Bringing it On

Greyhawk

The Philadelphia Inquirer offers an "expose" for those who might have missed the story the first 900 times it appeared in a major media outlet: combat teams from the 82nd Airborne were not instantly dispatched to New Orleans immediately after hurricane Katrina hit. There may be some confusion on the part of that paper as to what function those big boys with their guns play in disaster recovery efforts, perhaps enhanced by the enduring image of the US military as "meals on wheels" developed throughout much of the 90s. Perhaps the writers and editors of this piece pine for that September 10th world - but who doesn't?

In reality, having large groups of armed military operating under separate chains of command in an area were civil control has broken down completely and media reports are screaming hysterically about murder, rape, robbery, and general mayhem can often make the situation worse. And while some dream of a world where American warriors are trained to deploy rapidly to help under-privileged farmers prepare for spring planting, others look into the reasons why chaos reigned in New Orleans during the Mardi Gras from hell.

The Washington Post:

Governors can request assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. If federal armed forces are brought in to help, they do so in support of FEMA, through the U.S. Northern Command, which was established in 2002 as part of a military reorganization after the 9/11 attacks.
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The political problem in Katrina was that Bush would have had to impose federal command over the wishes of two governors - Kathleen Blanco of Louisiana and Haley Barbour of Mississippi - who made it clear they wanted to retain state control.

Read the whole thing - it includes a useful and brief explanation of the actual laws and restrictions placed on federal troops operating in the United States.

Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds expresses reasonable concerns about this comment from the President's speech:

Yet the system at every level of government, was not well coordinated and was overwhelmed in the first few days. It is now clear that a challenge on this scale requires greater federal authority and a broader role for the armed forces -- the institution of our government most capable of massive logistical operations on a moment's notice.

Indeed, no one cuts through bureaucracy faster than a General Officer more concerned with his mission than his career, but this passage begs for clarification, and Glenn is right to take the opportunity to glance towards Waco, Texas as he makes his statement. Because there's another enduring image of the US military circa mid-90s; roaring into a "compound" with guns blazing, offering a small sample to a would-be American messiah of what a group of fanatics in caves and cities in another part of the world were still years from experiencing. That's not what the President has in mind, but the image is forever there, and hard to ignore.

To further cloud the issue, you'll now find reporters complaining that those now-deployed troops are limiting their access, stopping them from getting high-res corpse photos, and generally treating them like some sort of potential looters, for gosh sakes. Clearly evidence of government clampdown on freedom of the press - clearly not what CNN expected when they demanded the deployment of those troops in the immediate aftermath of the storm. Expect this theme to grow unless federal troops are withdrawn.

Oddly enough, at the bizarro end of the spectrum we find Cindy Sheehan, who's demanding an immediate end to the occupation of New Orleans, via Michael Moore's web page. Seems they've got a big demonstration in DC coming up next week - and they don't need the nation to lose focus on what really matters. Themselves, of course.

Stay tuned for further developments.