Carmel fire contained

Israeli firefighters say they have fully contained the fire in the Carmel mountains of Israel, the country’s largest wildfire ever.

Actually, the Haaretz headline and one statement within the article say “full control,” but the substance of the article makes clear that containment is what has been achieved. “The fire is still burning in some locations and the winds are still strong,” the firefighters’ operations officer is quoted as saying.

The main threat to Haifa and its suburbs has been warded off.

With the mass evacuations of some populated areas, this was beginning to seem all too like the firestorms that gripped San Diego twice in the last seven years. Fortunately, the worst of it now seems over. The weather, however, remains unusually hot for the season, and there has been almost no rain so far, despite the normal rainy season being well underway.

The government is no longer requesting further help from abroad.

Israel, which has a dry climate for much of the year like southern California, is woefully ill equipped to fight major fires. I was amazed at the prevalence of outdoor burning of trash when we were there in spring and summer–both around Jerusalem and in other places, especially (but not only) in Arab areas where public services like trash collection tend to be less well provided. Various reports have suggested that it was a trash fire in a Druze village that got out of control. And now much of the Carmel has been devastated.

According to another Haaretz article,

Israel currently has about 1,300 firefighters available for operational duty, meaning one for every 6,000 residents. The average among Western countries is one firefighter per 1,000 residents.

I do not know what the figure is for southern California (or other fire-prone places like Australia), although at the time of the 2003 wildfires, the lack of preparation of San Diego was exposed. The County was somewhat better positioned to fight the 2007 wildfires.*

This is not Israel’s first major wildfire by any means. The just-linked article notes one in the Jerusalem hills in 1995, after which there was a government commission that noted the inadequacies of resources to cope with fires. Maybe this time they’ll actually do something to prepare for the next one.

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* Photos and experiences of which appeared at this blog.

Why the Mumbai attacks are not India’s 9/11

Various news stories in the US have used phrases like “India’s 9/11” in attempt to contextualize the Mumbai terror for American readers.

Aside from the fact that India unfortunately has endured many previous militant attacks–some of them originating from the same likely suspects, even if not on the coordinated, militarily precise, and mass-terrorizing scale as these latest–there is one overlooked sense in which this horrible incident has already been shown not to be India’s 9/11.

Homeland security, federalism, and bicameralism

In October, 2005, I commented on the intercameral differences within the Republican Congress on the question of federal grants for “homeland security.” The dispute–with the Senate favoring most of the money being divided equally among the states and the House favoring a high percentage of the disbursements being based on insured risk–is the stuff of classic bicameral policy disagreement. Insured risk tends to be roughly correlated with population, and so it is hardly a surprise that the House would prefer such a determination of where most of the money should go. The Senate, on the other hand, with its equal representation of even the smallest state, would be predicted to find the “risk” from terrorism to be about the same in Wyoming as it is in New York, and indeed that is the logic–the political logic–of its formula.

Now, fast forward to 2007. We had a change in party control, from both houses being Republican to both being Democratic. And at the moment, the chambers are once again bargaining over the formula for the distribution of homeland security grants. The proposals by each chamber again reveal the institutional biases of each chamber. But when compared to the 2005 intercameral bargaining, the 2007 proposals show even more starkly the difference between the parties and their constituencies, on this issue.

Here I compare the House and Senate proposals at each of these moments of bargaining:

2005 bills (Republican majorities)

House: 25% of funds distributed equally among states–but state must show need; most of rest allocated based on risk

Senate: 75% of funds distributed equally among states; 25% allocated according to risk

2007 bills (Democratic majorities)

House: 12.5% of funds distributed equally among states; most of rest allocated based on risk

Senate: 22.5% of funds distributed equally among states; most of rest according to risk

Wow. Good stuff!

Of course, one critical factor here is the relative sizes of the states each party draws its main support base from. That is, the parties’ positions (holding constant the chamber) are partly shaped by the same factor that separates the chambers (holding constant the parties). Consider the following breakdown of the populations of the states represented in each of these two Senates. The first column is the number of states (with half a state in each party row whenever the state delegation is split), and then the cumulative population of those states (or half states).

