4 year September 11 anniversary offers lessons for hurricane Katrina response
September 11 brought the United States together, at least for a time. Four years on, Hurricane Katrina has exposed its divisions, writes Michael Gawenda. But at least the country is finally talking about its real problems race and poverty.
On the fourth anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, there is great sadness and pessimism in America.
Images of death, suffering, abandonment and lawlessness abound. The unanswered cries for help and deliverance from the victims of hurricane Katrina are replayed over and over again on television screens just as the images of the aircraft smashing into the twin towers in New York were endlessly replayed. The sight of armed gangs looting shops and department stores, shooting at rescuers and police and even at those trying to flee the catastrophe is chilling and familiar, the gun having long been a staple of the imaginings of American popular culture.
Some in this most religious of Western nations have blamed hurricane Katrina and its terrible aftermath on a vengeful God a group calling itself Columbia Christians for Life arguing that the destruction of New Orleans was designed to…
rid the city of its five abortion clinics. This is an easy slur, suggesting that the conservative Christian fundamentalist movement, the base of the Bush-led Republican Party, is a throwback to pre-Enlightenment times. But the fact is that in the aftermath of September 11, major figures in the religious right saw God’s hand at work. Because hurricane Katrina came within days of the fourth anniversary of the terrorist attacks, there have been comparisons between that September morning and the carnage wrought by the hurricane.
Such comparisons in the end are not illuminating, except that it seems America remains as unprepared for a major disaster or catastrophic terrorist attack as it was four years ago.
But what is striking is that if September 11, at least for a brief time, brought America together and united much of the world in sympathy for the country, hurricane Katrina has starkly illustrated the bitter divide in American politics and American society.
In the main, the dead, the suffering, the displaced, the abandoned and the shooters and looters are black and poor. They are the descendants of slaves excluded by the original framers of the American Constitution from their dream of a republic in which all men were created equal and had the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
For the first time in a long time, the brutal and shaming facts of poverty and race in America are being discussed. The fact that in Washington, one of the nation’s most segregated cities, the infant mortality rate is twice as high as in Beijing. The fact that the US ranks 43rd in the world in infant mortality. The fact that 29 per cent of children are not covered by health insurance and that the US sits 84th in the world for measles immunization.
Katrina has also put in sharp focus the shortcomings of the Bush presidency its divisiveness, its lack of domestic vision beyond a commitment to small government (largely unfulfilled) and conservative social values.
It has once again illustrated the hopelessly inept nature of the Democrats, led in Congress by politicians who lack vision and political smarts. Most Americans couldn’t name the Democrat leaders in the Senate and the House of Representatives.
White House officials have spent their time doing what they often do best: plotting a political strategy to shift responsibility for the tardiness of the response to hurricane Katrina to their political opponents, in this case the Democrat Governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Blanco.
Even some leading conservatives have been alarmed by the Administration’s tactics and by its inability to respond quickly and decisively to this emergency. “He is a strong President but he has never really focused on the importance of good execution,” says Bill Kristol, a leading neo-conservative commentator. “I think that is true in many parts of his presidency.”
The terrorist attacks four years ago transformed the presidency of George Bush. He became President in 2000 having garnered a minority of the national vote, installed in the job by a 5-4 decision of the Supreme Court, which ruled against a recount of votes in Florida.
He came to office promising “compassionate conservatism”, small government and a modest foreign policy. He was regarded as an illegitimate president by a large minority of Americans.
Despite his initially shaky and slightly bewildered response to the September 11 attacks, Bush managed to rally America, quickly positioning himself as a President who had the determination needed to fight the war on terror and protect Americans from attack.
In the week after the attacks, polls showed that more than 90 per cent of Americans approved of the way Bush was handling the terrorist threat, which means the majority of those who had excoriated him after the 2000 election now supported him. At times of crisis, Americans need to believe in their President. What’s more, the attacks, for many conservatives, signalled the end of what they saw as the moral, political and spiritual malaise of the ’90s, encapsulated by the tawdry controversy surrounding Bill Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky.
