← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Walter Yannis
Thread ID: 19938 | Posts: 9 | Started: 2005-09-02
2005-09-02 07:43 | User Profile
[URL=http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/02/opinion/02fri1.html?th&emc=th]New York Times[/URL] September 2, 2005 The Man-Made Disaster
The situation in New Orleans, which had seemed as bad as it could get, became considerably worse yesterday with reports of what seemed like a total breakdown of organized society. Americans who had been humbled by failures in Iraq saw that the authorities could not quickly cope with a natural disaster at home. People died for lack of water, medical care or timely rescues - particularly the old and the young - and victims were almost invariably poor and black. The city's police chief spoke of rapes, beatings and marauding mobs. The pictures were equally heartbreaking and maddening. Disaster planners were well aware that New Orleans could be flooded by the combined effects of a hurricane and broken levees, yet somehow the government was unable to immediately rise to the occasion.
Watching helplessly from afar, many citizens wondered whether rescue operations were hampered because almost one-third of the men and women of the Louisiana National Guard, and an even higher percentage of the Mississippi National Guard, were 7,000 miles away, fighting in Iraq. That's an even bigger loss than the raw numbers suggest because many of these part-time soldiers had to leave behind their full-time jobs in police and fire departments or their jobs as paramedics. Regardless of whether they wear public safety uniforms in civilian life, the guardsmen in Iraq are a crucial resource sorely missed during these early days, when hours have literally meant the difference between evacuation and inundation, between civic order and chaos, between life and death.
The gap is now belatedly being filled by units from other states, though without the local knowledge and training those Mississippi and Louisiana units could supply. The Pentagon is sending thousands of active-duty sailors and soldiers, including a fully staffed aircraft carrier, a hospital ship and some 3,000 Army troops for security and crowd control (even though federal law bars regular Army forces from domestic law enforcement, normally the province of the National Guard).
But it's already a very costly game of catch-up. The situation might have been considerably less dire if all of Louisiana's and Mississippi's National Guard had been mobilized before the storm so they could organize, enforce and aid in the evacuation of vulnerable low-lying areas. Plans should have been drawn up for doing so, with sufficient trained forces available to carry them out.
It's too late for that now. But the hard lessons of this week must be learned and incorporated into the nation's plans for future emergencies, whether these come in the form of natural disasters or terrorist attacks. Every state must now update its plans for quick emergency responses and must be assured by the Pentagon that it will be able to keep enough National Guard soldiers on hand to carry out these plans on very short notice.
Things would have been even worse if a comparable domestic disaster had struck last year, when an even greater percentage of National Guard units were deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some states had more than two-thirds of their Guard forces overseas. After several governors protested, the Pentagon agreed to adjust its force rotations so no state would be stripped of more than half of its guardsmen at any one time. That promise has been kept so far. But honoring it in the months ahead will be extremely difficult with active-duty forces so badly overstretched in Iraq, and prospects for any significant early withdrawals looking bleak.
One lasting lesson that has to be drawn from the Gulf Coast's misery is that from now on, the National Guard must be treated as America's most essential homeland security force, not as some kind of military piggy bank for the Pentagon to raid for long-term overseas missions. America clearly needs a larger active-duty Army. It just as clearly needs a homeland-based National Guard that's fully prepared and ready for any domestic emergency.
2005-09-02 08:39 | User Profile
I'm sure I'm not the only one wondering, with a shudder, what might result if Al-Quaeda chose this exact moment to detonate a dirty bomb somewhere on the East or West Coast as well.
You might get your worse-is-better wish sooner than you'd planned, Walter.
Black or not, it's heart-rending to watch these people in Nola dying from our living rooms, broiling alive, starving, dehydrated. Let's face it....even if there were no looting, the physical logistics of the situation (and the day-late-dollar-short 'preparedness' of all branches of govt) meant most of them had no other fate to realistically look forward to the minute Katrina made landfall, the pumps failed, and the levees broke.
As opposed to the Dome, the folks trapped at the Convention Center seem to me to be mostly law-abiding and reasonably docile...a lot of infirm old people, mothers with two or three babies on their laps, etc. They are, being well outside the Golden 72 hours now, going to die in all likelihood. As are quite a number of the whites left behind - tourists, medical staff, and an unknowable number of folks currently hidden from harm's way on roofs and in temporary safehouses throughout the downtown area. I believe that the officials know already that there are certain groups of people - the older folks, and the infirm, and those still stranded in deep water - earmarked to be sacrificed purely out of logistics. With time almost run out now, you have to make terrible choices. It's all well and good to send in the reinforcements and even the military proper, but at this point, the die is already cast for thousands... no matter how many troops arrive there tomorrow.
The violence you're going to see this weekend is going to be far different in nature than the looting violence of these past few days. It will be the last desperate thrashing of the doomed just before death takes them, and I for one will have to abstain from hooting at the Dumb Groids from this point on. Human decency dictates that you either look on in silence now, or look away altogether.