Before 2006 election
54 Reps 27.5 138,079,342
46 Dems 22.5 142,824,157

After 2006 election
49 Reps 24.5 118,950,125
51 Dems 25.5 161,953,374

Note that the Republican states constituted the minority of the population even when the Republicans held the (spurious) partisan majority of the Senate. (This a theme I have covered before, in a somewhat more refined analysis with electoral data and cool graphs!)

President Bush has threatened to veto this bill over several other provisions, especially that which would extend collective bargaining rights to baggage screeners and other employees who were barred such rights when DHS was established.

We may see the first successful override vote in the House during the W years. The bill passed 299-128. However, the vote was 60-38 in the Senate. These results means a lot of Republicans in each house went with the majority, even if the non-democratic chamber will be able to sustain the minority veto in this case. What a difference it makes which party is setting the congressional agenda!

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Notes

My main source on the differences in the bills in 2007 was an article by Chris Strohm for Congress Daily. Sources on the 2005 bills are discussed at the previous planting (first link above).

In calculating state populations by party delegation, independents are counted as if members of the party with which they caucus (here, all Democrat: Jeffords, Sanders, Lieberman); population numbers are based on 2000 census.

On the specific issue of union rights for baggage screeners, I highly recommend the thread sparked by Matthew Yglesias in early March. The discussion in the comments contains pretty much the whole gamut of hypotheses about policy-making!

Security funding: Pork vs. programmatic policy?

Does it make sense that Wyoming, rated as “low risk” for terrorist attack, should get almost twice the funding for preparadness programs, on a per capita basis, as New York? The independent commission that investigated the 9/11 attacks recommended more than a year ago that all homeland-security money be allocated based on objective criteria–the risk of attack.

This issue is being debated in Congress now–in a House-Senate conference committee, and it is an excellent example of the different interests of the two chambers of the US Congress.

This is a fascinating case, because both chambers are controlled by the same party. Yet the legislative preferences on this matter break down in a completely predictable way, based on the constituencies of the chambers.

The Senate passed a bill that would share about 75% of all homeland security funds equally between the 50 states, with the other 25% allocated according to a state’s actual assessed risk of terrorism.

The House, on the other hand, passed in July an amendment to the Patriot Act that would do almost the exact opposite. Under the House plan, 25% would be allocated equally between the states, and even to get that share, a state would have to prove why the money was needed. Most of the funds would be based on assessment of risk.

(The assessment of risk would be based on calculating potential insured losses.)

Representative Nita Lowrey (Democrat, New York), the author of the amendment to the bill that the House passed, says:

The current formula is distributed as pork barrel, the same amount to everybody, no matter what, and it doesn’t make sense. New Yorkers are not very pleased about being No. 1, but if we are No. 1 in the risk/threat/vulnerability category, we clearly should get the resources so that we can be prepared.

Senator Craig Thomas (Republican, Wyoming) counters that his state has a lot of energy production “that involves a substantial Homeland Security risk.”

Lowrey notes that is a valid argument, and points out that the amended House bill would allow Wyoming to make that case and receive the funds if they are indeed merited.

Good case in programmatic vs. particularistic policy-making, and in House vs. Senate constituencies!

(The above information comes from an article by Alexandra Marks in the Christian Science Monitor on October 24.)

Pork vs. programmatic policy-making

One of the things that I tell my students ever year in the Policy-Making Processes course is that there are, very broadly speaking, two ways in which policy may be made: In a programmatic fashion, or in a particularistic fashion. The good old “pork barrel” is an example of particularism.

Given that we are just now entering the part of the course where this comes up, Chris Lawrence’s post from October 20 regarding the Porkbusters project could hardly have come at a better time.

As Chris notes, when politicians, commentators, or regular citizens label government spending programs, “one man’s pork is another man’s necessary infrastructure project.”

But then Chris adds the kicker, with respect to post-Katrina projects like rebuilding the Ponchartrain bridge as a 6-lane highway and other big “revitalization” spending (which Porkbusters are trying to have Congress appropriate money for instead of projects like the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere“):

a real “porkbuster” would favor letting the FHWA bureaucracy, not Congress, decide where the money would best be spent.

This is the crux of the matter. If policy specialists in the bureaucracy are given fairly wide leeway to apply their expertise and merit criteria in determining which projects should have priority, we are probably looking at programmatic policy-making. If, on the other hand, committees of politicians are establishing which projects will have priority, we are almost certainly looking at particularism/pork.

