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Thursday, September 08, 2005

Katrina's Windbags

A pretty good article by Max Boot.

Excerpt:

The target of my ire is people like, well, me: those of us who are supposed to make sense of events. It's an important job but also one in which it is all too easy to sacrifice perspective on the altar of immediacy.

At this point, we simply don't know what it all means and who, if anyone, is to blame. Many of the attempts to assign blame have already been revealed as farcically unconvincing. The argument, for instance, that Katrina is the offspring of global warming ignores meteorological records that show that the number of hurricanes has been cycling up and down for decades. An even more incendiary charge — that the response was dilatory because so many victims were African Americans — is presented with even less evidence, which is to say, none at all. No doubt other nuggets of insta-analysis will also be debunked in the days ahead, while future investigations will reveal problems that no one knew existed.

Eventually it will be important to figure out what happened and why in order to prevent a repeat — if we can. (And that's a big if.)

But not now. Now soldiers and relief workers must concentrate on the tasks at hand — saving the living, burying the dead, restoring the rule of law. Everything else can wait, even in this instant-gratification world of 24/7 sound bites.

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