#paul kramer

[xmasitw]

Paul Kramer

Santa Is A Socialist

2010

[thatantisocialbitch]

"It is in our nature to destroy what we create." -Dr. Paul Kramer

[pulitzerfieldnotes]

Hurricane Katrina and the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: Paul A. Kramer Field Note 3

5 reasons we don’t know this story already

Why isn’t the impact of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the broader “war on terror,” a substantial part of our baseline understanding of the government’s failure during and after Hurricane Katrina?  Why, in other words, don’t we know this story already?  In this case, and many others, the question of why we don’t know something is an intriguing part of the story itself.  Why do certain themes and explanations fail to emerge, or get buried once they do?  How and why do other narratives snap durably into position, then evolve into a smooth, burnished corner of collective memory, whether or not they approximate what happened?

This is not an idle question.  How societies decide to remember—and forget—historical events plays a significant, underestimated role in their ongoing debates and decisions.  Think about how frequently, and with what distorting effects, politicians, journalists and scholars invoke the “lessons of history,” as if the past wasn’t subject to interpretation or argument, but was a kind of stern schoolteacher at the blackboard: “Take this down.”  It’s not just, then, as the cliché goes, that history gets written by the victors; the victors (for better and, often, for worse), use history to attain their victory in the first place.  All this said, there are lots of forces that shape the historical narratives that stick and those that don’t, which are less subject to conscious manipulation, but which are nonetheless potent in etching certain stories and obscuring others.

So, why didn’t we know that the wars and the post-Katrina disaster affected each other?  Why hasn’t this history been told?  Here are five reasons, admittedly speculative, but they may help us get closer to some answers.

1) We actually did know this, once.  When it came to the FEMA/DHS story, journalist Robert Block was on the case as early as August 2004, when he filed a story for the Wall Street Journal that discussed emergency managers’ concerns about DHS’ neglect of natural disasters and its over-emphasis on terrorism.  In the aftermath of the storm and floods, this story played a significant role in newspaper accounts of the crisis’ origins.  Block and Christopher Cooper’s book Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security, a major source for my piece, came out in May 2007, and detailed many of these linkages.  The fact that this early coverage was there makes the relative absence of the story in present-day popular memory all the more striking.

2. Vociferous, official denials.  One reason why the story may not have taken over the long term was the immediate, forceful response to allegations that the war had undercut disaster response at home by the Bush administration, DHS and FEMA spokespeople, military officials, and some media figures (check out Christopher Hitchens’ swaggering, incisive and fact-fudging Slate essay “Iraq and Katrina,” subtitled “The War Hasn’t Kept Us From Fighting the Flood,” for the rhetorical high-point.) The message here was loud and consistent, if not entirely (or even primarily) reality-based: DHS hadn’t treated natural disasters like a stepchild; there had been sufficient military personnel and equipment on the ground (almost) as early as it was needed.  Subsequent investigations negated these claims, but by that point, apologetic counter-narratives had had a powerful impact on public understanding.

3. Timing.  As journalists and official investigators probed into the roots of the post-Katrina catastrophe, some of the dynamics I’ve uncovered here began to surface.  They turned up, for example, in the myriad Congressional and executive-branch investigations into the government’s compounding failures in Katrina, to which I turned for evidence. But by the time this information had been systematically gathered, the news had mostly moved on; what coverage remained dealt (appropriately) with the struggles of Katrina survivors and questions of urban reconstruction in New Orleans, and causal questions had faded. More recent, cause-level coverage has, very importantly, focused on the neglect of the New Orleans levee system by the Army Corps of Engineers.

4.  Anti-war movement emphases.  The people most responsible for first raising the questions this piece has attempted to answer, apart from journalists, are campaigners against the Bush administration’s “war on terror.”  Antiwar activists were among the very first to draw linkages—mostly speculative ones—between the post-Katrina catastrophe and the wars as equivalent or connected “disasters.”  Tragic tradeoffs were a fixture of activist signboards even as the crisis unfolded.  More detailed investigations emerged from this energy, but for immediate, practical purposes, it was enough to assert these connections rather than to specify them: that the war had disabled the country’s security was something that was known without needing to demonstrate it.  At the same time, the antiwar movement (appropriately, in my opinion), laid rhetorical emphasis on the victims of U. S. military projection outside the United States, rather than those suffering within it.

5. Personalization, parts 1 and 2.  If there is a single, overarching reason why this story still needs telling, it is the highly personalizing ways that blame for the crisis was ultimately distributed.  In conventional telling, the debacle falls to two main culprits: George W. Bush and FEMA Director Michael Brown.  The quotation that bridges these two—“Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job!”—condenses ineptitude, back-patting cronyism and self-delusion in one breezy Bushism.  As I hope the essay conveys clearly, my own sense is that both men own major portions of responsibility for the particular shape the disaster took (if not exactly in the ways we think.)  But personalizing stories are often there to comfort.  They are endemic to cultures that like to attribute failure and success to individual action and merit, and struggle to talk about social structures and institutional frameworks.  And in general, easy narratives—two stooges at the wheel, in this case—can be pulled around the basic facts without much intellectual work.  Most telling are the solutions that such individualizing accounts summon: purge the villains.

