Two Lessons
From Katrina

In this time of seeking to place the blame for the disaster in New Orleans on some person or party, it may be useful to review the real nature of the failures in that tragedy and to draw some lessons from them.

Yes, the response of the emergency and security services was totally inadequate. Yes, the scenes of dead bodies floating in the streets and of looters ransacking stores were a national disgrace. And yes, the racial characteristics of those who were left behind and who have suffered the most are shocking to our national conscience. But as much as each of these has exposed real weaknesses in our preparedness, they are not the real failures exposed by Katrina.

The real failures are a systemic one, the inattention to good governance, and a conceptual one, our limited conception of national security.

The suffering and loss of property that so many people in New Orleans have experienced were not caused, as many have suggested, by the fact that New Orleans sits at the bottom of a sunken bathtub next to an ocean that wants to overflow the tub’s sides and drown it. Many parts of the world are similarly situated, Holland being perhaps the best known example. As long as there are strong reasons for such places to be inhabited, as there are for New Orleans, the issue is not to avoid the risk but to manage it.

No, the primary cause of the failure was not nature, but the failure of government to build adequate levees and pumping stations. If the levees had not failed, none of the other disasters would have occurred. So why were the levees not adequate? The answer is our failure to promote good governance.

Instead of focusing on the basic and long-term priorities of our nation, we citizens tend to permit partisan bickering, pork-barrel politics, bureaucratic in-fighting, and a desire for short-term gains, all to trump the common good.

Government agencies were not unaware of the danger, only unwilling to admit its urgency. There was no political disagreement between Republicans and Democrats over the requests of the Army Corps of Engineers to fund higher levees, only other more politically desirable projects. There was no lack of money available, only a preference to fund multi-million dollar bridges to nowhere in Alaska and pet civic and cultural projects here in Vermont.

The first lessons to be learned from Katrina, therefore, are the need to engage in a serious re-examination of the roles and responsibilities of each level of government within our federal system for our protection and to insist that our elected representatives, both executive and legislative, fulfill those roles. These lessons are not just for New Orleans and Louisiana, I hasten to add, but are important for the country at large.

Just think of the threats posed by nuclear power plants, such as Vermont Yankee, and by the easy transmission of deadly strains of influenza coming out of Asia, for example, neither of which is going away.

The second failure in New Orleans has to do with our conception of national security. Traditionally, we have thought of national security in terms of protecting ourselves from various external threats. In the past it was "the evil empire" of the Soviet Union, or more recently "the axis of evil" of North Korea, Iran, and Iraq. Now it is Al Qaeda.

Our preferred response to these threats has been primarily military: more money for the defense and intelligence services, more police at airports and beefed-up security patrols at our borders, and even a war or two. While there are indeed still many bad guys out there from whom we need to be protected, what we have short-changed, if not completely ignored, are the internal threats to our nation’s security.

If Katrina damaged our national security in any fundamental way, it did so not by causing the price of oil to skyrocket or by exposing us to the infiltration of terrorists but by diminishing the image of America abroad. One of our nation’s greatest strengths in fighting those who would oppose us has for decades been the perception around the world that our system of government, economics, and civil society is better than the alternatives. Katrina displayed to the world that this picture has some smudges on it.

The images of all those people who were trapped in New Orleans, primarily because of their economic condition, has undermined the claim that all Americans are better off under our socio-economic system than are many of those living under other systems in other parts of the world.

The fact that most of those left behind in New Orleans also happened to be non-white was not lost on the minds of people living in Africa, Asia, and Latin America who watch the plight of their countrymen and ethnic brothers and sisters on CNN.

In the contest for friends and allies, public opinion matters. The U.S. is still perceived to be a great country, and the outpouring of concern for the victims of Katrina from towns and cities across the land amply demonstrates that the spirit of community has not been lost here.

But if the benefits and opportunities of our system are not seen as being made available to all, then the value of that system is called into question.

America may not have to be loved in the world for us to prosper, but our system of democracy must be perceived as providing security to the weakest among us and opportunity for advancement to those who seek it. The need to pay more attention to the human aspects of our national security framework, therefore, is the second lesson of Katrina.

Paul Kendall

Braintree