semitism.net

This is another op-ed that did not get picked up; I post here without any expansion, so take it in that light. But the point at that end is one that necessitates comments and discussion, so please join in.

Listening to Secretary of State Rice talk of the “new Middle East” while the region is in flames reminded me, somehow, of the approach of the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. For, like so many other issues these days, much of the attention that deserves to be paid to the Katrina anniversary is lost on the ongoing events in Lebanon.

We may not like to think about it in these terms, but there are at least two striking similarities between Katrina and Lebanon. First, and most obvious, the tragic loss of innocent lives and destruction of beautiful cities and lands. Second, and most painful, the Bush Administration watched both unfold and did what amounted to nothing to stop either one, after having done even less to prepare in advance for two preventable tragedies.

The Administration’s failures in the case of Hurricane Katrina are well known. During the crisis, the ineptitude of FEMA and its Director Michael Brown became instantly infamous. The immediate horrors in New Orleans of the Superdome, Convention Center, and Lower 9th Ward were followed by the reports of huge sums of recovery money gone missing, trailers never delivered, tens of thousands still displaced.

And in advance of Katrina herself, we know of the Administration’s debilitation of FEMA, its ignoring of the levees in New Orleans, its crafting of homeland security policies that left so many so much more vulnerable. Although President Bush made numerous visits to the region and declared the government was doing, and would continue to do, all it could, that we would see a “new” New Orleans, reality has not yet matched his words.

In the case of Lebanon, the response has again been one of form over substance, with even the form failing. Secretary Rice appears as hamstrung as Michael Brown at making anything happen, taking “no” for an answer at every turn, justifying bloodshed, talking yet again about a “new Middle East” as Iraq, the first “new Middle East,” burns a few hundred miles away, civilian deaths numbering in the tens of thousands.

As with the dismantling of FEMA, Secretary Rice and President Bush all but abandoned the Middle East peace process, ignoring terrorist threats like Hizballah because of the morasses created elsewhere. The needs of Lebanon, which should have been the cornerstone of Secretary Rice’s vision of the “new Middle East,” were ignored. Now it is just another example of the Old Middle East: tragic death, baseless hatred and murder, endless justifications and excuses, hopelessness on all sides.

But unlike Katrina, and making things more complicated, there are sides in the Lebanon War. No one justified Katrina’s devastation; no one defended the storm as a moral and justified response to some aggression in the Gulf of Mexico. No one saw Katrina as a force of divine inspiration manifest in a military and political movement whose ultimate weapon is the killing of civilians and ultimate goal the imposition of extremist Islam.

Yet that is what we see at present. The Administration and much of the American public essentially overlooks the harsh reality of the destruction of Lebanon and innocent Lebanese civilian deaths. Other than Qana, relatively little mention has been made of them as people, of their suffering in its own right, rather than qualified and couched in rationalization and defensiveness. In the end, the Lebanese civilians who are killed are essentially blamed for not getting out of the way of Hizballah and the attacking Israeli air strikes, as if, like the poor in New Orleans and the rural south, they should have had somewhere to go to get out of the way. Shame on these poor civilians for not beating back Hizballah on their own. For not shoring up the levees when they suspected failure.

So too does much of the rest of the world ignore Israeli civilian casualties. After paying lip-service to the illegality of the initial Hizballah attacks, the focus turns almost exclusively to the Israeli response. Hizballah rockets falling in Israel, killing and injuring Israeli civilians are afterthoughts, like those who suffered outside New Orleans, left out of the headlines because their stories seemed less dramatic, more complicated.

This taking of sides has distracted from the ultimate issue, the ultimate lesson of both tragedies: we have finally seen the fulfillment of Ronald Reagan’s declaration that “government is the problem.” Or, if nothing else, this government is the problem.

It is time the American public realizes this, stops taking sides, and learns that we can no longer depend on Washington in times of crisis, but must turn elsewhere, to ourselves. There may not be a clear idea of what that means just yet, or a 9-point plan for how that can work, but we need to start the conversation. In the end, we obviously need Washington to be able to make things happen, but it seems we need a new way to approach Washington, a new way to be constituents, to be citizens. That may sound like a platitude, but it is high time we started making it reality.

Before we watch this administration watch yet another disaster unfold.

Brad Brooks-Rubin