It is worth adding, however, that bureaucracies can also produce pork. It depends on the authority that has been delegated by their political principals—whether to implement the broad program of the governing majority or to reflect the preferences of politicians’ particular organized or localized constituencies. (This is “structural politics,” as Moe and Caldwell call it; that reference to a reading is for the benefit of my students).

Sometimes it is a fine line—and it clearly is a continuum—but the distinction between these two basic types of policy-making comes down to the extent of specific political criteria imposed on the bureaucracy. And that extent, of course, depends on how the politicians build their own election/reelection constituencies.

Follow-up post related to this theme:
Security funding: Pork vs. programmatic policy? (October 30, 2005)

The US military role in disaster relief inevitably will increase—Robert Kaplan

A theme of F&V dating back to the days immediately after Hurricane Katrina has been the need for better institutional design and coordination in disaster relief. For instance, on September 1, I called the then-slowly-emerging response to this disaster a Test for government reorganization under DHS.

In that post, I noted that back in 1993, after Hurricane Andrew, several specialists in disaster response had testified before the senate that the military should be given a much greater role in the government’s handling of natural catastrophes.

On October 22, CSPAN’s BookTV re-aired (right before the ridiculous segment on the electoral college) a terrific presentation at AEI by Robert Kaplan. He was talking about his new book, Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground. (The segment originally aired on October 15.)

The book itself sounds fascinating. As Kaplan said, he has travelled and lived for extended periods with military units in mostly unnoticed (though not secret, he noted over and over) operations all over the world, including places like Algeria (!), Colombia, Georgia, and Yemen.

One thing that really caught my ear in his presentation was a theme he articulated regarding the military and disaster relief. Among the operations he was present for was the aid operation by the US Navy after the south Asian tsunami. He said this sort of operation, as well as the military’s (late) engagement in New Orleans were the sort of operations that would inevitably become more common in coming decades.

The reason, he said, is not just that the US military is uniquely capable of mounting such operations in settings where, just as in wartime, public order inevitably breaks down. Also because to a greater degree than at any time in human history–and increasingly so–we have large dense population centers all around the world in flood plains and sesmic zones. In other words, the scale of major disasters will only increase, and militaries (not only our own; he also mentioned Canada and France as being well versed in relief operations) will be called in to provide relief and security.

He specifically outlined scenarios of military involvement in a New Madrid earthqauke that could devastate St. Louis and Memphis, and US forces being on the ground in China after a major flood.

It was not clear to me how much of this discussion is in the book, but it was clear that he was envisioning something very important and, I would add, that needs to be more explictly prepared for.

FEMA and the taking of “responsibility”

Armchair Generalist hits the nail on the head in this post today, and a previous post of his from September 7.

If the resignation of Michael Brown as FEMA head is the end of the accountability process, rather than its start, we will never get around to the really serious questions that need to be asked about whether the US government is properly equipped to handle major disasters, or whether we need a serious rethink about our institutions and organizations responsible for these tasks.

It is very easy to jump on Brown, who clearly had minimal qualifications for the post. But the bureaucratic reorganization under DHS meant that the head of FEMA takes orders from the Homeland Security Secretary, currently Michael Chertoff. And of course, he is responsible to the President.

Now, I know Bush has taken “responsibilty.” But what does that mean? Responsibility, like leadership itself, is not words, it’s actions and consequences. Obviously he is not going to resign, and porobably neither is Chertoff (resignation is the usual meaning of taking “responsibility” in the highest levels of government in parliamentary systems), but a good place to start might be for Bush to call off his allies in Congress who are blocking the formation of an independent commission to investigate the response to Hurricane Katrina.

It is about accountability, and being accountable for decisions made and not made is how government officials take responsibility. It is also through the process of holding officials accountable for past actions that we have dicussions about reorganization of the responsible bureaucracies that might save lives in the future.

Fall elections in New Orleans area postponed

October 15 is the date of primary elections for state offices in Louisiana and a state judicial district election for Jefferson Parish. The elections have been offcially and indefinitely postponed in the New Orleans area.

(Thanks to Rick Hasen’s Election Law Blog for the tip.)

The question of how or if elections would be conducted in the area, given that most voters have been evacuated, was a topic at Poliblog on Monday.

