Haiti: Obama’s Katrina
It’s been a week after a 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti and within minutes of the disaster the world was presented with televised images of the event. Over the past several days we have watched Haiti descend into savagery as people go without food and water, law and order break down, and the injured join the ranks of the dead who go unburied in the streets. We have also seen a massive relief effort mobilize, but witness relief supplies and rescue efforts become snarled in red tape.
Complaints about American actions are pouring in. France blames the USA for the congestion at the Port au Prince airport. Hugo Chavez of Venezuela is also claiming that the US is occupying Haiti, a claim that is backed by the French. What started out as a natural disaster is quickly becoming a man-made one as looters and gangs take to the streets in the absence law. Aid is pouring into the country but cannot get through critical chokepoints to those in need.
Although Obama’s lapdogs in the mainstream news media have yet to prick up their ears regarding the similarities between Hurricane Katrina and the Haiti earthquake, Howard Fineman writing for MSNBC notes the irony of the situation: “Elected in part out of revulsion at the Bush administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina, Obama now finds himself confronting an even more devastating and complex humanitarian crisis.” Dan Kennedy writing for the Guardian takes issue with Fineman’s characterization as well as those of others seeing similarities between the two disasters. Kennedy writes, “In fact, though we would all (OK, not Limbaugh) like to see the US alongside other countries and relief agencies doing everything they can in Haiti, the disaster is so large, the people are so poor and the social structure is so dysfunctional that it is bound to end in something that looks like failure.”
Evidently Kennedy isn’t familiar with Louisiana and Mississippi – two of America’s poorest states with state and local governments that are dysfunctional at best, corrupt at worst. While the divisions between local, state and federal government snarled the Katrina relief effort in 2005, the divisions between the UN authority, the US military, US Department of State, French and other governments pouring men and material into the devastated nation are just as bedeviling today. Kennedy argues that it takes time to work through these divisions, but President Bush was not afforded the luxury of that excuse 4 years ago. Why should Obama be exempt today?
It is true that a disaster of this scale cannot be practiced and prepared for beforehand. Nations cannot meet and design a coordinated plan for every possible disaster scenario that may or may not happen. But as President Bush was judged by the actions of the federal government in the Hurricane Katrina disaster, so too should President Obama be held responsible for the failures in Haiti. The precedent has been set Obama himself.
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