Forget Paul Krugman who remains in his own bizarro world on this issue as all others and normally we like to take the time to debunk his writings, but today there isn’t time so it’s best to just ignore him. Elsewhere in the Times more level-headed writers make it clear that legal and political issues snarled troop aid and not the other numerous “theories” being tossed into the heavily politicized debate about the response to the Katrina disaster: From the NYT:

For reasons of practicality and politics, officials at the Justice Department and the Pentagon, and then at the White House, decided not to urge Mr. Bush to take command of the effort. Instead, the Washington officials decided to rely on the growing number of National Guard personnel flowing into Louisiana, who were under Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco’s control.

To seize control of the mission, Mr. Bush would have had to invoke the Insurrection Act, which allows the president in times of unrest to command active-duty forces into the states to perform law enforcement duties. But decision makers in Washington felt certain that Ms. Blanco would have resisted surrendering control, as Bush administration officials believe would have been required to deploy active-duty combat forces before law and order had been re-established.

While combat troops can conduct relief missions without the legal authority of the Insurrection Act, Pentagon and military officials say that no active-duty forces could have been sent into the chaos of New Orleans on Wednesday or Thursday without confronting law-and-order challenges.

“Can you imagine how it would have been perceived if a president of the United States of one party had pre-emptively taken from the female governor of another party the command and control of her forces, unless the security situation made it completely clear that she was unable to effectively execute her command authority and that lawlessness was the inevitable result?” asked one senior administration official, who spoke anonymously because the talks were confidential.

…administration civilians worried that there could be political fallout if federal troops were forced to shoot looters.

In a separate discussion last weekend, the governor also rejected a more modest proposal for a hybrid command structure in which both the Guard and active-duty troops would be under the command of an active-duty, three-star general – but only after he had been sworn into the Louisiana National Guard.

This is not going to be the last word on the issue. Propagandameister Michael Moore is considering making a “schlockumentary” on it and Oliver Stone can’t be far behind. More seriously there will be heavily politicized commissions that will unfortunately fall down party lines. For good measure we can throw in a little global warming into the debate. But if some good can come out of this, it will be determining what roles the federal government can play in natural disasters and when, and on whose authority. Speaking selfishly, we’d like to see that figured out before the San Andreas breaks California off into the ocean.

technorati: new york times katrina FEMA

This entry was posted on Friday, September 9th, 2005 at 10:30 am by Insider and is filed under Big Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.