened leftwing newspaper, reported on the catastrophe thusly:

  "A modern metropolis sinking in water and into anarchy - it is a really cruel spectacle for a champion of security like Bush... bin Laden, nice and dry in his hideaway, must be killing himself laughing."

  Analysts noted that stereotypes of France as a nation of smug, self-satisfied poseurs are trading at a yearly high.

  My absolute favourite bit, though, has got to be this:

  A female employee at a multinational firm in South Korea said it may have been no accident the U.S. was hit.
  

  "Maybe it was punishment for what it did to Iraq, which has a man-made disaster, not a natural disaster," said the woman, who did not want to be named as she has an American manager.
  

  "A lot of the people I work with think this way. We spoke about it just the other day," she said.

  Far be it from me to inquire as to why Reuters finds it newsworthy that Some Random Korean Woman has a penchant for crediting natural disasters with sentience and a sense of political activism. Exactly how common is this phenomenon, anyway? Do hailstones rain down on the roof of the White House, spelling out "No Flat Tax!" in morse? Do we need a new agency to track radical meteorological formations? It would appear that Reuters has succumbed to the attractive superstitions of the aforementioned "ironic-thus-true!" argument, unless it now regards resorting to sorcery as a plausible tactic in policy debates.

• Accusations that the National Guard were shooting refugees. Well, Kanye said it, so it must be true. As mentioned earlier, the only confirmed shooting was committed by an unfortunate - and no doubt highly embarrassed - National Guardsman, who unloaded a round into his own leg while being attacked with a metal pipe.

• The Free Market killed New Orleans. Ha! And you thought the Carter-Reagan thing was as batshit crazy as it'd get! Apparently, the fact that people who owned cars were told to use them to drive away from the oncoming storm is indicative of something. I'll simply point out that Louisiana's evacuation protocols specifically state that public transport would be provided for residents without other means of escape (13:5, 18:2a:2-3, 20:3a:5, 21:c4, 29), and then direct your attention to this photograph. Now, which of the following is a more likely contributor to the crisis: a local-level failure to implement established emergency procedures, or an ill-fitting analogy based on abstract economic concepts?

• In a variation of the above, Johann Hari and other contributors used the emergency as a springboard to launch into a diatribe against "a washed-up president and his bankrupt [small-government] philosophy", liberally spiced with personal insults about Bush being a big stupidhead (which, seriously, never get old).
  

  "Even when the hurricane was just 24 hours away, Bush did not deviate from his dogmas: the evacuation procedure was, in effect, privatised. The city's people were simply told over the radio to leave, with no government assistance. Nothing was done to help the 150,000 people too broke to leave on their own - it would, presumably, have been "morally corrupting."

  The irony of railing against devotion to dogma while using a natural disaster to argue abstract political theory is apparently lost on Hari; he also neglects to mention that the evacuation was ordered because Bush called State Governor Blanco to urge it. Many people, in their subconscious equation of Bush with Nero, forget that he is not an all-powerful Emperor; he does not have the authority to order the evacuation of a city without declaring nationwide martial law, and cannot forcibly deploy troops to an area without a request from the state government. Indeed, Bush asked that Blanco cede authority to his administration on more than one occasion, and was rebuffed. On that note, it also seems to escape Mr. Hari that the US possesses a federalised government structure, with state and local decisions being delegated to successively low-level administrations. The reason for this is simple; the United States is a very large place, and it is not feasible for Washington to maintain, co-ordinate and micromanage evacuation plans for every community in its nation of three hundred million. Hari appears to be applying norms from the British government's centralised approach to disaster management, which simply do not scale to a landmass roughly 40 times its size. Local governments exist precisely because their members are familiar with the areas they govern; they know the topology, they know the demographics, they know the transport routes, and are thus in the best possible position to devise and implement emergency procedures. Finally, and despite Hari's insistence that the evacuation was "privatised", the plans did call for public transport to be provided for anyone without the means to escape; these procedures were simply not executed on the ground. And that, much as he may wish otherwise, was Nagin's responsibility. In the words of the Mayor himself:

  [Nagin] said the Superdome would be open as a shelter of last resort, but essentially he told tourists stranded in the Big Easy that they were out of luck. "The only thing I can say to them is I hope they have a hotel room, and it's a least on the third floor and up. Unfortunately, unless they can rent a car to get out of town, which I doubt they can at this point, they're probably in the position of riding the storm out."

