Why So Few First Responders in New Orleans? They're in Iraq

In The News : TNA Online Last Updated: Sep 2nd, 2005 - 08:31:47

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Why So Few First Responders in New Orleans? They're in Iraq!
by William Norman Grigg
September 1, 2005

Washington's perverse imperial priorities -- wage war abroad first, protect Americans at home later -- exacerbated the tragic impact of Hurricane Katrina.

More than two years ago, The New American warned that the Bush administration's war in Iraq was denuding states and municipal governments of "first responders" who would be desperately needed in the event of a disaster or attack at home.

The occupation of Iraq has rested heavily on the services of National Guard units, including those from Gulf States that have been mutilated by Hurricane Katrina. Additionally, many Guardsmen and reservists now serving in Iraq are key law enforcement and disaster response personnel whose absence is also being keenly felt in the flood-ravaged states.

"With military call-ups skimming the cream of state and local 'first-responders,' communities nationwide are more vulnerable now than they were prior to 9-11," advised "Exporting Our 'First Responders,'" a feature article in our May 5, 2003 issue. The article cited George C. Wilson of the National Journal, who pointed out that in the event of a terrorist attack on several cities involving nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons, "police and firefighters would be overwhelmed. And the governors might have no National Guardsmen because they would all be overseas.."

Nature's assault on the Gulf Coast was, in some ways, comparable to a strike by a tactical nuclear weapon. The toxic wake to be left by receding floodwaters will create a public health catastrophe larger than most conceivable bio- or chemical weapons attacks. Added to this is the breakdown of civic order in New Orleans and elsewhere in the region. Grave as the crisis would be even in the best of times, the absence of First Responders deployed to Iraq threatens to turn it into an unprecedented calamity.

"Chalk up the city of New Orleans as a cost of Bush's Iraq war," comments former Treasury Department official Paul Craig Roberts in his syndicated column. "There were not enough helicopters to repair the breached levees and rescue people trapped by rising water. Nor are there enough Louisiana National Guardsmen available to help with rescue efforts and to patrol against looting. The situation is the same in Mississippi. The National Guard and helicopters are off on a fool's mission in Iraq."

"Now the Guardsmen, trapped in the Iraqi quagmire, are watching on TV the families they left behind trapped by rising waters and wondering if the floating bodies are family members," continues Roberts. "None know where their dislocated families are, but, shades of Fallujah, they do see their destroyed homes."

Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair of Counterpunch offer a similarly grim account. Noting that New Orleans is in a desperate condition "akin [to] Dacca in Bangladesh a few years ago," they point out that "there were precisely seven Coast Guard helicopters in operation" to aid rescue efforts in the submerged city. "Where are the National Guard helicopters? Presumably strafing Iraqi citizens on the roads outside Baghdad and Fallujah."

"As the war's unpopularity soars," they predict, "there will be millions asking, Why is the National Guard in Iraq, instead of helping the afflicted along the Gulf in the first crucial hours, before New Orleans, Biloxi, and Mobile turn into toxic toilet bowls with thousands marooned on the tops of houses."

Infuriatingly, money that was to be used to fortify the levees near New Orleans was also diverted to pay for the Iraq misadventure. In an interview with the New Orleans Times-Picayune more than a year ago, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Louisiana's Jefferson Parish, lamented: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."

This aspect of the tragedy illustrates the cold reality that it is futile - and ultimately destructive - to rely on the central government in matters of local security. One inevitable consequence of our degeneration from a constitutional republic into a democratic empire is Washington's habit of siphoning both wealth and manpower away from states and local communities, and pouring them into grandiose campaigns abroad.

Providing for the "general welfare," in the words of the Constitution's preamble, is best accomplished by allowing Americans to keep their wealth and manage their own affairs at the local and state level. But Washington is in the grip of an amoral Power Elite that has other priorities. It's more important to that Power Elite to work its will on recalcitrant people abroad than it is to provide for the security of our citizens at home. And as the post-Hurricane crisis deepens, Americans will probably learn that the methods of coercion field-tested abroad can find violent application at home as well.

A crisis of this magnitude offers fertile soil in which authoritarian ambitions can take root, as well as a climate of acceptance for authoritarianism. Thus the following account from the Associated Press (hat tip: Charles Featherstone at LRC Blog) is sobering and alarming:

"Outside the Convention Center, the sidewalks were packed with people without food, water or medical care, and with no sign of law enforcement. Thousands of storm refugees had been assembling outside for days, waiting for buses that did not come.

"At least seven bodies were scattered outside, and hungry, desperate people who were tired of waiting broke through the steel doors to a food service entrance and began pushing out pallets of water and juice and whatever else they could find.

"An old man in a chaise lounge lay dead in a grassy median as hungry babies wailed around him. Around the corner, an elderly woman lay dead in her wheelchair, covered up by a blanket, and another body lay beside her wrapped in a sheet. 'I don't treat my dog like that,' 47-year-old Daniel Edwards said as he pointed at the woman in the wheelchair. 'I buried my dog.' He added: 'You can do everything for other countries but you can't do nothing for your own people. You can go overseas with the military but you can't get them down here.'"

Having deprived the states of the ability to respond to such disasters (as Madison pointed out in The Federalist, No. 45, this is almost exclusively a state function), the federal government (meaning, again, the Power Elite controlling it) can now exploit this apocalyptic disaster. Opportunities abound to set precedents for militarizing domestic emergency responses, federal interventions in the energy market, perhaps even the re-introduction of conscription in the guise of a national service program to deal with disaster relief (as well as military contingencies). The displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, and the radiating economic consequences of the disaster, will offer further opportunities to expand the central government's powers in novel and dangerous ways.

All of this underscores anew the wisdom in Frederic Bastiat's well-worn axiom that governments expand their powers by creating the poison and the antidote in the same laboratory. This is not to say or intimate that the federal government somehow controls the weather, but rather that its perverse imperial priorities helped magnify a tragedy into the crisis from which it now stands to profit.