Fiddling while New Orleans drowned

Knight Ridder's people again show they know how to slice to the core of a problem:

Two days after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, President Bush went on national television to announce a massive federal rescue and relief effort.

But orders to move didn't reach key active military units for another three days.

Once they received them, it took just eight hours for 3,600 troops from the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, N.C., to be on the ground in Louisiana and Mississippi with vital search-and-rescue helicopters. Another 2,500 soon followed from the 1st Cavalry Division at Fort Hood, Texas.

Folks, this isn't about puzzling out some sort of "abstraction" of failure. It's right there in front of us. One reason that I'm not interested in changing the discussion to Karl Rove's reconstruction project is that we still haven't made clear enough that these people don't know how to do even emergency management 101. Just like the post-9/11 erosion of civil liberties, however, Bush blames it on a lack of centralized authority, rather than an incompetent exercise of existing authority.

Indeed, the new National Response Plan, the nation's blueprint for responding to disasters that was unveiled with much fanfare in January by Chertoff's predecessor, Tom Ridge, includes a section on responding to catastrophic events.

More power doesn't produce better use of it. Most likely just the opposite.

"They're trying to say that greater federal authority would have made a difference," said George Haddow, a former FEMA deputy chief of staff and the co-author of a textbook on emergency management. "The reality is that the feds are the ones that screwed up in the first place. It's not about authority. It's about leadership. ... They've got all the authority already."

(Via Laura Rozen and Kevin Drum)