As Bush put it in those first weeks after the destruction of the World Trade Centre: “For too long, our culture has said ‘If it feels good, do it’. Now America is embracing a new ethic and a new creed: ‘Let’s roll’.”
America “rolled” into Afghanistan to get rid of the Taliban regime and hunt and destroy Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network. It had the support of NATO and a collection of governments that came to be known as the coalition of the willing.
The doctrine of pre-emptive action was developed, the axis of evil was identified and planning for the war in Iraq was quickly under way. At the same time, the Bush Administration refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol and withdrew from the International Criminal Court and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty it signed with the Soviet Union in 1972. It labelled the United Nations corrupt and ineffectual. America, the world’s lone superpower, would seize this moment in history to transform the world, not to conquer nations, but to liberate their people, defeat the threat of international terrorism and rid the world of dictators such as Saddam Hussein.
What Bush the war President did not do is demand sacrifices from the American people to fight the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the war on terror. His domestic program, which consisted mainly of tax cuts aimed at the better off, would be implemented. Unlike the war in Vietnam, there would be no draft: there would not even be calls by Bush for young men and women, at this time of war, to enlist in the armed forces.
Robert Putnam, professor of public policy at Harvard University, argues that the message of the Bush tax cuts was that “we are not all in this together”: “Whatever the economic merits or demerits of the policy, the civic implications were abominable.”
According to research by several sociologists and political scientists, while there was a spike in people seeking to join the armed forces in the first three months after September 11, 2001, recruitment rates quickly returned to previous levels and even declined.
“Virtually every measure of community involvement that shot up after 9/11 declined within three months to six months as it became a historical remembrance,” Tom Smith, the director of the National Opinion Research Centre’s general social survey, told The New Republic.
No sacrifices were demanded and none, it seems, were offered. Even television viewing habits, which changed dramatically after September 11, with news programs and the coverage of international news spiking, had returned to previous patterns within a short time, according to the Pew Research Centre, with top ratings to shows such as Fear Factor.
If America was changed forever by September 11, 2001, the lives of most Americans apparently didn’t change that much at all. Nor have their lives been changed much by two subsequent wars and by the deaths of close to 2000 soldiers in Iraq. Neither the war in Afghanistan, nor the war in Iraq, nor the disgrace of Abu Ghraib and the abuses of Guantanamo Bay, it seems, changed the lives of most Americans.
Perhaps the most profound changes were in the American psyche. Certainly the sense that suddenly America was under threat meant most Americans supported the passage of the Patriot Act, which curtailed their civil liberties, that they supported the war in Iraq once it was clear that the war was inevitable, and that they saw the abuses of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo as the unfortunate consequences of a war on terror.
Most Americans, but not all not by a long shot. This is a vast country of close to 300 million people, with great disparities of wealth and enormous cultural and political differences from state to state and region to region, even from small town to small town.
For every generalization that is made about America, there is an immediate counter-generalization. America’s strength is its ability to encompass contradiction and yet somehow unite its people in a belief in the country’s greatness and dreams and sense of manifest historic destiny.
Washington is full of ferociously bright youngish people who have flocked to the capital from all over the country to work as aides in Congress, in the multitude of think tanks, in the lobbying firms and for the Administration. At a recent gathering of a group of such people, all articulate and informed and passionate about politics and America, what was clear was that despite their political differences, there was concern that America faced serious challenges that neither the Administration nor Congress seemed capable of meeting.
There was even talk that America’s system of government with the checks and balances between the executive and Congress, with the constitutional checks on the powers of the federal government, and with an increasingly conservative Supreme Court favouring states’ rights made tackling these challenges virtually impossible.
George Bush was re-elected last year not because his political operatives led by Karl Rove energized and encouraged conservative Christians to vote though they did manage that, just as the Democrats encouraged the mainly young and angry anti-Bush vote but because a small but clear majority of Americans believed he was a can-do President who was best equipped to keep them safe, without the need for great personal sacrifice.