2005-09-02 10:42 | User Profile
[QUOTE]You might get your worse-is-better wish sooner than you'd planned, Walter.[/QUOTE] Yeah.
It ain't so nice when you actually get there, is it?
[QUOTE]Black or not, it's heart-rending to watch these people in Nola dying from our living rooms, broiling alive, starving, dehydrated. Let's face it....even if there were no looting, the physical logistics of the situation (and the day-late-dollar-short 'preparedness' of all branches of govt) meant most of them had no other fate to realistically look forward to the minute Katrina made landfall, the pumps failed, and the levees broke.[/QUOTE] I agree.
I wouldn't wish that sort of misery on my worst enemy, and I certainly don't wish any harm to these hapless negroes.
I take some cold comfort in the fact that this disaster calls the public's attention to:
There are probably other lessons here that anybody with thier head not crammed up their ass undertood ages ago, but we seem to have a lot of white people suffering from recto-cranial inversion.
Draw lessons, white folks. Make plans.
Worse is better.
Forward to Teheran.
2005-09-02 11:37 | User Profile
[QUOTE]It ain't so nice when you actually get there, is it?[/QUOTE]
Hell, I don't wanna get there [I]at all[/I]!
2005-09-02 12:13 | User Profile
[QUOTE]One lasting lesson that has to be drawn from the Gulf Coast's misery is that from now on, the National Guard must be treated as America's most essential homeland security force, not as some kind of military piggy bank for the Pentagon to raid for long-term overseas missions. America clearly needs a larger active-duty Army. It just as clearly needs a homeland-based National Guard that's fully prepared and ready for any domestic emergency.[/QUOTE]
Some outrageous but typically hypocritical chutzpah from the Times. Who
knows, maybe FoxNewsFairnBalanced will come out with an antiwar
statement after their local affiliate burns.
The article makes excellent points about all the local boys being out of town when their knowledge could have been most helpful. How many Georgia Guardsman will be injured or killed because the LA squad leader who could have guided them through the maze of downtown New Orleans is shooting journalists in Baghdad?
Still, I'll hold my cheers for the NYT until they bring us Judith Miller's head on a pike. This article is just too little too late.
2005-09-02 12:48 | User Profile
[QUOTE=il ragno] The violence you're going to see this weekend is going to be far different in nature than the looting violence of these past few days. It will be the last desperate thrashing of the doomed just before death takes them, and I for one will have to abstain from hooting at the Dumb Groids from this point on. Human decency dictates that you either look on in silence now, or look away altogether.[/QUOTE] I agree. I can no longer summon amusement or outrage at the behavior there; now all I feel is sadness. God help those poor people.
2005-09-02 14:54 | User Profile
Is it just me or are the Anarchists and Libertarians being awful quiet right about now. I'm sure there has to be a privatized, free market solution there somewhere. . . . Ah, yes Plantations.
I really have to swear off mainstream media (admittedly, I gave up TV back in the Nixon Administration--I'm talking print and internet from what we coyly call "mainstream" wink-wink sites)--it's downright scary how the drumbeat of "the gummint will help us... the gummint should help... the gummint has always helped us before... uh, gummint you there?" goes on.
It is hard to say that if people can't help themselves there's not much "government" of any kind can do for them, but I would say there is not much of a society there to step in and "save" with $10.6 billion in little green debt repayment promises.
BTW, I'm suspicious of the drumbeat. Looks the the uh, mainstream wink-wink uh, media has decided Bush has to go. To be honest, I'd be leary of the replacement gummint. I think there is a Liberal faction that has decided to make this a dry run for 2008. Talk about blood in the streets!
2005-09-02 15:35 | User Profile
[QUOTE=il ragno] The violence you're going to see this weekend is going to be far different in nature than the looting violence of these past few days. It will be the last desperate thrashing of the doomed just before death takes them, and I for one will have to abstain from hooting at the Dumb Groids from this point on. Human decency dictates that you either look on in silence now, or look away altogether.[/QUOTE] Cheer up, whitey will save them. Not that I care about groids -- the fewer of them the better.
2005-09-02 17:41 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Walter Yannis][url="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/02/opinion/02fri1.html?th&emc=th"]New York Times[/url] September 2, 2005 The Man-Made Disaster --snip== One lasting lesson that has to be drawn from the Gulf Coast's misery is that from now on, the National Guard must be treated as America's most essential homeland security force, not as some kind of military piggy bank for the Pentagon to raid for long-term overseas missions. America clearly needs a larger active-duty Army. It just as clearly needs a homeland-based National Guard that's fully prepared and ready for any domestic emergency.[/QUOTE]The purpose of a military is to fight and win wars. The imbedding of the reserves into all active duty core functions was a way to spread government money to the states, and to present to COngress an image of a 'leaner' force when no major wars were on. Pigeons come home to roost, after a thirty year effort to unify the reserves and the active components.
That said, I tend to agree with his comment, based on the known capacity for the criminal element to turn to looting as soon as a natural disaster, or even a little black out, hits.
AE