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Lessons from Katrina & 9/11
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Lessons from Katrina and 9/11: Don’t Misunderestimate Bush’s Incompetence
by R.W. Burniske
While thousands suffered in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, federal officials chastised reporters for “negative news stories” and declared “this is no time for politics.” They were wrong on both counts. Not even Fox News could put a positive spin on reports from New Orleans, nor could it suppress the political decisions that demonstrate how badly We the People “misunderestimated” the incompetence of our president and the people he appointed to federal agencies.
We should not wait several weeks before critiquing the performance of federal agencies and officials. By then, our attention-deficit nation will have clicked its remote control to another story. Besides, the Bush administration has a habit of exploiting periods of suspended politics. Remember 9/11? In the weeks following those attacks we were told to “pull together” and avoid “partisan politics.”
What resulted from our reticence following 9/11? For starters, Congress awarded unprecedented powers to the president, enabling the pre-emptive invasion of foreign lands. The Cost of War website estimates U.S. military expenditures in Iraq will soon eclipse 200 billion dollars, a figure the Bush administration has used to justify de-funding social and environmental initiatives – including the repair of levees in New Orleans. What it doesn’t reveal is the cost of human lives and a tarnished international reputation.
The past few weeks have demonstrated the importance of opposing the dystopian visions of our elected officials. Our failure to elect competent leaders produced a Louisiana governor who called for prayers rather than a state-funded evacuation in the face of a killer hurricane and an American president who mugged for cameras while strumming a guitar the day after that hurricane struck. In coming weeks, while the Bush administration’s “official story” takes us through the spin cycle, we’d do well to remember Walter Lippmann, a journalist who considered dissenting voices “a means of promoting the discovery of truth.”
“The opposition is indispensable,” wrote Lippman. “A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opponents than from his fervent supports. For his supporters will push him to disaster unless his opponents show him where the dangers are. So if he is wise he will often pray to be delivered from his friends, because they will ruin him. But, though it hurts, he ought also to pray never to be left without opponents; for they keep him on the path of reason and good sense.”
We the People are the indispensable opposition, and we should applaud those who protested in Crawford, Texas while our “war president” went bike riding, just as we should applaud honest journalists for condemning the tragically slow and incompetent response of the federal government to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. These actions require courage, for they spit the truth into the face of ugly lies.
Following the attacks of 9/11, xenophobic conservatives and sycophantic journalists ridiculed opposing viewpoints while calling dissenters “unpatriotic” and “un-American.” When skeptics questioned the legitimacy of a pre-emptive war based upon unsubstantiated claims about weapons of mass destruction, we were told that the president and his cabinet members had “intelligence” that we lacked.
Indeed, they did. It just happened to be fabricated intelligence cooked up by lackeys who began their investigations with an ideological answer in hand, then worked backwards until they had enough distorted evidence to support their claims. If one of my graduate students employed such unscrupulous methodology I’d say “that's propaganda, not research.”
By not questioning the Bush administration during a vulnerable phase in our nation’s history, we set an unfortunate precedent. Bush’s cabinet seized the opportunity to deliberately mislead Americans, employing weapons of mass deception to persuade people that Iraq posed an “imminent threat.” We have since learned that Saddam Hussein had no WMDs, no involvement with 9/11, and no affiliation with Al Qaeda.
Does anyone really believe anything that the Bush administration now says?
How many people along the Gulf Coast believe the president when he says the inexperienced cronies he appointed to run the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Department of Homeland Security are doing “one heck of a job”? How many displaced citizens of New Orleans can stomach the White House spokesman’s lies, including the absurd notion that “this administration has made flood control a priority since day one”?
We the People have a Bill of Rights that protects our freedom to speak, assemble, and protest. We also have an obligation to exercise those rights. Contrary to the president’s disingenuous claim, many people did foresee the breach of New Orleans’ levees. It was inevitable, but its impact could have – and should have – been mitigated by the protection of wetlands, reinforcement of levees, and development of evacuation plans.
Unfortunately, the indispensable opposition that has opposed this administration’s misguided militarism and environmental neglect has been dismissed for much too long. Now we see the consequences. Now we understand why “the opposition is indispensable.” Without alternative viewpoints our democracy suffers what the 9/11 Commission termed a “failure of imagination.” Without opposition, the president suffers the delusion that he can act with impunity, demonstrating a “misleadership” style that is equal parts arrogance and ignorance.
As we observe the fourth anniversary of 9/11, We the People must not allow a mean-spirited, deceitful administration to silence dissent by squeezing old wounds. We the People must never be misled into another war by a president whose administration prefers to attack and destroy the opposition – from CIA agents to career diplomats and heads of state – rather than listen to opposing viewpoints that might prevent them from rushing headlong, like a pack of lemmings, over the precipice.
On September 24, during the Peace and Justice Festival in Washington, DC, We the People will march to the White House and tell an incompetent president that the indispensable opposition demands our country return to “the path of reason and good sense.”
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R.W. Burniske is an associate professor in the College of Education at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
September 11, 2005