  There's the take-charge attitude needed at a time like this! As the emergency plans make clear, the shelters of last resort come into play only after the public evacuation has been completed. Let me state once again, and very clearly: the reason why so many people were trapped in New Orleans in the first place was that Nagin was reluctant to call for a full evacuation, fearing that hotels and other businesses would sue, and then neglected to follow the provisions of the city's evacuation protocols when the order was finally given. Not only that, but he turned down Amtrak's offer of a free train with room for several hundred passengers. Was that Bush's doing as well? Even when Bush, at Nagin's request, offered Blanco a number of options - including more unified federal control - in an attempt to get the evacuation moving, Blanco delayed and equivocated, apparently fearing a loss of state-level authority. Is that Bush's fault, too? Hari's article is little more than yet another helping of Bush-as-Arbitrary-Evil in service of an ideological tract, the kind of superficial polemic that has become so infuriatingly common in recent years.

• In the same article, Hari enunciates another familiar theme; Bush slashed funding for the New Orleans Army Corps of Engineers to pay for tax cuts, thereby dooming the city.

  This can be seen in the long, ominous run-up to Katrina, where Bush ignored warnings about public safety in New Orleans in favour of his ideological script: cut, cut, cut the public sphere. Elected representatives for Louisiana had been scrambling for extra cash for New Orleans' flood defences for years, citing dozens of reports that warned a hurricane hitting New Orleans was one of the top three threats to America's security. But they were arguing for a Big Government project with no immediate corporate beneficiaries - the very antithesis of the Bush philosophy. So instead of receiving extra cash, the Army Corps of Engineers' budget for levee construction in New Orleans received a 44 per cent cut in its funding.

  Now, Bush did cut funding to the Lake Pontchartrain project over the first five years of his presidency, which is a legitimate point of policy debate (although it's quite remarkable how it wasn't even a blip on these commentators' radars before now). But please, don't insult our collective intelligence by trying to cast it as some grand ideological statement, or by implying that it contributed in any way to the damage caused by Katrina. Firstly, let's recall that the universe does actually predate George Bush's presidency; despite Hari's desire to trim the "long, ominous run-up to Katrina" at January 20th 2001, it began long before Bush took office. The previous administration exhibited no greater urgency in tackling the problem despite similar "warnings about public safety", and - contrary to Hari's assertions of public-sphere atrophy - Bush's budget allocations to the ACE nationwide have actually been considerably higher than Clinton's during his last five years (p79-80). Secondly, the Lake Pontchartrain project is only one of several flood control schemes under development in New Orleans; Bush's cuts were motivated in part by the fact that large sections of the Pontchartrain upgrade have already been completed (including, incidentally, the section breached by Katrina, which should be enough to kill this argument on its own). Bush's overall spending on New Orleans flood control between 2001 and 2005 was - in rather stark constrast to Hari's contentions - more than double Clinton's from 1996 to 2000 ($285m vs $127m), as borne out by the far more generous funding afforded to other flood-prevention projects in the city (p4, p3). Under Bush, Louisiana was the most heavily-bankrolled Army Corps district in the nation; the state government, unfortunately, was not always astute in its choice of how best to employ this money. Moreoever, the Corps themselves acknowledge that even unlimited funding from Bush could not have stopped Katrina:

  [Flood wall manager Al] Naomi was at a loss when asked how this engineering disaster could have been prevented. "You see, there was not sufficient money or time to do anything about this," Naomi says. "If someone had said, 'O.K. here is a billion dollars, stop this failure from happening for a Category 4,' it couldn’t have been done in time. I’d have had to start 20 years ago to where I feel today I would’ve been safe from a Category 4 storm like Katrina."Sure it should have been done 20 years ago, but what can we do about that? You have to recognize before we had Category 3 protection we didn’t have anything."

