Many perceived the response to Katrina as a slow train wreck. Most of the blame for the shortcomings was quickly placed on Washington. The most powerful nation in the world seemed unable to cope with high winds and floodwaters. While some of the unfolding criticism was warranted, much of it was not.
On the day the storm came ashore, I was in San Diego attending ceremonies commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of V-J Day, but I left before noon to return to Washington. Over the next few days, we had numerous meetings. President Bush was deeply engaged in the federal response. As usual, he peppered the relevant officials, including Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and FEMA personnel, with detailed questions. Chertoffwas a capable cabinet secretary, but it was painfully clear that his department’s resources were limited. Understaffed and underequipped, DHS was heavily dependent on hiring private-sector contractors to perform urgent tasks such as restoring electricity and establishing communications. But in a disaster of this magnitude, private contractors were quickly overwhelmed.
Some state and local officials, notably in Louisiana, did not help matters. Governor Kathleen Blanco was reluctant to relinquish command of the thousands of National Guardsmen in her state, as President Bush had urged her to do. Her actions led to an unnecessary delay in the crucial early hours over the issue of who could organize and direct the Guardsmen. The U.S. military knew how to mount a humanitarian operation with precision, speed, and efficiency. It was increasingly clear that the governor of Louisiana did not.
In light of Governor Blanco’s unwillingness to cede control of the National Guard, President Bush was faced with two difficult choices: first, whether to federalize the Guardsmen, which would take away Blanco’s authority over them, and, second, whether to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would suspend posse comitatus—the longstanding American law that bars federal military forces from conducting law and order missions on U.S. soil. These steps had not been taken over the objections of a state governor since the civil rights movement, when federal troops were deployed to the South to restore order and enforce desegregation. Confronted with images of civil disorder and media reports depicting chaos in New Orleans, White House officials discussed whether Bush should take those steps.
As troubling as Blanco’s leadership was, I was concerned that invoking the Insurrection Act and federalizing the National Guard in the Gulf states against the Governor’s will could set an unfortunate precedent. The practical consequences were also worrisome. If the President invoked the Insurrection Act and ordered the Defense Department to use active-duty forces for law enforcement missions, we could have nineteen-year-old Marine lance corporals trained to fight in Iraq patrolling the streets of New Orleans as policemen. Because DHS, not DoD, was authorized by statute to deal with domestic problems, our military had not been organized, trained, or equipped to conduct law enforcement in American cities. A mistake or two could make a bad situation worse.
I sensed it was a close call for the President. He ultimately decided against invoking the act and against federalizing the National Guard. Though he was never much of a second-guesser, in the weeks and months After Katrina, he may well have wondered whether he should have taken those measures. From my vantage point, President Bush made the right call.
Without formally stripping Blanco of her authorities, the President had us send as many troops as rapidly as we could to the region to assist DHS. We sent forty-five hundred active-duty troops from the 82nd Airborne and Marines from the First and Second Marine Expeditionary Forces. General Blum effectively worked around state officials to restore order with National Guard troops. Instead of overruling the law on posse comitatus by performing law enforcement missions, thousands of active-duty troops could support the National Guard by delivering humanitarian aid and rescuing stranded victims.5 Their very presence had the effect of reducing crime and disorder.
From a military standpoint, the response to Katrina was considerably swifter than any previous response to a hurricane, and probably to any natural disaster in American history. During the Hurricane Andrew disaster in 1992, for example, it had taken five days to deploy roughly sixty-eight hundred troops. But within five days of Katrina’s landfall, more than thirty-four thousand ground forces from the Guard and active-duty were assisting in rescue efforts.6 At the peak of our operations, we had some forty-six thousand National Guard troops—citizen soldiers who in many cases were policemen, firefighters, emergency medical technicians, engineers, and municipal workers in their civilian jobs—on the scene.7 An additional twenty thousand active-duty forces were there as well. There were 350 helicopters and 21 ships conducting round-the-clock operations.8 Men and women in uniform were rescuing and evacuating thousands of displaced residents and assisting FEMA in reestablishing order in the hurricane’s Aftermath.9 They helped to evacuate eighty-eight thousand Gulf Coast residents and rescued another fifteen thousand. Hundreds of Coast Guard helicopter and boat rescue teams provided critical assistance in the effort.
From a headquarters in the New Orleans Superdome, the National Guard launched what amounted to the biggest rescue operation in American history. An active-duty Army three-star officer and gruff Cajun with ties to the region, Lieutenant General Russel Honoré, took charge of the active-duty forces in the region, bringing leadership, discipline, efficiency, and confidence to the effort.
Back at the Pentagon, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense Paul McHale, a former Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania and a colonel in the Marine Corps Reserves, skillfully coordinated DoD’s response from the outset, working closely with DHS, FEMA, and the White House.* Because of DHS’ lack of resources, McHale anticipated the DoD assets DHS would need and helped their officials prepare the necessary requests for support. McHale had me approve these requests even before DHS had submitted them to expedite the process.
