Soldiers rescue the politicians

Sep. 13, 2005. 01:00 AM

"After hours, then days of confusion, the first sign that someone might actually be capable of providing relief to storm-battered New Orleans arrived in the person of U.S. Army Lt.-Gen. Russel Honoré.

"He came off the doggone chopper, and he started cussing and people started moving," said New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, up to then in despair at the feeble federal response to the disaster that had overwhelmed his city.

He described Honoré as a "John Wayne dude" who can "get some stuff done."

Honoré led the first significant relief column into the flooded, lawless city, but took care to order his troops to keep their weapons pointed down. They were in the United States, not Iraq, he reminded them in a rare show of sensitivity during those chaotic days when stopping looters seemed to be an obsession with the local police.

The civilian side of the relief effort, however, continued to flounder, with the inept Federal Emergency Management Agency at the storm centre of criticism. Finally, late last week, FEMA director Michael Brown was removed from his post overseeing the relief operation and replaced by Vice-Admiral Thad Allen of the U.S. Coast Guard. Yesterday, Brown quit FEMA entirely.

So twice in two weeks, the U.S. military was called upon to address glaringly public failures by the country's civilian political leadership.

"It looks like the military is the only thing that's functioned in this entire mess," Michael Greve, an expert in governance at the American Enterprise Institute, told the Christian Science Monitor. "Once they arrived, things turned around."

While civilian relief agencies will play a greater role as the situation stabilizes, we seem to be witnessing another example of the "militarization of humanitarian relief," a term used by foreign policy pundit Robert Kaplan in an interview with the Star's Lynda Hurst last week.

Why is this happening? While we would expect the military to play a role in any major relief effort — even Mel Lastman called in the army, remember — we would not expect soldiers and sailors necessarily to lead it. That is a job for the civilian authorities.

In the aftermath of the fumbled response to Katrina, liberal critics have noted that two decades of government bashing in the United States — and other Western democracies — have weakened the sinews of state. Perhaps this is so, yet the military is part of the state apparatus, one of the oldest and most traditional parts, in fact.

The problem would seem to run deeper — to the type of people now serving in government.

The growing importance of ideology has meant that well-rounded pragmatists have been squeezed out of the U.S. political process, replaced by ideologues and party loyalists whose main attribute is not what they have done, but what they believe.

Brown was not the head of FEMA because of his expertise in emergency relief, but because he was a friend of former FEMA director Joe Allbaugh, who was George Bush's campaign manager in 2000. Prior to joining FEMA in 2002, Brown had served as commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association for a decade. And among his subordinates at FEMA, one was a veteran of the 2000 Bush campaign and another had worked in the White House in 2001 planning presidential trips.

"These guys kind of have a deer-in-the-headlights look; they haven't been through this kind of thing and it shows," commented Paul Light, director of the Centre for Public Service at the Brookings Institution.

The politicians were no better at providing leadership. Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco was almost invisible, Mayor Nagin colourful but ineffective — his police force just melted — and the president strangely disengaged and rhetorically inept.

The American military, however, is used to solving problems. Whatever political difficulties still exist in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is no denying the brilliant military victories the Americans won in both those countries, nor the pivotal role U.S. forces played in the tsunami relief effort.

Honoré, who has an MA in human resources, has held command positions in Korea and Germany. "He's less a man than a force of nature," one of his officers says. Allen, a career Coast Guard officer, helped manage the emergency response to the Sept. 11 attacks in New York.

Their experience commanding large numbers of men and women to achieve practical results dwarfs that of most civilian government officials.

Kaplan sees nothing wrong with an expanded role for the military beyond waging war. But what does it say about the health of the body politic in the world's largest democracy that it has to rely so heavily on men in uniform to get anything done?"

Fred Edwards is a member of the Toronto Star's editorial board.