  The original New Orleans levee system was constructed in 1965. By the time Bush arrived on the scene, it was already fifteen years too late to upgrade them before Katrina hit. Unless you're going to criticise him for not being able to effect legislation retrotemporaneously, then, the blame for failure to bolster the levees lies with his predecessors, in increasing order of culpability; it was simply a matter of successive governments playing the odds that a Category 4-5 hurricane wouldn't score a direct hit on New Orleans (which didn't even happen this time). Bush deserves criticism for adopting the same shortsighted policies as his presidential forebears, but to assert a material connection between the budget "cuts" and this particular disaster is, put simply, nonsense.

• The Louisiana Guard and all its equipment was in Iraq. If Bush hadn't invaded, New Orleans would have been saved. Christopher Hitchens takes apart this argument on philosophical grounds here, while the practicalities are tackled here and here.

• As with 9/11, the religious crazies oozed out of the woodwork to claim that God visited Katrina on the people of New Orleans for their sins and iniquities, yea, in His mercy. Repent America saw Providence in the fact that NO had been obliterated mere days before "Southern Decadence", an "annual homosexual celebration attracting tens of thousands of people to the French Quarters section of New Orleans."

  "Although the loss of lives is deeply saddening, this act of God destroyed a wicked city," stated Repent America director Michael Marcavage. "From 'Girls Gone Wild' to 'Southern Decadence,' New Orleans was a city that had its doors wide open to the public celebration of sin. From the devastation may a city full of righteousness emerge," he continued... "We must help and pray for those ravaged by this disaster, but let us not forget that the citizens of New Orleans tolerated and welcomed the wickedness in their city for so long. May this act of God cause us all to think about what we tolerate in our city limits, and bring us trembling before the throne of Almighty God," Marcavage concluded.

  Unwisely, Repent links to Southern Decadence's website on the same page, thereby giving the queers a chance to recruit some of their more weak-willed members. Meanwhile, "conservative intellectual" Pastor J. Grant Swank adds his dulcit voice to the chorus:

  "Southern Decadence" was set for New Orleans soon. It was to be a yearly hoopla celebrating practicing homosexuality as a legitimate, giddy lifestyle. Thousands upon thousands were going to crawl all over New Orleans "to celebrate their sexuality,"... Decent citizens would cover their eyes to play hide-and-seek against the all-inclusive wickedness. Little children would be taken on hopefully safe excursions in order to escape the blatant evil parading their avenues... divine judgment has come upon a metropolis that was bent on making its environs open to hell’s demons... How very interesting that New Orleans, extending the welcome mat to sodomites, is now in need of prayer from the very God the perverts disdain.

  Columbia Christians for Life eschew the small-time vagaries of the anti-gay lobby, and instead go for the abortion jugular:

  Satellite picture of Hurricane Katrina at NOAA.com looks like a 6-week unborn human child as it comes ashore the Gulf Coast... The image of the hurricane above with its eye already ashore at 12:32 PM Monday, August 29 looks like a fetus facing to the left (west) in the womb, in the early weeks of gestation (approx. 6 weeks)... this hurricane looks like an unborn human child... Louisiana has 10 child-murder-by-abortion centers - FIVE are in New Orleans.

  Even our old buddy Fred Phelps gets in on the action:

  New Orleans, symbol of America, seen for what it is: a putrid, toxic, stinking cesspool of fag fecal matter.

  Say what you will about old Fred (and we have), but you can't deny his flair for gratuitous verbal imagery.

• From further afield, a Minister of the Kuwaiti Government opines that Katrina is one of Allah's loyal jihadists. Of particular note is the following paragraph, a deliciously bitter core of sarcasm in a piece that's positively shuddering with Schadenfreude:

  "But I began to ask myself: doesn't this country [the U.S.] claim to aspire to establish justice, freedom, and equality amongst the people? Isn't this country claiming that everything it did in Afghanistan and Iraq was for truth and justice? How can it be that these American claims are untrue, when we see how good prevails in the streets of Afghanistan, and how it became an oasis of security with America's entrance there? How can these American claims in the matter of Iraq be untrue, when we see that Iraq has become the most tranquil and secure country in the world? But how strange it is that after all the tremendous American achievements for the sake of humanity, these mighty winds come and evilly rip [America's] cities to shreds? Have the storms have joined the Al-Qaeda terrorist organization?"