On September 4, 2005, I visited New Orleans. The devastation was terrible. Water had risen to the heights of roofs. Whole neighborhoods were underwater. U.S. military and Coast Guard helicopters were rescuing people stranded on top of their houses. We flew over the Seventeenth Street Canal levee that had been topped, allowing the swollen waters of Lake Pontchartrain to flood one of America’s great cities.
As the federal government mobilized to assist Katrina victims, its performance was overshadowed by media coverage of the wrenching drama that had unfolded on the ground. Along with more than eighteen hundred lives, the storm had torn away the veneer of civilization in some places. The state and local governments that had kept a lid on anarchy, crime, and violence had dissolved. There were reports of murder and gang rapes. Reflecting the panic on the ground, some reporters and their anchors in the studios became advocates, sharing in the harsh condemnation of the emergency aid workers, the federal government, state and local leaders, in fact, anyone who might bear any responsibility. This chain reaction in the media left a damaging impression that the officials coping with the disaster didn’t care and that our government was incapable of mounting an effective response.10
Eight months After Katrina I wrote a memo to the President: “The charge of ‘incompetence’ against the U.S. Government should be easy to rebut, were people to understand the extent to which the current system of government makes competence next to impossible.”11 After five years back in government, wrestling with natural and man-made disasters as well as two wars, it became clear to me that our government institutions were proving inadequate to the challenges of the twenty-first century and the information age. Efforts After 9/11 to refashion and create institutions such as DHS and the director of national intelligence (DNI) had led to suboptimal results: new layers of bureaucracy with the underlying challenges not well addressed.*
We needed to refashion our government institutions and develop new capabilities to respond to the challenge posed by terrorism and other non-conventional threats. For example, we were losing, or at least not winning, the battle of ideas against Islamist extremists. The State Department and other departments and
agencies were not fulfilling their promises of political and economic support for reconstruction in places like Iraq and Afghanistan for a variety of reasons, including a lack of both funds and deployable personnel. The threads of national power—military, financial, intelligence, civic, communications—were sometimes working at cross-purposes, much as the Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force had in the era before the Goldwater-Nichols legislation in 1986 mandated the creation of a joint force.13
The idea that our government might not be up to the new challenges had preoccupied my thoughts for some time.14 Just what to do about it occurred to me in an unlikely place from an unlikely source: a Democrat who had inherited the U.S. presidency in 1945.
In the spring of 2006, I visited the Harry S. Truman presidential library outside St. Louis, Missouri, to deliver a speech comparing our struggle against violent extremists to the decades-long challenges of the Cold War.15 Before my remarks, I spent some time touring the library. It was a treasured opportunity for someone who admired the blunt, no-nonsense midwesterner. I was taken into his private office, which was largely untouched since his death. Inside I glimpsed a wall of books, many of which he’d received from friends and contemporaries, including Winston Churchill. Hanging not far from his office was a large copy of an invitation to his inauguration. The invitation had inadvertently been extended to the President himself. Scrawled at the bottom was Truman’s RSVP: “Weather permitting, I hope to attend. HST.”
I was a junior in college when President Truman left office. He was deeply unpopular. Truman was a fierce partisan and rather cantankerous man. But what I have come to understand—and what came back vividly to me during my visit—was how central a role he and his administration had in the international challenges of the second half of the twentieth century.
As World War II ended and America entered the Cold War, it fell to the Truman administration to fashion an entirely new construct for an uncertain era. Largely overlooked and certainly underappreciated at the time, his administration crafted many of the institutions and policies that proved crucial to fighting and prevailing in the long conflict against the Soviet Union. The Marshall Plan, for example, provided needed resources to the war-ravaged economies of Western Europe and helped to keep them from sliding into the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence. The containment strategy was pursued over many decades. Many Truman-era international institutions, designed to buttress the democracies of the world and encourage the rise of others, are still with us today: the World Bank, NATO, the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and the Organization of American States, among them. At home, the Truman administration created the NSC, the CIA, and the U.S. Information Agency, and merged the Navy and War departments into the Department of Defense. All of that occurred at the inflection point at the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. The George H. W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush administrations had similar opportunities to fashion new policies and institutions for a new era: The inflection point at the end of the Cold War and the twenty-first-century challenges of the information age.
When I returned to Washington I put these thoughts together in a memorandum for President Bush: “Today the world requires new international organizations tailored to our new circumstances.”16 I noted that many of the most pressing threats we faced were global and transnational in scope—terrorism, proliferation, cybercrime, narcotics, piracy, hostage taking, and criminal gangs. By their nature, they could not be dealt with successfully by any one nation—not even the United States—and, as such, required the cooperation of many nations.