Before the terrible images of the horrors brought by hurricane Katrina, Bush was faced with the challenge of an engagement in Iraq that for most Americans seemed to have no end in sight and that to a growing minority appeared to be unwinnable.
Most importantly, polls showed that, for the first time since the September 11 attacks, a slight majority of Americans thought the war in Iraq had made America less safe. The optimism and even the wonder and inspiration in the wake of the Iraqi elections in January has long since evaporated.
The call to Americans to support what Bush described as America’s historic mission to spread democracy and liberty, and that that message seemed to be bringing results in the Middle East, had become muted.
Despite reasonable economic times (even if growth was based on consumer spending financed by borrowing and a ballooning budget deficit), the mood of America seemed, according to opinion polls, to be increasingly sour.
Then came Katrina. Brad Lyman, a Baltimore City College professor of sociology, summed up the response of many people when he said nothing had been learned from September 11.
“It has been nearly four years since emergency responders died in the World Trade Centre towers because of poor communications systems,” he said, yet the same failures were apparent in New Orleans and Katrina’s victims “became weaker and more vulnerable as federal, state and local officials used precious media time to point fingers at one another”.
“Four years after 9/11, Katrina exposed emergency planning and execution that border on malfeasance,” he said.
Congress returned after a five-week break on Monday and is now awash with partisan debates about who should be held responsible for what went wrong with the Katrina rescue operations. There are plans for congressional committees of inquiry into the disaster and plans for billions of dollars in aid for the victims and evacuees and the reconstruction of New Orleans and wrecked towns and communities in Mississippi. George Bush is sending his most trusted adviser, Vice-President Dick Cheney, to the region to make sure rescue and reconstruction efforts are delivering results.
Bush is now in can-do, problem-solving mode, but for almost a week he seemed to be the can-do-nothing, know-nothing President, apparently unable to comprehend the extent of the tragedy that had befallen millions of Americans.
For the first time in a long time, there has been talk and debate in the mainstream media of race relations in America, of poverty and its effects. These issues have been buried for much of the past several decades, ever since Democrat and Republican administrations decided these were not issues government could or should address.
Wade Henderson, of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, told The Age that the images of black suffering and abandonment raised profound issues.
“Poverty was the unifying factor for those left behind in New Orleans, and most of the poor were African-Americans,” he said. “You can’t have a history of discrimination in education and housing and employment without having these sorts of consequences.”
Henderson says that much of the discrimination has been addressed, at least in legislation, but that such a history cannot be wiped out by laws.
George Bush, on his first visit to New Orleans last week, embraced two distraught black women, and there’s no doubt he felt genuine sympathy and compassion for their plight. When they told him they had nowhere to go, that their homes had been destroyed, that they had no money or food, he directed them to the Salvation Army shelter down the road.
The trouble was that the shelter itself had been destroyed, but the larger point is that Bush’s instinctive response to the plight of these women was to send them to a non-government, charitable shelter.
The Republican leadership in Congress says that hurricane Katrina means the Administration’s legislative program more tax cuts, the abolition of an inheritance tax, social security reform will have to be delayed. But there is no suggestion from either side that Katrina and its aftermath should lead to policy changes to address the race-based poverty exposed by the disaster. Indeed, in an editorial The Wall Street Journal has urged the President to seize the moment and urge Congress to pass the proposed tax cuts that Bush promised during his 2004 election campaign.
The aftermath of hurricane Katrina is likely to dominate political debate in Washington for some time, even while Iraq moves towards a vote on a constitution in October and more US troops arrive to minimize the violence during December’s referendum and elections.
There are now growing doubts that Bush can keep America safe, that he has a plan for victory in Iraq or even that, in the wake of a great disaster, he can be the leader and the healer that Americans expect their president to be.
Yet for every generalization there is a counter-generalization. George Bush has bounced back from major political setbacks before, just as history suggests that America and Americans do not remain sad and pessimistic for long. Chances are that sooner or later it will be, in the words of Ronald Reagan, morning again in America.
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