Public Opinion and Hurricane Katrina

Political Arithmetik has a series of fascinating posts.

Thanks to Paul Brewer for the tip.

The post-9/11 disaster plan

Sunday’s LA Times had a lengthy report detailing the response to Hurricane Katrina and what went wrong with the emergency planning that had been put in place after 9/11.

Seven Betrayals and Oh, Blackwater

Democracy Now! continues to provide some of the best daily coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I know some readers will be put off by the program’s political bent, but in fact they have had some of the best on-the-scene reporting I have found anywhere.

Today’s program has an interview with a “hold out” in the French Quarter who goes through a list of what he calls the Seven Betrayals of the victims of the storm. His first one is something that Steven T. pointedly asked on September 3: Why did the city not make its transit buses available for evacuation? The “hold out” has several other criticisms of the state and local governments’ immediate response.

Before and after the segement on the seven betrayals are interesting segments containing interviews with active-duty military on the scene and refused interview requests from local police regarding the (non)removal of corpses.

Also there is a segment at the end about the presence of heavily armed Blackwater USA contractors in New Orleans. The presence of this contractor—famous for being the company whose employees were hung from a bridge in Fallujah—has been noted in the media previously. For instance, in the Washington Post, Sept. 8. However, the Post story noted their presence as contractors to commercial businesses. The Democracy Now! story says that some of the Blackwater employees claimed to have been deputized by the Louisiana governor and DHS. Even with respect to their presence in New Orleans under contact with private businesses, the Post story notes:

Peter W. Singer, an expert on private military contractors at the Brookings Institution, said he thinks the presence of such firms is “overkill” when firms that perform more conventional security work are available.

Overkill. Precisely the title of DN correspondent Jeremy Scahill’s co-authored report.

I don’t know what to make of it. But it is troubling to think of private armed contractors patrolling the streets of an American city. If it is true that they are working for government agencies, it is downright chilling.

FEMA as an institution II: Militarization?

UPDATE (9/14): Arms and Influence has some thoughts about the pros and cons of “militarization” that are well worth reading and thinking about. And “J” in the comments has some really interesting insights that are relevant to the larger issue of institutional design that has been a F&V theme regarding FEMA.

Bryan S. asks a good question: Why not “militarize” FEMA? This is precisely the sort of question that needs to be asked. I do not know if giving the agency a military-like command structure would solve the problems that were revealed by the response to Hurricane Katrina. But it is worth thinking about. In the comments at Arguing with Signposts, Neil Lawrence embellishes the idea with what seem like sensible operational procedures, including a more institutionalized relationship with the active-duty armed forces.

The question of militarization of FEMA itself is separate from coordination of FEMA with the actual military, but it might be complimentary to it. I would remind readers that the idea of a more institutionalized relationship with the armed forces was raised at least as far back as the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew in 1992.

Elaborating on the idea, Chris Lawrence notes that several existing federal agencies already operate on a “militarization” model, including—and I had no idea about this—the NOAA Commissioned Officer Corps.

One thing is for sure, since the agency was placed under DHS and since Michael Brown was made its head, it has been treated by the current administration as a patronage agency more than as an institution with a mission. Because we cannot count on individual Presidents and the Senators who confirm presidential nominees to make good choices, we need to consider institutional reorganization as a means to upgrade the agency’s profile within the executive branch. Among my own suggestions (in various of my posts linked here) have been re-organizing FEMA on a model more akin to those of the CIA and FBI. A militarization model should at least be part of that debate, as well.

Responses to national tragedy

As many are remembering throughout the blogosphere today, I recall the disbelief. A plane has hit the WTC? Surely a little general-aviation plane. Oh, a commercial airliner? How could that be? Another plane has hit the other tower? The first tower has collapsed? What does that mean? I assumed glass had fallen off, but never imagined the tower had literally collapsed. I then got myself to a TV and saw the live images of the second tower coallapsing.

We were all stunned, and once it was clear that this was an attack, I debated about whether to go about my plans for the day. I did. I had a dental appointment in southern Orange County. I live in northern San Diego County. (There actually are dentists in San Diego County, but there isn’t Dr. Brazeal.) To go between home and dentist requires passing through Camp Pendleton on I-5. I briefly wondered if was even a good idea to drive through a major military base and past a nuclear reactor on a day America was under attack by terrorists. But I went ahead.

