But when the histories of Hurricane Katrina are written, they will probably note a critical dividing line, a moment when a region's disaster became a nation's tragedy. It occurred around midmorning on Aug. 29, when the levees protecting New Orleans began to break.
Prior to that, most of the more serious government failings had clearly been those of state and local officials. They had planned inadequately for an evacuation of New Orleans in a major hurricane, especially for the poor. They then failed to implement even that inadequate plan, leaving tens of thousands stranded and vulnerable. In essence, their incompetence and lack of preparation set the stage for what happened next.
But when the 17th Street levee gave way sometime Monday morning, the larger and more serious failures became those of the federal government. State and local resources -- even if brilliantly deployed, which they weren't -- were no longer capable of handling the crisis; only the federal government could have handled a disaster of those dimensions, and it simply did not.
Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, didn't even learn that the levees had been breached until midday Tuesday, a full 24 hours after the breaches occurred. Why? Why was the federal response so abysmal? Because it wasn't deemed important.
And the most powerful symbol of that negligence is the command structure of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
If leadership considers a job important, it appoints qualified people to fill it. That's why Richard Myers, a four-star general with 30 years in the military, much of it in command positions, was appointed to head the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It's why Condi Rice, who has a doctoral degree and more than 20 years of experience in academic and government work in international affairs, including four years as national security adviser, is secretary of state.
So if Michael Brown, the head of FEMA, had previously headed the International Arabian Horse Association and had no experience in emergency response, what does that tell you? What does it tell you that Brown's second in command, chief of staff Patrick Rhode, was a Republican political operative who also had no previous emergency-response experience? And while the post of deputy chief of staff, FEMA's third in command, is vacant, until June it had been filled by Scott Morris, yet another Bush political operative with a background in public relations, not emergency management.
To those willing to look at the situation honestly, FEMA's command structure tells you that the Bush administration didn't take the agency seriously, an attitude that goes a long way in explaining its glaring lack of resources, leadership, skills and instinct. The president put the right people in charge of FEMA only if you think of emergency management as managing the political side of an emergency. And maybe that was the idea.
Even now, though, we don't seem to have learned the right lesson. FEMA was downgraded in importance and funding largely because terrorism dominated the political scene. And while a major terrorist attack could be devastating, it remains much less likely than an 8.4 earthquake destroying Los Angeles or San Francisco, a Category 4 hurricane swamping Miami, Savannah or Houston, or an F-5 tornado wreaking carnage through downtown Omaha or Atlanta. Likewise, a biological terror attack is far less likely -- and would be far less deadly -- than a pandemic from avian flu imported accidentally from overseas.
Even now, top politicians of both parties are citing our failure in Katrina not as evidence that our priorities are misplaced, but as proof that we still aren't prepared to handle a terrorist attack.
While that might be true, it demonstrates a crazy way of thinking, evidence of just how deeply Sept. 11 has addled our leaders' priorities.
-- Jay Bookman is the deputy editorial page editor. His column appears Thursdays and Mondays.