Right Wing Nut House

The fallout from the political assault on the Bush Administration by the MSM and the left following Hurricane Katrina is spreading to Asia as politicians and press organs in Pakistan seek to make President Musharraf pay the same political price paid by President Bush for the perceived sin of “not caring” about the victims of a natural disaster.

President Gen. Pervez Musharraf said his government was doing its best to respond to the crisis. He had appealed for international help, particularly cargo helicopters to reach remote areas cut off by landslides.

“We are doing whatever is humanly possible,” Musharraf said. “There should not be any blame game. We are trying to reach all those areas where people need our help.”

Anyone who doesn’t think ordinary people - not to mention governments - from around the world don”t watch CNN International or other warmed-over western news reports should listen to this poor fellow who was forced into looting just to survive:

“We haven’t eaten anything for two or three days. The shops are closed and we haven’t got anything from the government,” said a 20-year-old man who refused to identify himself as he ferreted away stolen goods. “We are desperate and hungry.”

Sound familiar?

And here is what happens when aid is distributed the way that critics of the Administration’s Katrina efforts at the Superdome and Convention Center in New Orleans thought was necessary:

In the first major influx of aid, about 10 trucks brought by Pakistani charities and volunteers rumbled into Muzaffarabad early Tuesday. Attempts by relief workers for an orderly distribution dissolved into chaos, as residents scuffled for cooking oil, sugar, rice, blankets and tents.

The same thing happened with every truck, every helicopter that was ferrying aid to these devastated locations. It is why international aid organizations refuse to deliver assistance to areas where there is no local security; people die in these life and death fights for food.

More similar complaints voiced by ordinary people in Pakistan with those expressed by American journalists in New Orleans:

“If the government has devoted its efforts to rescue a few hundred people stuck under the rubble of one building in Islamabad, why has it then completely ignored this badly afflicted area where tens of thousands of people have been killed and injured?” one unidentified survivor told Aljazeera.

The Kashmir earthquake measured a devastating 7.6 on the Richter scale. That makes this particular earthquake the 4th largest on record. The temblor initiated rock slides and mudslides along the narrow, unpaved mountain roads that connect rural parts of the Kashmir with Islamabad, itself hard hit by the disaster. No military on the planet - not even the American military - could supply the kind of relief by air that would make a difference for the 2.7 million people affected by the disaster. And with 40,000 people injured - many of them with broken bones and other crushing injuries that would necessitate surgery to repair internal damage - there is no evacuation plan or rescue scenario that could possibly help more than a fraction of those who need assistance.

It would appear that we have entered an era where a government’s response to natural disasters will be critiqued based on some pie in the sky notion of what some all powerful government should be doing rather than what can humanly be done under the circumstances. Ignorant reporters and suffering victims are least able to objectively assess any kind of governmental response to a large natural disaster since they are stuck with a grasshopper’s view of the relief effort.

A case in point would be the press obsession with what was going on at the Convention Center in the aftermath of Katrina. While conditions at the Center were uncomfortable and people were hungry - and in a few cases dehydrated - rescuers were working frantically to save the lives of nearly 10,000 people stranded on rooftops, on balconies, and even in the attics of houses. The heroic efforts of the Coast Guard, the Louisiana Fish and Wildlife Commission (whose more than 300 boats began rescuing these people night and day almost before Hurricane force winds died down) as well as the National Guard troops, New Orleans Fire and Rescue teams, and even the much maligned (deservedly so) New Orleans Police Department saved thousands upon thousands of lives. But to hear the press tell of it, nothing was happening much to save the poor, black people of New Orleans.

I doubt whether we will be able to regain any kind of perspective on what a natural disaster actually means for people who must endure one. They will no longer be seen as acts of God but rather opportunities for a political opposition to skewer the party in power as the inevitable delays, screw-ups, mistakes, and mismanagement are highlighted and shown as indicative of the incompetence of national leaders. One consequence of Katrina and other disasters like the earthquake in Kashmir will be what I choose to call “The Chicago Effect.”

The great Chicago snowstorm of 1979 overwhelmed the ability of both the city’s snow removal equipment to remove the white stuff as well as the city’s disaster management bureaucracy to deal with the crisis. The resulting political firestorm cost then Mayor Michael Bilandic his job. Incoming Mayor Jane Byrne went out and bought enough snow removal equipment to handle the same kind of snow fall in the future. The problem is that much of that equipment would sit idle for decades because the kind of snowfall experienced by the city that caused the political upheaval comes along perhaps 3 times every hundred years.

So the question arises; do you plan for a “normal” sort of hurricane which governments at all levels respond to fairly efficiently or do you pre-position supplies, have the National Guard (or, more ominously the regular army) on standby, and have all the apparatus needed to deal with a major catastrophe like Katrina ready to go at a moment’s notice? The latter would be ruinously expensive and might be used once every thirty years. But it might head off criticism of the party in power that not enough was done prior to a Katrina-like disaster.

Chalk up one more casualty to Katrina; common sense reaction to an act of God.