  Aside from the Medieval notion of a natural phenomenon acting as an emissary of God, I'd point out that - if we're taking all events to be dictated by the will of Allah - then either Kuwait deserved to be invaded and pillaged by Saddam Hussein, or else America and the Coalition were acting as Allah's righteous warriors in evicting him. Thus, this Minister should be either praising America for carrying out Allah's wishes, or else cursing them for interfering in his design and campaigning for an immediate return of the Iraqi occupation (hmmm... maybe that's why he's so pissed?) Ah well, I suppose you can't expect logical consistency from a zealot.

• And my favourite, the coup-de-grace: reports that the refugees had resorted to cannibalism. Ah, cannibalism. The one vice that you don't hear nearly enough of these days.

All in all, a rather sorry state of affairs. In all the white noise of Katrina coverage, I came across only a handful of articles offering something beyond the standard media hyperventilation. Winds of Change, for instance, has an excellent piece which discusses the failures at each level of government, provides an insider's view of the political and law-enforcement culture in New Orleans, and includes a closer look at Ray Nagin (apparently a decent, upstanding public servant who was simply overwhelmed by the magnitude of what he faced). Something that particularly caught my attention was this quote, from Human Rights Watch:

As astutely noted by police abuse expert Prof. James Fyfe, some cities' police departments have reputations for being brutal, like Los Angeles, or corrupt, like New York, and still others are considered incompetent. New Orleans has accomplished the rare feat of leading nationally in all categories.

Which might go some way towards explaining why at least 249 officers went AWOL in the aftermath of the storm, with some going so far as to join the criminal element. Meanwhile, the Washington Post has an extensive article on the buildup to the disaster from the perspective of Jefferson Parish Emergency Manager Walter Maestri, as well as some interesting polls regarding the evacuees. And of course, Wikipedia harnesses the power of ten thousand nerds to produce an exhaustive timeline of the crisis.

In terms of identifying culpability, Charles Krauthammer's analysis provides a succinct but accurate overview:

1. The mayor of New Orleans. He knows the city. He knows the danger. He knows that during Hurricane Georges in 1998, the use of the Superdome was a disaster and fully two-thirds of the residents never got out of the city. Nothing was done. He declared a mandatory evacuation only 24 hours before Hurricane Katrina hit. He did not even declare a voluntary evacuation until the day before that, at 5 p.m. At that time, he explained that he needed to study his legal authority to call a mandatory evacuation and was hesitating to do so lest the city be sued by hotels and other businesses.

2. The Louisiana governor. It's her job to call up the National Guard and get it to where it has to go. Where the Guard was in the first few days is a mystery. Indeed, she issued an authorization for the National Guard to commandeer school buses to evacuate people on Wednesday afternoon -- more than two days after the hurricane hit and after much of the fleet had already drowned in its parking lots.

3. The head of FEMA. Late, slow and in way over his head. On Thursday he says on national television that he didn't even know there were people in the Convention Center, when anybody watching television could see them there destitute and desperate. Maybe in his vast bureaucracy he can assign three 20-year-olds to watch cable news and give him updates every hour on what in hell is going on.

Indeed. Brown's lack of qualification, incompetence and general blundering have been well-documented throughout, and it's a relief that he was forced to resign; one need only contrast his performance against that of General Honore to see how far short of the mark Brown fell. Similarly, the innumerable failings of the agency itself should compel substantial internal reform.

The most galling aspect of all this is that FEMA has been here before. Established in 1979 as a rapid-response unit geared towards handling nuclear attacks, its inability to shift focus as the nuclear threat subsided quickly earned it a reputation as one of the government's poorest-performing agencies; one Senator referred to it as "the sorriest bunch of bureaucratic jackasses I've ever known." As Hurricane Hugo approached Puerto Rico in 1990, aid was withheld because the Governor's request form had been incorrectly filled out. After its botched efforts in the Loma Prieta earthquake, Congressman Norman Mineta stated that FEMA "could screw up a two-car parade." Its response to Hurricane Andrew was so disastrous - the agency's passive policy of providing aid only upon request meant that the federal government remained largely unaware of the devastation, until Bush Sr. appointed a special task force under Andrew Card to survey the region and pressure the state government into accepting assistance - that Congress considered dissolving it once and for all. Exacerbating these problems was the fact that FEMA was a "political dumping ground", where most positions were filled by contributors or friends possessing little relevant experience. Congress had rightfully called for the agency to be brought more into line with other federal organisations, with the highest positions appointed by the President and the remainder staffed by career civil servants.