What I remember most was three things. One, there was hardly any traffic. Second, the light traffic was composed entirely of polite drivers (why does it take a national tragedy for people to be so polite?). Third, marines stationed along the entrances to the base armed with bigger guns than I had ever seen.

Regarding the response in the first few days after the event, and the comparison to the response to the tragic hurricane on the Gulf Coast, many posts on many blogs that I am too lazy to link to right now (inlcuding my own from yesterday on “leadership”) have remarked on the differences between the responses to 9/11 and Katrina. But as I was watching my Angels hammer the White Sox yesterday, a few random thoughts came to mind:

After 9/11/2001, major-league baseball suspended play for a week, and resumed play with American flag decals sewn on players’ uniforms.

After Hurricane Katrina, play went on, and the players are all wearing Red Cross emblems on their helmets.

Both events are grave national tragedies with mass death and devastation, both should generate (in my view) somewhat uneasy mixes of at once coming together as proud and resilient Americans along with soul-searching about collective decisions made and not made, and MLB is only one American institution. Yet the juxtaposition of responses is quite striking.

Oh, and the traffic has not been any lighter and certainly not any more polite than usual around here in the wake of the news from the Gulf Coast.

The three greatest catastrophe scenarios to prepare for

The LA Times reports that there was a FEMA emergency training session in which the three “most likely catastrophes to strike the United States” were:

1. A terrorist attack in New York.

2. A “super-strength hurricane hitting New Orleans.”

3. A major earthquake on the San Andreas fault.

How grim: Two down, and, uh oh.

Oh, did I mention that this seminar was in August, 2001?

Leadership

Steven T. has a terrific, thoughtful post from Friday on President Bush’s “leadership.”

I agree, first of all, with Steven’s assessment that the high grade the public gave Bush for “leadership” was one of the most important challenges that John Kerry failed to overcome in the 2004 election.

But what is leadership, and did Bush really show any remarkable leadership in September, 2001, that should have led us to expect a steady hand and firm response to a catastrophe like what has befallen the Gulf Coast four years later?

I would submit that 9/11 was an easy situation in which to show “leadership.” (Radio Saigon transmitted a similar argument several days ago.) Even I was looking up to him and was downright moved by his speech before Congress a week later, despite the fact that I was in the majority of the public that, according to a poll earlier that summer, believed he was either illegitimate as president or had “won on a technicality.”

It is not hard to exude leadership when you are the Chief of State and the state and nation have just come under surprise attack.

Steven quotes from a NYT news analysis:

Nine days after the United States was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush stood before a joint session of Congress and rallied the nation to a new mission.

But what was that mission? Defend freedom, defeat terror, the Taliban must surrender OBL, etc. Broadly acceptable and rather vague calls for future action, but little in the way of specifics or immediate action beyond the response already taking place at Ground Zero. (This is not a criticism of the speech; as I said, I was moved by it at the time, and it still looks pretty good to me on a re-reading four years later.)

If rallying the nation to a “mission” based on broadly acceptable goals is the definition of leadership in a crisis, what would have been the equivalent here? What is the grand mission that would have earned him “leadership” points with respect to Hurricane Katrina? Delivery of immediate aid—on which FEMA and other government agencies failed in critical hours and days—is a set of actions, not words with broad promises of future action.

And therein lies a critical aspect of what leadership is—and is not. I think we expect too little of our leaders if we define them as providing good leadership because they say the right things after a crisis. True enough, Bush said the right things after 9/11 and stumbled badly after Katrina. But leadership should be judged by great actions at least as much as by great words. And the great actions that would have been required in this crisis would have been immediate and visible, even anticipatory, given that we can forecast storms in a way that we cannot forecast terrorist attacks (or earthquakes or other disasters). If a “new mission” was to be part of the response, it would have required redoubling of efforts to prevent future similar catastrophes (as was indeed a theme of the 9/11 speech, if rather vaguely). And doing so inevitably would have involved calling for significant spending increases in areas that had been cut on this President’s watch.

I will leave to other threads and other blogs the debate about whether this President’s actions, as opposed to reassuring words, in response to 9/11 deserved the high grades for “leadership” that the public gave him. Clearly the public gave him those grades; I am suggesting that the public may employ a form of grade inflation in assessing leadership.