It's complicated
Now, of course, comes the rearguard action against the conventional wisdom. Here is an interesting John Tierney column suggesting that even Sen. Mary "Are you of the Body" Landrieu is not without sin. And here is a good Washington Post story. Excerpt (emphasis mine):
"Louisiana's politicians have requested much more money for New Orleans hurricane protection than the Bush administration has proposed or Congress has provided. In the last budget bill, Louisiana's delegation requested $27.1 million for shoring up levees around Lake Pontchartrain, the full amount the Corps had declared as its 'project capability.' Bush suggested $3.9 million, and Congress agreed to spend $5.7 million.Sometimes when I highlight things like this, or generally suggest things are complicated and different than conventional wisdom suggests, someone I'm related to will ask "why are you defending that asshole?" I'm not defending anyone, but just taken aback by the simplistic reductionism of the conventional wisdom.
"Administration officials also dramatically scaled back a long-term project to restore Louisiana's disappearing coastal marshes, which once provided a measure of natural hurricane protection for New Orleans. They ordered the Corps to stop work on a $14 billion plan, and devise a $2 billion plan instead.
"But overall, the Bush administration's funding requests for the key New Orleans flood-control projects for the past five years were slightly higher than the Clinton administration's for its past five years. Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, the chief of the Corps, has said that in any event, more money would not have prevented the drowning of the city, since its levees were designed to protect against a Category 3 storm, and the levees that failed were already completed projects. Strock has also said that the marsh-restoration project would not have done much to diminish Katrina's storm surge, which passed east of the coastal wetlands."
That said, I kind of wish I hadn't pulled my punches in the "Super Mike Brown" post. When I sourced Brown's photo from the FEMA website, I had been surprised by his thin qualifications for the job and almost mentioned that in the post (which would have been about the earliest post-Katrina attention paid to Brown's background). It did seem odd to find the general counsel of FEMA elevated to the director's job. You would not expect to see the general counsel of the Fed replacing Alan Greenspan.
Another missed opportunity to set the curve on Brown came back shortly after the levee broke, when the lead New York Times story quoted him as saying something like "I don't want people to think that New Orleans is filling up like a bathtub--that isn't happening." At the time that comment jumped out at me as likely counterfactual, but I didn't take the trouble to write about it. I wish I had. Nevertheless, I'm still not convinced that the first days of this unprecedented natural disaster would have played out materially differently under James Lee Witt.
The point is that this stuff is complicated and I'm far more likely to spend time pointing out where the conventional wisdom is deficient than to spend time piling on about how horribly the humans all performed in the natural disaster.
posted at 4:10 PM
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