The final report on FEMA and the need for reform coincided with Bill Clinton's election as President; he responded by appointing James Lee Witt, who had headed Clinton's Office of Emergency Services in Arkansas, as the agency's new director. An experienced crisis manager, Witt immediately began staffing FEMA with professionals, clearing out the old guard and moving the agency away from its nuclear-centric orientation. In his first two years, internal regulations were reduced by 12%; by 1995, they were down 50%. The result? FEMA gained newfound respect as a model federal agency, handling events such as the Midwestern Floods of 1993 and the Oklahoma Bombing in 1995 with efficiency and consummate professionalism. Even Clinton's political opponents applauded his role in turning the agency around; Oklahoma Republican Daniel Inhofe noted that "I haven't spent a lot of time complimenting the President on his appointments, but I sure did on this one."

4. The president. Late, slow and simply out of tune with the urgency and magnitude of the disaster. The second he heard that the levees had been breached in New Orleans, he should have canceled his schedule and addressed the country on national television to mobilize it both emotionally and physically to assist in the disaster. His flyover on the way to Washington was the worst possible symbolism. And his Friday visit was so tone-deaf and politically disastrous that he had to fly back three days later.

Bush's main failings concerned his reluctance to insist upon more direct federal involvement, and his inability to negotiate the administrative end of the relief effort. Constrained by legalities regarding state autonomy, Bush nonetheless exhibited too great a willingness to defer to Blanco, and too little resolve to convince her to accede. The provisions of the Stafford Act which empowered FEMA also gave Bush and his subordinates a certain leeway to pursue their own strategies; to use a colloquialism, the situation simply needed someone to grab it by the balls, as Andrew Card had done in 1990:

FEMA's enabling legislation, the Stafford Act, provided FEMA officials with powers that the bureaucrats didn't exercise. "We found that without state requests, FEMA could assess the catastrophic area, assess what assistance the state needed, start mobilizing that relief, present its recommendations to the governor, and, if necessary--as Andrew Card did--get in the governor's face to force the issue of accepting federal help. Before Hurricane Andrew, FEMA officials took almost none of these steps. Consequently, when a disaster occurred, FEMA's relief efforts were inevitably too little, too late."

Furthermore, Bush's policies of positioning FEMA as a standalone agency within the larger Department of Homeland Security and of altering its brief to concentrate on terrorism - while not a return to its limp pre-1993 stature - have clearly not had the desired effect, hindering its performance as a speedy, streamlined unit. More seriously, he has re-introduced the culture of appointment-by-connection, the stigma of which will be perhaps the most long-lasting political consequence of this entire affair; that "heck of a job" comment will haunt him for quite some time to come.

When presented with an inefficient, philosophically-confused agency with a track record of underperfomance, Congress made a number of astute suggestions and Clinton implemented them near-flawlessly. History has already repeated itself in bringing these problems to the fore; it is now incumbent upon Bush to ensure that the solution follows suit. As we continue to survey the changes wrought by Katrina upon the geographical and political landscapes, it is instructive to recall Bush's words during his first Presidential debate with Al Gore in 2000:

You know, as governor, one of the things you have to deal with is catastrophe. I can remember the fires that swept Parker County, Texas. I remember the floods that swept our state. I remember going down to Del Rio, Texas. I have to pay the administration a compliment. James Lee Witt of FEMA has done a really good job of working with governors during times of crisis. But that's the time when you're tested not only -- it's the time to test your metal, a time to test your heart when you see people whose lives have been turned upside down. It broke my heart to go to the flood scene in Del Rio where a fellow and his family got completely uprooted. The only thing I knew was to got aid as quickly as possible with state and federal help, and to put my arms around the man and his family and cry with them. That's what governors do. They are often on the front line of catastrophic situations.

Indeed.