This, ultimately, may be the main reason this story has proven elusive: it is more difficult and troubling to think about the ways the United States’ institutional fabric has been shaped by massive, seemingly unalterable realities (in this case, the United States’ worldwide military presence) than by a few identifiable and replaceable bad apples.  Here, as elsewhere, the seemingly critical narratives that a society settles on can ultimately hide more than they reveal, and justify existing arrangements more than they confront and challenge them.

Text by Paul Kramer.

For more of Paul’s reporting, visit his project, “Hurricane Katrina and the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

[pulitzerfieldnotes]

Hurricane Katrina and the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: Paul A. Kramer Field Note 1

How this article came about

This story began with my own puzzlement, looking at newspaper headlines in the tragic fall of 2005.  Two stories dominated coverage: the increasingly controversial war in Iraq, and the disaster following Hurricane Katrina.  I’m an historian trained to ask questions about the ways US history is connected to the histories of everywhere else, and what struck me at the time was the gulf between these two Gulfs.  One would scarcely have known reading the war side of the front pages that the United States had just experienced the devastation of the Gulf Coast, the failure of New Orleans’ levee system, and the flooding of the city.  Similarly, one could mostly read the Katrina coverage and not know that the United States was waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan, as part of a much larger and more amorphous war against “terror.”

But a few connections did poke up in the media: harrowing stories about Guard forces from the Gulf Coast watching the disaster remotely from desert bases; about activists raising questions about the toll the wars had taken on American society; about investigators and reporters tracing the roots of FEMA’s utter failure and the role its relocation in the Department of Homeland Security in the aftermath of 9/11 had played.

Looking for a closing lecture for a class I was teaching at the University of Michigan on the United States’ role in the world, I assembled this information in a preliminary way, and suggested to the students that it was worth asking questions about how events as seemingly distant as the United States’ wars in the Middle East and Central Asia might play a role in catastrophes as seemingly local as those that followed Hurricane Katrina.  It was late in the semester, and we were all tired, but to my great surprise, the students were visibly energized by the talk. In fact, a couple of them emailed me that afternoon, asking me for a copy, even though they knew they weren’t going to be quizzed on it. (In my experience to that time—and since—this never happens.)

In the lead-up to the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, I decided to dig into this story further.  To what extend did it make sense to rewrite the history of Hurricane Katrina—more specifically, the government’s failure to prepare for it and respond to it—as an episode in the Bush administration’s “war on terror”?  Activists at the time had provided one set of on-the-fly answers to this question: absolutely, the two disasters were causally related to each other, and the callousness and ineptitude that seemed to characterize Bush’s approach to the Gulf Coast was also reflected in his foreign policy.

I wanted to turn this answer back into a question, and found myself tracking two particular threads: the question of FEMA’s transformation after 9/11, and the impact of overseas Guard deployments on the post-disaster rescue and relief efforts.  A third thread also emerged: the ways the war “came home” where policymakers and troops saw flood victims as adversaries or even “insurgents,” and where policing New Orleans was seen to require military personnel and institutions.

With the generous support of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, I've come up with what I think is a significant reframing of Hurricane Katrina and its devastating aftermath—following the lead of path-breaking reporting at the time, I show the way the post-9/11 "homeland security" siphoned major resources away from natural disaster preparation, both through the erosion of FEMA and its redirection towards an exclusive focus on terrorism, and through the over-stretching of Guard units sent on overseas deployments.

At the same time, I demonstrate that the rescue and relief efforts in the wake of the storm and the flood were powerfully shaped by a war framework, among soldiers, officers, the media and high-level policy-makers.  In this sense, the war not only drained necessary resources, but also remade rescue efforts in its own image, with the campaign self-consciously cast as an effort to "take back the city."

Finally, this story is about how Americans talk—and don’t talk—about tradeoffs between world-wide military projection and society’s ability to support the well-being of its members, including protection from natural hazards.  My conclusions on this point take strong issue with official denials at the time—that these two projects remain entirely separable due to abundant resources and organizationally savvy. My research supports, but also complicates, anti-war activists’ sense that there are tradeoffs between war and domestic social well-being that are worth talking about. There are tradeoffs, I conclude, but they’re complicated and worth tracking deep into the sources to specify them.  When we do we learn, among other things, that wars remake the societies that wage them—in ways that are desired and undesired, expected and unexpected—and that these changes exact heavier tolls from some than from others.

 Text by Paul Kramer.

For more of Paul’s reporting, visit his project, “Hurricane Katrina and the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

[franciscodeborja]