I believed that in important ways, existing international institutions—including some whose origins dated back to the days of FDR and Truman—were proving inadequate to the times. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) were working to bring development funds to impoverished countries, but a nontrivial portion failed to reach the intended people because of inefficiency and corruption. I was also thinking of the United Nations, which was heavy on anti-American and anti-Israel diatribes and comparatively light on accomplishments. NATO, too, had its shortcomings. Because it was designed as a European defense organization against the Soviets, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization did not have linkages with some of the world’s important democracies outside of Europe, such as Japan, South Korea, Israel, and Australia. NATO also required unanimity among twenty-eight member nations that included some occasionally contrarian members, making it difficult to deal with new challenges. The demographics of Western Europe—with aging populations and declining investments in their militaries—did not promise a robust alliance.
I suggested that new international organizations might be needed to bring competence in areas where existing organizations proved to be less well suited to the twenty-first century—areas such as developing and utilizing quick-reaction forces, assisting in military and military police training in foreign countries, counterproliferation, capacity building for the rule of law, and helping to strengthen domestic government ministries. Too often the United States was called on to do the work alone that other countries could, and should, help with. Because ours was the only military in the world that could deal with a serious crisis rapidly, America relieved the pressure on other countries to step forward, which left our forces burdened with the responsibility.17
I proposed that the President start a national discussion on this subject and offered a few suggestions of initiatives. The list included such things as a peacekeeping and governance corps that would have a standing capability to respond rapidly to problems abroad before they spun out of control. That could have been useful to handle unrest in Liberia and Haiti, possibly heading off civil strife before it began. Civilian teams could also bolster our military’s expanding humanitarian efforts, such as when the massive tsunami struck coasts in the Indian Ocean in December 2004, killing 185,000, and when a 7. 6 magnitude earthquake in October 2005 left the Pakistani region of Kashmir devastated, with 80,000 dead and nearly 3 million homeless.
Our humanitarian assistance efforts brought about a noticeable transformation of opinion within those important parts of the Muslim world. We did well for America by doing good. After Defense Department tsunami relief efforts, polls in Indonesia showed that 65 percent of its citizens had a more favorable impression of the United States. Osama bin Laden’s approval ratings in Indonesia—the largest Muslim nation in the world—dropped from 58 percent before the disaster to 23 percent Afterward.18 In Pakistan, a country not known for its favorable views toward America, our rescue operations in the wake of their earthquake changed many minds. By November 2005, more than 46 percent of Pakistanis had a favorable view of the United States—more than double the percentage that had held that view six months earlier.19 The favorite toy among Pakistani children quickly became small models of the American Chinook helicopters that had been so visible in delivering American relief supplies to those left homeless. The Chinooks were referred to in the Pashtun dialect as “Angels of Mercy.”
I also recommended some form of maritime organization to which countries with significant naval forces, such as India and Japan, could contribute to combating piracy on the high seas. Because strong and growing economies tended to stem the rise of violent extremism, I suggested that the President consider a new market-oriented institution to provide grants and support to entrepreneurs in developing countries in Africa, Central Asia, and Latin America that would bypass the government level, where waste and corruption in poor countries were often a serious problem. I thought it might be useful to conduct a reassessment of how our country disperses foreign aid—perhaps using microfinance to promote individual entrepreneurship instead of massive block grants to governments, often for large construction projects.
I suggested consideration of a Middle East security initiative to bolster moderate states in the region and to help shield them from threats posed by nations like Iran, as well as consideration of an Asian security organization—in a sense, an organization with
some of the attributes of NATO—to engage the United States in building stronger partnerships with our friends and allies in that region. I thought we needed to expand free trade agreements beyond our immediate neighbors to friends and allies around the world.
Here at home, I proposed a review of the executive and legislative branch institutions that were organized and arranged for an earlier era. We needed adjustments so that agencies and departments could function with the speed and agility the new century and the information age demanded. The compartmentalized organization of the executive branch, with its separate elements and the lack of a coordination mechanism, was equally true in Congress, with its separate committees and subcommittees. It was and remains exceedingly difficult to pull all the strands of American power through a single needle eye to create coherent national policy.
I suggested consideration of a new U.S. agency for global communication that could serve as a channel to inform, educate, and compete worldwide in the battle for ideas. We found ourselves engaged in the first protracted war in an era of e-mail, Twitter, blogs, phone cameras, a global internet with no inhibitions, cell phones, handheld video cameras, talk radio, twenty-four-hour news broadcasts, and satellite television.20 By 2006, it was clear that our government’s efforts to counter extremist ideology through public diplomacy and strategic communications were proving an abject failure. We didn’t have global communications agencies to engage in a strategic effort to counter the ideology and propaganda of Islamists, as institutions such as the U.S. Information Agency and Radio Free Europe had combated Communist ideology.
Meanwhile, our enemies were successfully hammering home their messages via the internet and satellite television. With media relations committees that met to discuss ways to achieve their violent objectives, terrorist groups such as al-Qaida had proven effective at persuading many credulous observers—Muslims and non-Muslims alike—that they were the exasperated victims of Western oppression rather than the stormtroopers of a totalitarian political movement with a brutal will to power. Our enemies had skillfully adapted to fighting wars in the twenty-first-century media age. But the U.S. government and the West remained—and still remains—pitifully far behind.*
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